Don’t be an annoying white person at work

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One of the most dangerous ideas in the workplace today is that racism is gone. Because it’s not.

Jesse Rothstein, professor of economics at Princeton University, shows the prevalance of racist thinking, even today. “Some people think racial discrimination is something that ended in 1972 or something. Some people think that segregation persists because minorities cannot afford the neighborhoods.”

But in fact, Rothstein found that there is a threshold for the percentage of people living in a city who are minorites. And once a city crosses that threshold, white people start leaving. In terms of white flight, Rothstein says, “There’s a real difference between a school with 5% minorities and a school with 6%.”

These are the people you work with. The white people who would leave a school district if it wasn’t white enough. No one wears a percentage sign on their shirt to let you know where they fall on the continuum of racist thinking, but we all fall somewhere.

I have written before about how subtle discrimination is. It’s not okay to be racist in an overt way. There is wide cultural agreement on this. Which means that the racism goes to places that are hard to pinpoint. For example, I reported that when we read resumes, we judge people who might be African American more harshly.

The advertising industry is so suspect in its hiring practices that the New York City Commission on Human Rights recently issued subpoenas in an investigation of systemic discrimination against African Americans. And an interview in CareerJournal unveils a long list of excuses the advertising industry uses to explain the lack of African Americans in high level positions.

In a new twist to an old story, Miriam Jordan reports in CareerJournal that employers are coming up with new reasons to discriminate against African Americans: “There is a perception that Latinos closer to the immigrant experience might work harder than black persons,” says Joe Hicks, who is African-American and vice president of Community Advocates, a nonpartisan group that aims to advance interracial dialogue.

So what can a white person do to improve the situation? Start with herself, of course. The more you understand your racial prejudices, the less they will show up at work. In the mean time, I polled a few people, and here are a some annoying things that white people say that African Americans wish they wouldn’t.

1. Don’t praise someone as articulate, as if you’re surprised. There has been a lot of dicusssion about Joe Biden calling Barak Obama articulate. My friend says he has experienced this problem many times in his life, but would never come out an say anything because he’d be labeled “too sensitive.” He quotes Michael Dyson, professor at the University of Pennsylvania: “Historically, articulate was meant to signal the exceptional Negro. The implication is that most black people do not have the capacity to engage in articulate speech, when white people are automatically assumed to be articulate.”

2. Don’t discuss politics. It is a mine field of offensive and inappropriate comments. The number of political issues that have underlying race issues makes politics too risky to contend with at work.

3. Don’t make racial jokes or comments against any race. Often whites think it’s okay to joke with a black coworker about Asian, Latinos, etc. This makes most people of color uncomfortable and also think “If whites joke with me about Asians/Latinos, etc. what are they doing when they’re with Asians/Latinos?”

4. Don’t say “you people” when referring to people of another ethnicity. It creates a division between you and the other person where a division is not necessary.

And finally, here’s a story someone sent me to illustrate how careless white people are at the office: “I recently changed positions within the same organization and willingly took a job in an office in a predominately black neighborhood. Whenever we have joint office meetings or we are in the main office only my white counterparts ask, “How are things going over there (code for “I wouldn’t be caught dead over there, do you feel safe, has your car been stolen?”) This question comes from people who never spoke to me before, and it was an every-meeting type question. In one meeting I responded with, “I don’t have a problem working around or with black people.” No one has asked since.

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How to make ladder-climbing a positive experience

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The work world offers a continuum of means to stability. Huge risk takers might choose to pay off the Russian mob and try to corner to oil market in Siberia. If you’re looking for stability, you might try climbing a corporate ladder in a large, publicly traded company.

Climbing, of course, could lead to instability. The less valuable you are to the company, the more likely you are to be laid off, given mind-numbing work, or given positions that offer little flexibility. And those situations often lead to big instability.

