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. Read 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.” Read 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.
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 And we have recognized as a nation that our school system is out of date and a waste of time for kids.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? Read 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. Read more
Recently I wrote a post about how to pick a husband if you want to have kids. A lot of people asked that I write the male corollary to that post. So, here it is.
This post is about identity. How to see yourself. How to figure out if you can remake yourself. How to make a life that is true to yourself. And, put more bluntly, how to get the best deal in a wife given who you are.
For men, there are three choices: breadwinner, and stay-at-home dad, and shared responsibilities. Read more
I only fly business class because too many things go wrong when I don’t.
When I’m at the airport, I miss my planes. A lot. My biggest problem is that I can’t actually read my boarding pass. So, I’m going to tell you about how I get help.
But asking for help is complicated. Garret Keizer, author of Help: The Original Human Dilemma, explains how nuanced the act of giving and receiving help is. But he shows also that help is what makes us human.
Research about mentoring, startups, organizational development, and even Asperger’s all show that one’s ability to ask for assistance makes or breaks their career. One way to get good at it is to watch how other people get and give help. Here are seven other ways to get good at asking for help: Read more
I wait until my kids and husband go to bed. I wait ten extra minutes just in case. Then I take my new book out of the bag: Family Violence: Legal, Medical and Social Perspectives.
It’s a textbook organized by types of violence. The only light on in the house is the one next to the sofa where I curl up to read.
I flip through pages: Neglect, sexual abuse, ritual abuse. Everything is here.
I pause at physical abuse. There are lists of signs. Inconsistent stories from caretakers. Belt marks. Hand prints.
Burns are most common for kids under three. I think of my burn. How old was I? I was older, because I could walk to the doctor’s office by myself. Read more
I spent the morning going through my file of links that people have sent to me over the week that looked good to read. I have seen enough productivity advice to know that I should not leave links in my inbox. David Allen says everything needs to be dealt with now or filed for later. Leo Babauta says you should clear out your reading folder each week so it doesn’t hang over you. And I want to be productive, so I’m following all the rules.
But something happened on the way to the bottom of the reading folder and I ate a box of cookies after I read Mike Maddock’s list of Resolutions Successful People Make and Keep. I am upset about the list because I assumed I’d click on the list and be like, “Oh yeah, I’m great. I do all those things.” But the list is killing me. Read more
This webinar is to show you how to leverage your strengths with Myers Briggs. It includes four days of of video sessions and email-based course materials. You can purchase this workshop for anytime, on-demand access. The cost is $195.
I have too much to say about Myers Briggs to be contained in just my blog posts. So I’m doing a webinar. Also, Melissa and I have so much fun with you guys in these webinars, and we want to do another. During the last two, people kept saying we should do a Myers Briggs one.
So here it is, with a special guest: the guy who taught me about Myers Briggs, Rob Toomey. It started out that I interviewed him, in the olden days, when I was a columnist at the Boston Globe and actually did interviews. Then I would call him just to ask him things:
Q: Why do I hate my INTJ co-worker?
A: Everyone hates INTJs but INTJs don’t care. They just want the work done.
Okay. To be fair, Rob doesn’t talk like that. He’s very diplomatic. I am summarizing his wisdom. But in the webinar, it will be a lot of Rob talking. (And he will be fun, because he’s an ENTP, and ENTPs are fun.)
The biggest reason to understand Myers Briggs is that just about every company in the Fortune 500 uses it as part of training for senior management. If you understand the meaning of your own score you will immediately become more effective at meeting your goals, and if you understand other people’s scores you’ll be way better at communicating with them.
Naturally, when I heard that top leaders in the Fortune 500 get this training, I had to have it too. And my path to expertise was the typical journalist path: I bugged my source incessantly til Rob was not a source but a friend.
Then when I was running Brazen Careerist, I would not shut up about Myers Briggs. I told everyone in the company that they had to take the test, and when they refused, I said, “Forget it, I’m so good at it I know your score anyway.”
Just to prove me wrong, they took the test.
And I was right. Which I tell you only to show how smart you can be about everyone if you understand Myers Briggs.
So this is the last thing I’m gonna tell you about the webinar. Everyone should sign up. I’m not kidding. Having a solid understanding of Myers Briggs has changed every aspect of my life. And it’s going to be really fun because I love Rob and I love Melissa, and this is my dream-come-true Myers Briggs party.
Here’s the official announcement of what we’ll do: Read more