I got a terrible feeling as I extended my hand to introduce myself. We were meeting at a hotel restaurant for breakfast. It was St. Louis or Atlanta. I can’t remember which. I was screening him for a senior role on my team during my tenure at a large IT outsourcing company. I had been coached not to make instant decisions about candidates. We chatted. ‘Let the data make the decision,’ I kept repeating to myself. For some reason I was glad we were in a crowded hotel lobby. I couldn’t put my finger on this feeling I had. Ever been there? Continue reading…
Summer Book Review #17: Basic Black
“Everybody thinks of it as a personal problem and that they have to solve that problem (alone),” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute and guest of Diane Rehm’s NPR show this past Monday, “The Ongoing Struggle To Balance Career And Family.” I was multi-tasking when I happened upon the program. It made me smile. Over a year ago I started Novofemina for many reasons. One of them was that, “no one is talking about transition issues.” Well, here it was on a npr station…next to godliness in my mind. Continue reading…
Summer Book Review #16: Confidence
“Today is just the beginning, it’s where you go from here that matters,” said David McCullough, Jr., a high school english teacher from Wellesley, MA and a faculty commencement speaker. His words were powerful and more sophisticated than anything I heard at 18. He went on, “I urge you to do whatever you do for no other reason than you love it and you believe in its importance.” Mr. McCullough engaged my spirit with his directives…worthwhile whether you stand at commencement or in a transition somewhere post graduation. Continue reading…
Summer Book Review #15: How Will You Measure Your Life?
I’m not a big sports fan. My 7-year-old son has taught me more about sports and team devotion in the past year than I’ve learned in my entire life. Last week, before our beloved Boston Celtics lost to the Miami Heat in game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals, we were listening to an interview with one of the Celtic’s big three, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen. The player responded to a journalist’s question about their approach to upcoming practices and games by saying, ‘we’ll probably watch the tapes.’ Continue reading…
The universal barriers of transition…
“I wish for my son the exact same thing that I wish for my daughter,” I said in response to a question posed by an audience member at a WITI event that I spoke at last spring. The woman asked me ‘what I hoped for’ for my daughter. “I want them to have the confidence to follow their heart, early.” From the get go. No deferrals. Continue reading…
Transition and Steve Jobs…shared learnings?
Merriam Webster’s Online defines prolific as, “marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity <a prolific composer>.” I turned to this query after completing Walter Isaacson’s, Steve Jobs (Thorndike Press, 2011). Prolific, although not a descriptive used by Isaacson, came to mind as I finally closed the book. Yes, I admit I read a physical version of the book despite the tech infused visionary at its core. Prolific. How else can you describe someone who served as the catalyst for a list that includes…the Macintosh, Pixar blockbusters like Toy Story, Apple Stores, iTunes, the iPod, the App Store, the iPad? Prolific? Continue reading…
Transition and jobs: three routes
In early May I happened to catch a few minutes of wbur’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. His topic, Death At A Young Age, featured the 1987 death of five sorority sisters who were killed in an automobile accident when returning from a charity walk-a-thon. While it might sound morbid, the conversation was anything but. Continue reading…
Those elusive 21st century female role models
Is anyone else entertained? Can you recall any male executive who was held accountable amidst all of the hoopla surrounding the global financial crisis in 2008? We had a crisis that resulted in the collapse or near collapse of large financial institutions, like Lehman Brothers or AIG; the federal bailout of financial services and large industrial companies, recall TARP and GM; downturns in the global stock market and the housing market; and widespread unemployment that reached and still remains at historic highs. Now answer this: is there anyone in America who can’t tell you who Ina Drew is? Continue reading…
Transition through a techie lens
What’s your take on social media? Earlier today I experienced social media deja vu for the first time. Who knew? A friend tagged a Forbes.com post on LinkedIn entitled,“The Six Enemies of Greatness (and Happiness)” by blogger Jessica Hagy. The caption included a few little drawings.
The Six Enemies of Greatness ( and Happiness) by Jessica Hagy, Forbes.com 2/28/12
The drawings looked and felt like the illustrations that I’d been seeing all week in “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge.” What can I say, the drawings spoke to me…. Continue reading…
Transition: How do you start?
“This is an evolution not an event,” I added sincerely as I sat with a colleague on the eve of his first major downsizing. He was the CIO of a major insurance company. It was the early 90’s. None of us were fatigued yet by downsizing. He was visibly worried as he sat thinking through the likely impact of a meeting scheduled for the next morning. I was on my soapbox of ‘enlightenment through defining a problem correctly.’ I urged him to think about a broader set of actions: the message to the employees who would stay, the required behaviors of his management team in the days and months that followed, his willingness to help those who would be on the receiving end of a sobering message. Continue reading…