But there are a few things you can do to make ladder-climbing easier. So here are three ideas, and one general tip: Pay attention to employment litigation – where the courts are systematically documenting what helps and hinders ladder-climbers as a way to protect minorities from discrimination.

1. Start somewhere good.
There are companies that are known for being respectful of employees and there are companies known for being embroiled in litigation from bitter employees.

Stay away from the latter. Daniel Gilbert shows that if the last girl liked the guy you’re dating than you’ll probably like him, too. It is not a big leap to apply this research to the workplace. If other people love working at the company, then you will too.

So talk to former employees and find out if they liked the company. (Current employees often have too much invested in their job to tell you the company stinks.) LinkedIn is actually a great way to find former employees of a given company. And most people will be happy to tell you if they loved their former match.

2. Get a sponsor.
In order to move up in a large company you need someone to guide you. A sponsor is someone who is a mentor, but it’s a specific type of mentor. This person is well-connected in the company, who will not only make you known to the right people, but will help you steer yourself within the company.

You find a sponsor the same way you would find a mentor. By networking, by approaching the person directly, or by asking your human resources department if there’s a company program you can join.

It is well documented that a sponsor works to get an employee up the ladder. And because of this, when a large company gets in trouble for not promoting enough minorities into senior management, one way they can remedy the problem (reg. req.) in a way that satisfies the courts is to establish a sponsor program for minorities.

This should be enough evidence for you to set up your own little program, for yourself.

3. Get into a line management position.
Corporations are set up to favor ladder climbing from line management rather than from support roles.

What does this mean? Line managers are directly responsible for generating money for the company (think product management or sales). Support staff, on the other hand, is responsible for making things run smoothly so the line managers can generate money (think human resources, public relations, or customer service).

Support managers generally do not have the profit-and-loss experience necessary for a top management position. Of all the CEOs who worked their way up the ladder, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with someone who made their mark on the company in a support role. And discrimination lawsuits have identified placing minorities in human resources and public relations departments as inherently career-limiting moves.

One of the most important pieces of climbing a ladder is creating a situation where you have enough clout to create a furtively flexible work life. (For example, a last-minute decision to go to a basketball game does not raise any eyebrows.) This is what will make ladder climbing palatable over an extended period of time.

Take a job that allows you to adding directly to the company’s bottom line, because if you can take responsibility for profits then you will get more leeway to create the kind of work life you want. And, that, after all, is the key to making a climb up the ladder a positive experience.

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I can’t pronounce my son’s last name

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The first time I had my own company, we ignored Martin Luther King Day. And it felt really bad, like I was not living my own values. Now I am careful each year to do something to mark the holiday. So today I’m posting a piece I wrote a few years ago, before I had a blog…

My husband and I didn’t argue about my son’s first name. We argued about the last name. At first, I didn’t have a strong opinion, so we gave my son my husband’s name, Rodriguez, even though I can’t roll the Rs, which drives my husband crazy.

But then I got cold feet. I worried that our son would face discrimination for his name. My husband said, “Don’t worry, I get it all the time. He’ll get used to it.”

I was surprised to hear that my husband experiences discrimination. Part of seeing someone as a minority is seeing him as other. So, because he’s my husband, I don’t think of him as a minority.

But here’s an example he gave me: He worked with a think tank that researched solutions to homelessness. Sometimes when he met with leaders of homeless shelters, the leaders mistook my husband for one of the homeless. This never happened to his counterpart, Jay Alexander .

But my husband kept telling me it doesn’t matter. He said that to me once a week for nine months until I believed him.

What did I know? I have never had a name that identifies me as a minority, so I don’t know what it’s like. My great-grandfather changed the family name so that it would not sound Jewish and his sons could get through the Ivy League quota system. (The change worked, they got in.) In the family tradition of changing one’s name for one’s politics, I changed my last name when I was in my early twenties because I didn’t want to be part of a patriarchal naming structure. (In this case, I’m not sure if the change did anything.)

