Category leadership

The Friday Poem: ‘The Boss’ by Deborah Garrison

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

One of the most important workplace relationships is the one between you and your direct supervisor. A good ‘boss’ will quickly sense your potential and connect your talents with work that challenges and enables professional growth. He/she employs personal experience to communicate the value of failure along with success. A good boss has a high EQ and a healthy dose of empathy for all.

For this week’s Friday Poem, a meditation on ‘The Boss’ through the eyes of poet Deborah Garrison.

The Boss

A firecracker, even after middle age

set in, a prince of repression

in his coat and tie, with cynical words

 

for everything dear to him.

Once I saw a snapshot of the house

he lives in, its fence painted

 

white, the flowers a wife

had planted leaning into the frame

on skinny stalks, shaking little pom-poms

 

of color, the dazzle all

accidental, and I felt

a hot, corrective

 

sting: our lives would never

intersect. At some point

he got older, trimmer, became

 

the formidable man around the office.

His bearing upright, what hair he has

silver and smooth, he shadows my doorway,

 

jostling the change in his pocket –

milder now, and mildly vexed.

The other day he asked what on earth

 

was wrong with me, and sat me down

on his big couch, where I cried

for twenty minutes straight,

 

snuffling, my eyeliner

betraying itself in the stained

tears. Impossible to say I was crying

 

because he had asked. He passed

tissues, at ease with the fearsome

womanly squall that made me alien

 

even to myself. No, it didn’t make him

squirm. Across his seventy years,

over his glasses, he eyed me kindly,

 

and I thought what countless scenes

of tears, of love revealed

he must have known.

 

Deborah Garrison   ‘A Working Girl Can’t Win’ 1998

a working girl can't win

Click on this link to hear the author read the poem as part of a 1999 interview with Bill Moyers.

“In this episode of Sounds of Poetry, Garrison tells Bill that poetry is about “trying to find a way to understand and describe the world that lifts you a little bit out of it, instead of just being in it and being lost.”

The week@work: Olympics close: memories remain, the power of vulnerability, workplace lessons from the cineplex, and Seattle’s millennials @work

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

This week@work the world’s best athletes headed to the airport and the rest of us, mere mortals, returned to our workplace. A CEO discussed the benefits of embracing vulnerability and a movie critic found workplace advice at the multiplex. In Seattle, the most recent additions to the workforce ‘gig’ their way to dream jobs.

As the Olympics came to a close on Sunday evening, there were three stories that continued to resonate from the ‘workplace’ of track and field.

‘That girl is the Olympic spirit’: After colliding, runners help each other cross finish line’ Marissa Payne for the Washington Post

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For track and field athletes, the Olympics offers the biggest prize of their careers. A gold medal is a tangible symbol of years of hard work and dedication. But on Tuesday, long-distance runners Nikki Hamblin of New Zealand and Abbey D’Agostino of the United States proved hardware doesn’t always trump heart.

After the two collided on the track during the 5,000-meter race, resulting in a bad leg injury for D’Agostino, the two urged each other on and both eventually were able to finish the race, albeit seemingly sacrificing their chances at a finals berth along the way.

“Everyone wants to win and everyone wants a medal. But as disappointing as this experience is for myself and for Abbey, there’s so much more to this than a medal,” Hamblin told reporters after the race.”

‘This Great-Grandmother Coaches an Olympic Champion. Now Let Her By.’ Karen Crouse for The New York Times

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“The great-grandmother who could pass as Barbara Bush’s kid sister waded through the stands at Olympic Stadium on Sunday night, trying to get close enough to congratulate the South African runner Wayde van Niekerk, who had just captured the gold medal in the 400 meters and broken one of the oldest world records in men’s track and field.

This is Botha’s first Olympics. She competed — without distinction, she said — in the sprints and the long jump when she was young and began coaching in 1968 while living in her native Namibia, then a territory under the rule of South Africa. Her first athletes were her son and daughter, but when they reached a certain level, she passed them off to other coaches, she said, “because I feel that’s not always a good thing as a parent to coach your own children.”

The woman who didn’t believe it prudent to coach her own children has earned the trust of her athletes by treating them as family.

“She doesn’t see us as athletes or as people; she sees us as her children,” said van Niekerk, who asked Botha in late 2012 if he could train under her at the University of the Free State, where she has been the head track and field coach since 1990.

Van Niekerk won the race from Lane 8, considered a disadvantageous position. Botha said it didn’t bother her that he was in an outside lane. “Because every lane is the same distance,” she said.”

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Can Ashton Eaton Save the Decathlon?  Mary Pilon for The New Yorker

“Ten years ago, Tate Metcalf, a high-school track coach in Bend, Oregon, was trying to find a college that would give one of his athletes a scholarship. Ashton Eaton was a talented sprinter with a fierce long jump, but Metcalf received mostly lukewarm responses. His coach felt that Eaton would have the best shot at getting into a Division I college if he competed in one of track and field’s multi-event disciplines, like the heptathlon or the decathlon. Metcalf knew it would make Eaton, who was raised by a single mother and had never had any private coaching, one of the first people in his family to go to college. So he suggested it. “Sure,” Eaton replied, as Metcalf recently recalled. Then Eaton said, “What’s the decathlon?”

