One of my favorite stories that I discuss in my book is actor Michael Chiklis.  During a serious stall-out in his career, Chiklis' wife Michelle advised him on changing direction, agreed to take a major (though strategic) financial risk to get Michael on a more promising path, and networked with friends to help him land an audition they both knew could mean a second life in Hollywood.

Fast forward a few years, Michael has won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of tough, complex cop Vic Mackey on The Shield.  He is winning starring roles in big-budget films, and today is guest hosting on Regis and Kelly.

Very cool to see how well Chiklis' career is going, and to know what a big part his wife played in that.

(By the way, Michael, you DO look an awful lot like Joe the Plumber! )

The media has given a lot of attention to the stay-at-home aspects of my book.  And while I do spend a good amount of time looking at wives who help their husbands from home, I also profile a number of women who are their husbands' business partners in a more official capacity.  Thousands of successful small businesses around the country were the result of a dream of a husband-wife team.  And without the "wife" part of the equation, the dream never would have become a reality.

Today I read about yet another such couple.  18 years ago, Mike Walden was a police officer in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  His wife, Amy, was a police dispatcher.  Good, solid middleclass jobs, to be sure.  But the Walden's wanted more.  They wanted to pool their policing expertise to launch a security company.  So with Mike landing the clients, and Amy managing the books and other financial aspects of the business, they launched Walden Security.  Today Walden guards high-level operations all around the United States and will bring in about $92 million in revenue this year.

You can read more of their story here.

Many of the husband-wife teams I profile in Beside Every Successful Man are just like the Waldens.  Together, they combined their talent, ambition, and skills to reach a level of success many would never have considered possible.  A biblical proverb tells us "iron sharpens iron."  As I repeatedly found while researching my book, this is especially true when husbands and wives team up in business.

One of the long-standing falsehoods of hardline feminists is that bringing in less than half the family income makes women powerless in their homes.  They insist that if women don't work full-time over the entirety of their lives, their husbands will start calling all the shots.  But a new Pew study proves that just ain't the case.  If anything, it's women who rule the roost, whether they work or not.

The most salient points of the study:

The survey finds that in 43% of all couples it’s the woman who makes decisions in more areas than the man. By contrast, men make more of the decisions in only about a quarter (26%) of all couples. And about three-in-ten couples (31%) split decision-making responsibilities equally...

 Two-thirds of all husbands in dual-income families say they make more money than their wives, and wives generally concur in this assessment. But earning more money doesn’t necessarily mean making more decisions at home, at least for men. And for women, earning less doesn’t always mean making fewer decisions.

The study's author commented to USA Today, "Across all decision-making realms, it tilts to the woman. I was surprised by the percentage of men who made none of the decisions in any of the areas. A significant percentage were just bystanders."

So maybe it's men's power shortage the extreme feminists should be worried about!


[Edit to add: I have written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about this Pew study and others that echo its findings.  You can read here.] 

One of the things that frequently came up when I was researching the wives of successful men was how often the men got a job, promotion, or landed important clients through their wife's networking.  I ended up devoting an entire chapter to the PR and Networking of wives because their efforts on this front seemed even more effective than when the men did it themselves.

Now a new study proves that women do indeed have the upper-hand when it comes to networking, and that this upper-hand translates to higher $$$.

From the Ottowa Citizen:

Female workers get by -- and earn more -- with a little help from their friends, a new study shows, but men don't enjoy the same boost from their social networks.

Women who found their current job through a close relative like a parent or sibling earned $32,691 a year on average, researchers at the University of Oregon found, while those who landed a job through a close friend earned $28,546. Those with no previous connection to their employer pulled in just $19,415 annually.

Men, meanwhile, didn't enjoy any salary benefits from their personal grapevine.

"I was expecting that males would be getting a much higher return for their social networks, but the study actually shows quite the opposite," says Michael Aguilera, an associate professor of sociology. [highlight is mine]

Now, obviously this study focused on how women's networking impacted their own careers, not their husbands.  But my interviews with couples routinely showed that when wives leveraged their connections on their husbands' behalf--whether those connections came from church, children's playgroups, or their own business contacts--their husbands received a big boost on the work front.

So ladies, I ask you: who do you know and are you making the most of those relationships to help your husband?

I would certainly never recommend this show, but a friend sent me a great clip...