My husband always says, “It’s no big deal.” But now I am sure that it is a big deal.

A study conducted at the University of Chicago and MIT shows that people who have names that are typically from minorities are much less likely to get a job. In this study, hundreds of fake resumes with very similar qualifications were sent in response to entry-level job advertisements. A resume from a name like Amy Alexander was fifty percent more likely to get an interview than a resume from a name like Latoya Washington.

This shouldn’t surprise me – of course people like to hire people who are like them. And minorities are not running the show in corporate America. In fact, I am guilty, also. Even though I know that diversity enhances workplace success, I also know that managing someone like myself is a lot easier than managing someone who’s not like me; it’s so much easier to lead people who are already thinking in the same way that I am.

So I can talk until I’m blue in the face about race and discrimination, but I have to admit that I have preconceptions about someone with the last name of Rodriguez and someone whose last name is Alexander. I don’t want to have preconceptions, but we can’t always control those things. So I thought of changing my son’s last name, but then I thought, that’s a cop out.

I want to believe that we can control how we approach resumes so that we mitigate our preconceptions by reading resumes without reading names. Each of us is more likely to interview more fairly if we do not read names. It’s a simple process that will teach each of us something about our prejudices and ourselves.

So give name-blind resumes a try. See what happens. And who knows? Maybe one day, that resume you might have skipped will be my son’s.

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Workplace diversity is here, but it’s not what we expected

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There is plenty of data to show that diversity is good for the workplace. But in general we don’t really create it for ourselves, because we like to work with people who are similar to us.

“In terms of innovation, diverse teams way outperform non-diverse teams, but people are very comfortable working with people they have worked with in the past or people who are like them,” says Frans Johansson, author of Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation.

Before you start commenting about how you are the exception, and your office is diverse, let’s be clear on what diversity is. The research about diversity at work is about diversity of experience, perspectives or work styles. This means that teams you might assume are diverse may not be – for example a multi-racial team of prep-school and Ivy-league graduates might have had a homogenous experience. This also means that places we typically think of as diverse, like San Francisco, are actually more homogenous than we realize (#6).

Diversity is a popular idea, but we misuse the idea of it all the time. We can learn a lot about diversity from preschools, by way of politics.

Wisconsin recently voted to ban gay marriage. Voters of Madison, where I live, strongly opposed this measure. The sentiment here is indignanation that their own state passed such a discriminatory law. Yet gay marriage is not about diversity in Madison. Gay people are part of the mainstream here, and are widely accepted.

A better gauge of Madison’s ability to accept diversity is whether their school system is willing to spend the money to comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Act at the preschool level. And the answer is a resounding no. The school system violates case law precedents and no one is standing up for the kids who are different and demanding that they receive fair treatment under the law.

Another preschool example: New York City preschools cost more than $10,000 a year. Most offer no financial aid, and on top of that, the admissions process is so difficult and grueling that many parents hire consultants to help get their kid in. (I hired a very popular one for $4000.) Almost all the schools talk about the importance of diversity, but how you can have diversity among people who will pay $10,000 a year for preschool? You have already eliminated 99% of the U.S. population.

Do you know where there are truly diverse preschools? In Head Start, where kids come to school speaking no English, where some kids have parents with Ph.D’s, and some have parents who can’t read. And you know what? These classrooms are very, very difficult to manage, because diversity is very difficult to manage.

And this brings me back to Johansson, who says that truly diverse teams are not easy. “Making diversity work requires a lot of effort up front. So you won’t get results as fast as you’re used to.” People must know this instinctively because we talk about diversity all the time, and create it only rarely. “People talk about it because they know they should,” says Johansson, “But they just don’t believe it.”

So what can you do to change things?

1. Understand that we each have an inherent bias against diversity.

2. Test your team for diversity. Did you mesh right away? Then you’re probably not coming from such different perspectives.

