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I’m going to give you an outline below, of all the stuff I’m going to cover. But one of the things we’ll cover is that you need to solicit advice from people you trust, and then you need to take it, even if it’s hard.

The first piece of advice is that someone said I put too many unflattering photos of myself on my blog. So I hired Tamara Bell, a photographer for the Chicago Bulls, to take my portrait. And I dragged her to the bathroom at my son’s music lesson building because I love the lighting. See? I take advice. (more…)

So much of the world is based on how much people like you. For example, when you are in a job interview, there are three or four other candidates. All are qualified, because no one interviews people who cannot do the job—that would be a total waste of time. This means that interviews are about being enchanting. Whichever of the four candidates who the hiring manager most wants to hang out with all day is the one who gets the job.

The same is true for getting a promotion. Whoever the person in charge likes the most is the one who gets the promotion. And the rent control apartment. And the best match for a tutor. And the best coaching for Little League. It’s always about who is most enchanting. They get all the benefits.

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No one wants to seem old and outdated. The key to avoiding this is learning how to think like the next generation. So recognize what you care about that younger people don’t care about. Not like a house and mortgage – that stuff is dependent on what stage of life you’re in. I’m talking about things that are not dependent on stage of life - values and your outlook, which tend to be more generational.

When it comes to Generation Z, the most jarring shift  is that they’ll be obsessed with the bolstering of public institutions. This is a generation that cares about consensus-building and sticking with the systems that bind us together. And in order to rebuild after crisis, the generation will stress conformity – because noncomformity is a guilty-pleasure of a generation with no crises (like the Baby Boomers growing up in the 50s). Generation Z will focus on being part of the whole rather than differentiating themselves as special. (more…)

I get up at 5am to drive my son to his cello lessons in Chicago. On Saturday he’s in lessons for four hours. I wake him and he says, “No. It’s too early. It’s too hard to drive to Chicago all the time. I can’t do it.”

I don’t say anything. I sit on the side of the bed, in the dark, and I can’t force a seven-year-old to drive sixteen hours a week for cello. This is crazy. I can’t do it.

My son glances over at me from his squishy warm pillow. I decide I’ll let him sleep.

Then he throws off the covers, bounds out of bed and says, “I’m just like the kids in the video! I have to work hard if I want to be great! All great artists suffer! I have to suffer on the drive! Let’s go!” (more…)

I get so many books in the mail to review, and the way I evaluate which ones are worth my time is to first read the jacket flap. So I’m not even going to pretend that I have read Tipping Sacred Cows, by Jake Breeden, but I’m going to tell you that it has an amazing jacket flap.

He lists sacred cows in corporate life that we should reconsider:

Balance: Disguising indecision as a bland compromise that attempts to achieve many things but ends up accomplishing nothing

Collaboration: Creating a culture of learned helplessness with little individual empowerment and accountability (more…)

I’m at my son’s cello lesson, thinking about this week’s Time magazine. Sheryl Sandberg’s on the cover.

I never used to write about women on my blog. I wrote for three national magazines about careers before I even acknowledged that I was a woman aside from saying

1. I got the column because I was a woman running tech companies. (Rare back then.)

2. I got a promotion because I leveraged the sexual harassment my boss dished out in order to climb the ladder (around him).

Other than that, I tried very hard to not mention women. I could see that women who had kids got very little respect at the office and I stayed away from them. I only hired men. Even after I had kids, I only worked with men. (more…)

I took the kids to New York City for a week, and while Melissa was trying to figure out what to do with the kids for the day I was working, she came up with this idea that my seven-year-old son should do an internship with a stylist.

He wants to be a stylist. He talks about it all the time. And it’s hard for me because I’m so bad at dressing myself that he has actually reprimanded me: “Mom. That’s okay for the farm, but not for Boca Raton.” (more…)

Thank goodness someone finally had the courage to stand up and say that telecommuting is officially banned. Because telecommuting has been implicitly banned for a long time in Silicon Valley, but only Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has the courage to say it, point blank, without apology.  And her honesty is going to help all of us.

Telecommuting has been dead for a while.
Facebook has something called lock-down, where no one can go home. Kids come to Facebook if they want to see their parents. Really. Which means that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has also been promoting the end of telecommuting, but it’s actually more difficult for her to come out and say it when she is also championing the cause of women and encouraging them to “lean in” and have kids alongside a huge career.

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Alphabet Horse

In his last State of the Union speech President Obama proposed that we have universal preschool in the US. It’s appalling to me that he wants to pour money into preschool programs that are so out of sync with what families need.

Women have been very vocal about not wanting to work full-time while they have kids. And we have recognized as a nation that our school system is out of date and a waste of time for kids. So why are we dumping money into an institution that does not meet anyone’s needs? (more…)

I’m fascinated by the idea of judging whether you are on a good path. Because everyone wants to know if they are doing okay. The problem is that if you look at things out of context, you can’t really see what’s going on.

See the picture up top? You can’t totally tell what they are doing until you see other pictures, pictures of similar but different paths. (more…)