It’s not often that you get a free kick in business, but I was given one yesterday while sitting aboard the Seabourn Spirit which had just berthed at the sailing port of Hvar, Croatia. In fact, I was parked inside the Amundsen Lounge which was doubling as the presentation hall for the Narta 2010 Seminar.

 For those who may not have been following my tweets, Narta is Australia’s largest consumer electronics buying group for independent retailers. Every year the group takes around 200 industry executives to premier locations (last year it was the snowfields of Whistler, Canada) and I am also privileged to attend.

Yesterday’s session commenced promptly at 8.30am and there was a fission of excitement in the room as the celebrated management ‘guru’ Tom Peters was giving the keynote presentation. It’s always exciting to experience a “celebrity” in person and despite his slightly avuncular demeanor Peters, whose seminal work ‘In Search of Excellence’ co-authored with Tom Drucker, reshaped the way business looked at management practices in the nineties, was in good form.

Peters is a commanding speaker and his well-honed presentation style dominated the room. So it was difficult not to pay attention. But it was when he started waving over his head a Panasonic toughbook computer emblazoned with the slogan ‘Women are born leaders’ that I really leant forward. It seems that Peters is a pragmatic feminist (my term). By his own admission he knows that the power of the female purse drives the world’s economy and taking this market seriously makes good business sense. To back this up, he cited research published by The Economist and The Harvard Business Review which includes facts such as, “ In developing nations, women’s earned income is growing at 8.1%, compared to 5.8% for men. Globally, women control nearly $12 trillion of the $18 trillion total overall consumer spending, a figure predicted to rise to $15 trillion by 2014.”

While Peters session surprised many executives in the audience who are rarely exposed in such data (with the exception of this blog) his passion on the subject was powerful. It was the strongest takeout from his presentation and it remained a dinner table subject that evening.

But Peters’ world is much larger than mine and most of the industry’s executives, both male and female. As a native to North America he has watched the emergence of understandings of how gender intelligence can impact on the bottom line first hand.

Two of the key pillars in his message was that if independent businesses are to survive against the corporate giants, then they needed to start listening to their staff and customers and in turn create ‘intimacy’ in their business, a condition that corporations can’t hope to match. Both listening, and the ability to be intimate with one another, are skills that the female gender possesses in spades.

But what wins Peters more points in my book is that like even a closet feminist, he knows the power of sharing. So, if you would like to hear just what one of the world’s leading experts on management has to say about women and how you need to start connecting with them have a look here.