3. Embrace the multi-generational workplace. The reason generation is such a big issue in the workplace today is that in many instances, it creates diversity that you can’t escape. Usually you can decide to not to work with the person who would bring diversity to your team. You don’t need to give a reason, you just choose someone who is more like you. But what do you do when a whole generation is not like you? You have to learn to work with someone who has different pespectives.

So, the bad news is that we’ve been talking about diversity for twenty years, and accomplishing very little. The good news is that the fireworks at the multigenerational workplace are not just conflict, but the first signs of widespread diversity at work.

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Christmas at the office is bad for diversity

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Countless workplace studies have shown that a diverse staff is likely to outperform a homogenous staff. So with all this talk about diversity, why are we still hanging Christmas wreaths at work?

Not everyone at the office celebrates Christmas, and acting as if everyone has the “holiday spirit” squelches the spirit of workplace diversity.

Diversity in the workplace is not “diverse religious expression.” Diversity should express itself in how people approach business problems. Religion is not appropriate at work in the same way that politics is not appropriate; both are divisive.

Corporate events that are tied to religion make people who don’t practice that religion feel like outsiders and therefore inhibit diversity. (And those of you who think Happy Holidays is non-sectarian, please realize that almost all non-Christians I know hear “Happy Holidays” as “Merry Christmas to those of you who do not celebrate it.”)

For me, the Christmas problem starts early – at Yom Kippur, which usually falls in September. This is the most important holiday for Jews, but I have never gotten this holiday off from work. I take vacation days to observe Yom Kippur. And I don’t complain about using my vacation days because it is absurd to think everyone should stop working because the Jews have a holiday.

But as workers, Jews have to observe Christmas. For us, it’s a weird day to be off from work. No stores are open. There’s nothing on TV. Most restaurants are closed. It’s a boring day, a good day to be at work. So when Christmas rolls around, many Jews would be happy to work on the 25th and have a more useful day off. But we are forced to take a holiday.

Given the nothingness of Christmas to most Jews, it is absurd how much Christmas cheer that Jews partake in just to fit in at the office.

Vendors send Christmas cards, co-workers say “Happy Holidays,” clients expect Christmas gifts. Jews partake in all these moments because the best way to succeed at work is to fit in. The bottom line is that Jews are forced to be what they are not in order to fit in, and that is never good when you’re trying to promote the diverse expression of ideas.

I can already hear the uproar: “Christmas is not about religion!” It’s always the Christians who say that. Christmas is about religion because Christians celebrate Christmas.

Jews don’t do Christmas. Muslims don’t do Christmas. Buddhists don’t do Christmas. And no one rants and raves about how religious or nonreligious Christmas is except the Christians. That’s because they feel they have authority over the holiday – it’s theirs.

Here’s an exercise for those of you who have gotten to the bottom of this column and are infuriated (I know you’re there – you send e-mail to me every December): Try to see my point of view. Even if you don’t agree with me, acknowledge that my point of view represents a minority in the workplace. If you cannot step outside yourself and see things from a minority perspective, you will not be able to manage minorities. And if you want your career to be upwardly mobile, you need to be able to manage diversity.

If you want to be kind and generous and contribute to peace on earth in the New Year, help minorities to fit in. Open your mind to experiences that are different than your own. Look at ways your office makes diversity difficult and fix them. You can start by getting rid of those Christmas wreaths.

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How to decide where to live

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Take the question of where to live seriously. Don’t let inertia push you toward a big-name city, the place you grew up, or your old college haunts. Make a conscious decision to live somewhere that will improve your quality of life by really understanding what your core needs and interests are–and will be.

City leaders understand they are competing to attract vibrant, creative populations and are branding themselves accordingly. Young people get this, and many treat cities as a consumer product to be test-driven, like a new car. A white paper written by Next Generation Consulting stated that because of an increasing shortage in skilled workers, Generation Y is saying, “I can find a job anywhere. It’s more important to me to find a place where I fit in.”

