I was in tears and, at the same moment, utterly surprised at my reaction. Crying? I was watching Iron Lady, Meryl Streep‘s Academy Award victory lap in which she portrays Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979-1990. The movie caught me off guard. The twist for me came in the movie’s lens into Mrs. Thatcher’s life; the view is of her nearing dementia with life ‘highlights‘ told in retrospect. A wave to young children who were pleading with her not to go as she sped off to the Conservative Party‘s leadership. An aging person alone washing out her tea cup in the sink of a lovely, closeted London home. Adult children operating on the periphery. Why did it hit me so? Continue reading…
Transition’s detractor: ourselves?
“You kept saying that you ‘didn’t want to go’ but you kept walking backwards so I didn’t stop you,” said an affable guide during a debrief session about my performance. The event in question was rappelling down a sheer rock face during a 10-day Mountaineering Course with Colorado Outward Bound. Did I mention that I had never camped before? Continue reading…
Transition: Crafting an approach
“I wasn’t interested in leading a double life,” said AJ a former colleague of mine who co-founded Infuse, a not-for-profit entrepreneurship program for inner-city high school students in Silicon Valley. Her dual risk arose because she works as a program manager at Infinera, a publicly traded optical networking company. It’s easy to get inspired when speaking with AJ. She is a bundle of energy and passion. Aside from being enthused about her work at Infuse I’m fascinated by her dual dilemma ‘approach.’ Continue reading…
Risk and Failure
“I finally got around to reading your interest card,” said Andrall Pearson former President and COO of Pepsi Co. and my professor during a second year course at the Harvard Business School. His quip came as he leaned on my desk with hushed tones moments before class started. The card, an arcane pre-Internet system – think index card – held a few sentences authored by students to convey our interests to professors. On my card I’d divulged my dream of running an emerging business. That day the class was scheduled to discuss a 1980’s-style emerging business, Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT). OAT was founded in 1978 by a high school anthropology teacher in her three-story house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My little visit from Andrall was my heads up, referred to as a soft-call, that I would be leading the class’ discussion that day. I had about a minute and one-half to prepare. Continue reading…
Transition Approach: certain versus confident
I remember a great NPR piece from the summer of 2009. I was driving in traffic, my typical commute. Eight miles in 55 minutes. The discussion’s topic was leadership. The reason it caught me was that it described leadership in two simple yet separate buckets; certain or confident. It hit me because I think that every leader I have ever worked under would think of herself or himself as confident when in fact they were more often certain. I wonder if this simple dichotomy works in transition as well? Continue reading…
Valentine’s Day and Transition: A Common Link
It hit me yesterday as I was fielding a call from a former colleague who happens to be in transition. She was reeling from what sounded to me as a normal twist in a job pursuit cycle. Maybe you’ve seen this movie too. You finally find a target company or role that is perfect for you but the cavernous void created by online recruiting puts obstacles in your way. My friend’s plight was amplified by a heaping tablespoon of self-criticism. Even if it wasn’t Valentine’s Day one might suggest that there were two answers for her; networking and chocolate. Continue reading…
Barriers: Real or Imagined? (Take 2…)
“There was no money,” said my mother in response to a question I’d asked her last week about my grandfather. “He was pre-med at St. Bonaventure‘s,” she said. My grandfather was a 1st generation American whose Italian immigrant family had settled in upstate New York close to the turn of the 20th century. His father died when he was very young leaving a family of 6 children. His mother remarried. Tony – as my grandfather was lovingly known – never went on to med school. Continue reading…
Conversations: A critical transition tool
I was reading the New Yorker this week and was struck by an article by Jonah Lehrer called, Groupthink: the brainstorming myth (The New Yorker, January 30, 2012 pg 22+). The article was interesting in that it completely upended the notion of brainstorming as a productive tool for creative problem solving. Brainstorming? My kids, 1st and 2nd graders, even know the approach. Continue reading…
Little known transition attributes: courage & silence
“I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on,” said Steve Jobs in his much-quoted commencement address to Stanford University in June 2005. He was speaking about dropping out of college and then hanging around campus to explore courses that appeared interesting to him but Continue reading…
Trials, experiments and transition
This week a conversation from almost a decade ago popped into my mind. In it I was speaking with a brainy friend of mine who was a coder at Microsoft. He and I were talking about how small teams of coders were independent but highly linked. For example, one team might be given the challenge to build the “slide show” function for Powerpoint; another might be given the “inserting pictures” function. Each group would work on their own piece. Every night they would run a routine to integrate all of the code written that day by the various teams. Sound groundbreaking?