Rebecca Ryan, CEO of Next Generation Consulting, says: “Where you live is more important than where you work because a mortgage and your kids’ school are more long-term than the job you have.”

So how do you choose where to live if everywhere is a possibility?

1. Understand what really matters.
Richard Florida, professor at George Mason University and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, summarized conclusions from a recent summit of the mavens of the economic development and psychology-of-happiness communities: “Place is as important as having a job that challenges you, but not as important as relationships with family and friends.”

Jane Ciccone, designer of jewelry line Jane Elizabeth, got it. She says she and her husband, “fell in love with San Francisco, but our families were in Massachusetts. We could have stayed in San Francisco if we could have gotten some of my family to move there. But no one would move because of the cost of living.” Now they live in Newburyport, MA, and she is expecting to give birth any day.

2. Leave room for career flexibility.
You probably won’t have the same career your whole life. If you move to a city where the culture or demographics reflect your values (think recycling rates, number of churches) and meets the needs of your non-work interests (e.g. kayaking in the Pacific Northwest) then you are more likely to move among careers without having to relocate away from your interests or relationships.

Realize that a high-cost of living directly affects what flexibility you have in your career. You severely limit your ability to drop in and out of the workforce and careers if you are raising kids and paying a mortgage in an expensive place.

3. Live where your income is at least as high as the median.
If you’re surrounded by people who have more money than you, you won’t feel like you have enough. The relative amount of money is what matters, according to Daniel Khaneman, who won a Nobel Prize for applying psychology to economics.

3. Consider that more choice is not intrinsically more desirable.
Do you really need to be able to choose from 20 takeout restaurants every night? Probably not. The same is true for private schools, and pet-friendly parks. More choices make us nervous about deciding and more likely to regret what we’ve ultimately settled on, according to Barry Schwartz, author of the Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. You don’t want life dictated to you, but you also don’t want to spend your whole life deliberating what-if scenarios.

4. Don’t relocate away from a spouse or significant other.
The single biggest factor in our happiness, according to many studies is not money, it’s our sex life. Daniel Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, has quantified it for us: “Going from sex once a month to sex once a week creates a big jump in happiness.” Caveat for the adventurous: Sex needs to be with a single, consistent partner to confer bigtime benefits.

5. Keep your commute short.
There’s a huge psychic cost to joining the suburban crawl. “You think you are moving out to the suburbs because it’s better for your kids, but in some cities, you’re never going to see your kids because you’re always in your car,” says Wendy Waters, founder of the blog All About Cities.

6. Seek diverse populations for a richer life.
Bigger cities are often among the most homogenous. Ethnic diversity and racial differences now are not as pronounced as economic and educational differences. Diverse ideas are often based in diverse experience; however housing costs are pushing out nearly everyone but the rich from the most popular cities.

Richard Florida says, “San Francisco is becoming an entirely homogenous place. This is true of entire regions and migration trends will make this worse. The creative revolution is creating a concentration of wealth worse than in the Industrial Revolution.”

7. Make a decision to improve the world.
“The key to solving this problem,” says Florida, “is not to beat up Boston and San Francisco, but to make second-tier cities attractive.”

In a large part, this is a government problem. Pay attention to cities such as Columbus, Ohio, where mayor Michael Coleman has a vision for the city that intensely embraces diversity. Or Madison, Wisconsin, where there’s a capable network of investors working with the government to promote local technology innovations.

You can find meaning in community by helping to promote diversity and creativity in a city such as these. You can help build new models for cities that make room for communities of people with diverse ideas and diverse income levels. The decision is a little like driving a hybrid car: We can’t fix everything in the world. But we can live our life in sync with our values and with intention to make a difference.

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Don’t report sexual harassment (in most cases)

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Why I’m not deleting this post…
There were not laws to protect women in 2006. It was a scary, lonely time for women. We didn’t always have language to describe what was happening to us at work.
When you reported sexual harassment in 2006 you got fired. And there were no repercussions for the harasser because no one cared. In 2019, we are making progress in supporting victims, but we still have a long way to go. And we can’t know how far we’ve come unless we save evidence of what life was like before.

—Penelope, Aug. 2, 2019

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Sexual harassment in American work life is pervasive — as much as 80 percent in some sectors. But most women don’t stand a chance of winning a lawsuit. So having a plan to deal with the problem is a good idea for all women.

When it comes to harassment, Georgia Gatsiou, chef at Beard Papa, says: “I would talk to him myself. I am aggressive like that.” You should probably take that approach as well. Most sexual harassment isn’t severe enough to hold up in court, and the law isn’t strong enough to protect you from most types of retaliation. So unless your safety is at risk, you’re usually best off handling the harasser yourself rather than reporting him to human resources.

To win a lawsuit, courts require proof that harassment was severe and pervasive in the work environment, according to Alisa Epstein of New York-based law firm Samuelson, Hause & Samuelson. And that employee handbook becomes important too. Gatsiou is typical of employee handbook readers: “It’s big. I’ve read a lot of things in that handbook. Maybe there’s something about harassment. I don’t know.” But when you report to human resources, you must follow your company’s policy precisely or you risk losing your ability to take the company to court.

After you’ve filed a report, human resources will protect the company, not you. Human resource executives talk about their concern for harassment. But, according to Jim Weliky of Boston-based law firm Messing, Rudavsky & Weliky, “most human resource departments don’t live up to their propaganda.”

The law is set up to encourage a company to take proscribed steps to protect itself from liability rather than to protect your emotional stability, or, for that matter, your career. Once you take action against a harasser, retaliation is your biggest problem.

“Very few retaliation cases we have were not triggered by reporting the problem to human resources,” says Weliky. “But not all retaliation is strong enough to make it to court.” Retaliation is usually subtle: fewer invitations to lunch, a cubicle that isolates you from office networks, and project assignments that are boring. That sort of retaliation effectively holds back your career without standing up in court.

Just because you don’t have a lawsuit doesn’t mean you need to put up with harassment or retaliation. It means you need to take things into your own hands. Your goal should be to stop the harassment without hurting your career. No small feat, but possible.

“This is a negotiable moment,” says Carol Frohlinger, attorney and author of Her Place at the Table: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success. “Before going to human resources, have a frank conversation with the person making you uncomfortable.

“Be clear on what behavior is harassing and that you don’t like it. As long as he doesn’t repeatedly refuse to negotiate like saying, ‘You’re so premenstrual’ and walking away,’ ” Frohlinger said, “you should negotiate things for yourself.”

As in any important negotiating session Frohlinger advises that you assess your “best alternative to a negotiated agreement,” or BATNA. Your BATNA is probably to leave the company. But you should let your opponent feel that your BATNA is to go to human resources. Because no matter how arrogant he is, he will not be happy about being dragged into a ‘he said-she said’ mess before the human resources department.

When you negotiate, aim high: If your harasser is your boss, ask for help to switch departments, and ask to go to a better department with a top manager. It’s in your harasser’s interest to help you. Or, if a co-worker is harassing you, make sure the co-worker appreciates that you handled things yourself. You save the co-worker a lot of problems by not reporting him.These are ways to decrease the chances of retribution while squelching the harassing behavior.

If the harasser will not negotiate with you, assess your power versus his. “Sexual harassment is more about the balance of power than what has been said,” advises Weliky.

When Kate, a high-powered New York City lawyer, was young and working with a managing director, she recalled an incident in which he asked her to “bring the papers by my hotel room, and don’t worry if I’m only wearing a towel.”

She thought the comment was ludicrous and told the whole office. “I could do that because I was on my way up in that firm, and he was doing poorly,” she said. “He didn’t have a lot of ways to make my life difficult. In fact, someone told his wife and she bawled him out in front of his co-workers.”

A great situation, but most of you cannot depend on your harasser’s wife for vigilante law enforcement. If the balance of power is not in your favor, and you get nowhere negotiating, find a new job and leave the offending company–in that order–because it’s always easier to find a job when you have a job, even if you hate the job you have.

There is plenty to do in this world that does not require you to work in companies that enable a boys’ club atmosphere. There are a lot of men who feel alienated in this atmosphere too.

Find those men and work with them. Then get a lot of power in your career and create a workplace culture you believe in.

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Knowing when to make your move

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Just because you’re adamant about making sure you have a personal life doesn't mean you can't be top in your field. Top is different today than it was even ten years ago. Top doesn't mean climbing a ladder to make the most money. Top means having influence in discussions that matter to you, and having interesting problems to solve.

How do you get that? One way is by making a move when you can't get any further on the path you're going. A good example of this is Billy Cunningham, medical professor at UCLA. He made a name for himself by documenting that upper-middle-class people of color in the United States were 37 percent more likely to have poor health than upper-middle-class whites, and by making revolutionary recommendations in front of Congress like dispensing medical information in church. His recommendations worked. But then he was faced with the question of what to do next.

“I thought about what is coming down the pipe where we might see the same disparities and can anticipate it and prevent those gaps from occurring. I also thought about what I could be the first to study. I started focusing on adherence to AIDS cocktails and then I realized I was late to the game because several others had started working on it before I did and they had laboratory expertise that I didn’t which would make it hard for me to compete.”

The topic he settled on was the AIDS vaccine. He was in a position to study ways to distribute it and to put himself in a position to be a key member of the community that launches the vaccine (when it is discovered) in South Africa, where the infection rate is as high as 50% in some populations.

Cunningham knows he wants to bring better medical treatement to minorities, but he knows the best way to make a difference is being the top in his field. He consciously plots to find a space that is open for him to rise to the top. You should be doing this too, in your career. This is how you have the most influence to ask important questions, seek meaningful answers, and make a difference in peoples’ lives.

Another good example of making a move is Alex Ohanian and Steve Huffman, who just sold their company, Reddit, to Conde Nast. When I interviewed them last February, they had received a buyout offer from Google, but they turned it down. At that point, Reddit was on an exciting and seemingly limitless path. Today, though, Reddit’s path as a stand alone company might be a dead end because Digg, their competitor, is now an industry standard, and Reddit is second fiddle. Taking the buyout offer now, from a premier publishing company with enthusiasm for building out Reddit, makes good sense for Ohanian and Huffman. After all, Ohanian told me, “We do this because it is fun and interesting.”

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How to succeed in China

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My Chinese radar really perked up last week when I read the Economist article about Alibaba. This Chinese company is the largest online business-to-business marketplace in the world, and it just purchased Yahoo! China, which makes Alibaba the12th most popular site in the world.

I checked out the site right away, and, guess what? It looks just like eBay, except that the testimonial on the home page is from someone who lives in Vietnam. Moments like this make me think career advice really needs to address the China issue: How will you survive in China? But the answer is, of course, that you probably won’t. Which is why I don’t write a lot of advice about it.

Some people will do well in China, though. So let’s take a look.

There is a brisk business in Chinese nannies for American babies. New York Magazine reports that, “The lycee is passe (old Europe has no trade surplus), and some parents are scouring Craigslist and placing ads in the China Press for sitters who speak Mandarin, China’s official language.”

One of those parents says, “Even if my little girl weren’t very smart, she’s always going to get a job because she’ll be totally fluent in Chinese.”

This is not true. It takes a lot more than speaking Chinese to succeed in China.

China is among the easiest countries to attract outsiders to work but is also one of the hardest places for them to succeed, according to David Everhart, regional practice leader for Asia at the recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International.

Everhart gave me this list of five traits of people who succeed on a Chinese mission:

1. You are generally a very patient person, with a high tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.

2. You already have a certain knowledge of Chinese culture — not only societal, but also the business culture.

3. You have evaluated your company’s China strategy and are empowered to manage expectations at the home office about what it will take to meet your goals.

4. You have researched and secured extra support so your family will be able to adapt socially in China.

5. You arrive in China and immediately begin thinking about succession planning: how to develop the leaders of the future who will allow the firm to localize its management team.

Most of us will never work in China, but there’s a lesson in this list. You need social skills and a big-picture strategy for any job you take. In China, because of a cultural gap, you need them even more. But don’t kid yourself: If you can’t tolerate a certain amount of uncertainty and ambiguity, you will flounder in a leadership position anywhere, not just in China.

Finally, check out Melanie Parsons Gao’s blog. She is a Sun employee who blogs about making the transition to China. She posted a list of what to bring that is interesting even if you never go.

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How my friend copes with her disability at work

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Wendy Waters suggested that I write about how to deal with disabilities in the workplace. So here’s a story about my friend Ann, who has a really deep voice. It isn’t a sexy deep voice; it sounds more like Oscar the Grouch with a sore throat or Darth Vader on Prozac.

Her voice, which is a result of a birth complication, is a disability that she must deal with daily and for the most part, has overcome. While I know this now, and it’s the basis for this story, I didn't always see things that way.

I knew Ann in grade school where I confess to having had evil thoughts:

1. Why is she first chair in saxophone and I am last chair in oboe? She has the right mouth for wind instruments, and I don't. It's not fair.
2. Why is she class president and I am not even getting invited to boy-girl parties? How can someone with such an awful voice be so much more popular than I am?

But Ann and I ended up on the high-school track team together, and we became close friends. I spent so much time with her that I stopped noticing that her voice was different than other people’s. It seemed normal to me.

But there were constant reminders: restaurant customers stared when they heard us talking. Often sales people did not hear what she wanted because they were so stunned by the sound of her voice. Ann never lost patience, never seemed uncomfortable. I never knew how she did it.

In the track world you meet tons of kids from schools all over the state, and when Ann walked by, I heard lots of them say: “What's wrong with her voice?”

When I asked Ann if she felt weird about how she sounded, she'd say no. “A deep voice sounds authoritative,” she’d tell me.

Ann flourished in college. She learned to be extra nice to people because they usually would be extra nice back. She became very loyal to friends who stuck by her because so many others shied away after hearing her speak. Naturally, she knew she was different, but good grades could help her overcome prejudices and she excelled in school.

After college she went to a top advertising firm. I assume that her voice was not a problem during job interviews, or at least that interviewers believed Ann could overcome her voice impediment enough to impress potential clients.

But then she was assigned to a manager who hated her. He berated her intelligence, made sexually offensive comments around her, and generally let her know he did not want her around. In truth, his actions amounted to harassment. But her harasser had leverage, so Ann had to leave the company.

Once you leave a high-profile company without recommendations, you can pretty much forget going to another company in the same industry. So Ann returned to where she flourished — school. She took programming classes, and a classmate liked her so much that he got her a job. His software firm needed someone who knew advertising and someone who knew programming, and the company liked the idea of Ann wearing two hats.

The company went under in the tech meltdown of 2002, but Ann found that by switching gears, she had developed a new specialty, which is in a very narrow niche that she now dominates (and doesn’t want me to identify because she wasn’t thrilled that I was writing about any of this). But the bottom line is that things are good for Ann now. She weathered many storms and is successful despite her disability. Here are her tips for others who are struggling with some kind of impediment. But the tips are applicable to all of us:

1. Don't blame other people for your failures. Take responsibility for your life and move past people who don't help you.
2. Have patience with yourself if you don't choose the right career on the first try. Trust that you will find a place that’s right for you, and keep looking.
3. Convince yourself you are great. Then convincing other people is much easier.

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