Eaton, who is twenty-eight, is now the defending Olympic gold medallist and world-record holder in the event. “He’s the face of track and field,” Metcalf said, sitting underneath a giant banner of Eaton draped over Hayward Field, in Eugene, Oregon, at the Olympic trials earlier this summer. “But nobody knows it because he’s a decathlete.” It’s true: though he has a gleaming smile, press-perfect interview skills, and historic talent, Eaton has remained virtually unknown relative to his Olympic-champion counterparts and even some of his decathlete predecessors. The one place he’s remained indisputably famous is Eugene: here, his face graces billboards and bus signs; the local minor-league baseball team recently distributed Ashton Eaton bobblehead dolls as part of a tribute night to him. “I haven’t seen them yet,” Eaton told me. “It’s a little weird.”

The decathlon hasn’t always been a path to athletic obscurity. Many consider the winner of the event, which can trace its origins to ancient Greece, the “world’s greatest athlete.”

On Thursday evening, after two days of competition in ten events, Olympian Ashton Eaton repeated as gold medalist in the decathlon. He continues to hold the title of ‘the world’s greatest athlete’.

One of the best series in journalism is Adam Bryant‘s weekly column in The New York Times, ‘The Corner Office’. Bryant poses five or six questions to a selected CEO, and their responses appear in the Sunday Business Section. This past week, Christa Quarles of Open Table shared ‘early leadership lessons’.

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“The importance of embracing vulnerability. Early on, especially when I worked on Wall Street, God forbid that you declare any granular weakness, because people would pounce on it.

But the paradox of owning what you know and what you don’t know is that you actually seem more powerful as you expose more vulnerability. I’ve become more comfortable with exposing my vulnerability and not being afraid to go there.

When I give criticism now, I’ll talk about how I failed in a similar situation. I try to humanize the criticism in a way that says this is about an action, it’s not about you as a person. I want to make you better. If somebody feels like they’re in a safe place and they can hear the message, they’re more likely to change.”

Theater critic A.O. Scott may seem an unlikely source of management wisdom. This week he suggests ‘Even Superheroes Punch the Clock’.

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“This summer, your local multiplex is home to an extended business seminar. There are sessions on crisis-management and how to deal with office romances (“Star Trek Beyond”); on office rivalries and mission-statement drafting (“Captain America: Civil War”); on start-ups (“Ghostbusters”) and I.T. disasters (“Jason Bourne”). Every action movie is a workplace sitcom in disguise.

What is “Suicide Squad”? A bad movie, to be sure — and yes, I’m aware of opinions to the contrary (thanks, Twitter) — but also a movie about difficult personnel issues….The central problem of “Suicide Squad” is one that bedevils department heads and midlevel employees in every corner of the modern economy: team building.”

The last story this week is journalist Kirk Johnson‘s profile, ‘Debt. Terror. Politics. To Seattle Millennials, the Future Looks Scary.’

“Part of Jillian Boshart’s life plays out in tidy, ordered lines of JavaScript computer code, and part in a flamboyant whirl of corsets and crinoline. She’s a tech student by day, an enthusiastic burlesque artist and producer by night. “Code-mode” and “show-mode,” she calls those different guises.

This year she won a coveted spot here at a nonprofit tech school for women, whose recent graduates have found jobs with starting salaries averaging more than $90,000 a year. Seattle, where she came after college in Utah to study musical theater, is booming with culture and youthful energy.

But again and again, life has taught Ms. Boshart, and others in her generation, that control can be elusive.

Even for someone who seems to have drawn one of her generation’s winning hands, it feels like a daunting time to be coming of age in America.

“I don’t just expect things to unfold, or think, ‘Well, now I’ve got it made,’ because there’s always a turn just ahead of you and you don’t know what’s around that corner,” she said.”

A final thought this week @work – When we find that ‘dream job’, in an uncertain global economy, we realize there is more to what we do than the compensation: money or medals. The Olympics is our quadrennial reminder to honor our values. Thanks to @abbey_dags and @NikkiHamblin.

 

Photo credits: ‘Fireworks explode during the Rio 2016 closing ceremony’   Robert Gauthier Los Angeles Times, ‘Abbey D’Agostino and Nikki Hamblin’ @NCAA, ‘Ashton Eaton’ Matt Slocum for AP, ‘Ans Botha and Wayde van Niekerk’ Twitter, ‘Suicide Squad’ courtesy of Warner Bros.

The week@work or on vacation-what leadership looks like, what leadership reads & ‘wasting time’ on the Internet

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

This week@work, desks and cubicles are vacant as colleagues are catching a few last days of escape away from work. Among those still @work: a journalist shared a relic of presidential transition to remind us what leadership looks like, the White House tweeted the President’s vacation reading choices, Olympians continue to compete in Rio, and we may not be wasting time on the internet.

There’s been a copy of a letter circulating recently on the Internet. It arrived in my Twitter account this week via journalist Joyce Karam. It’s a handwritten note written on Inauguration Day, 1993 by departing President George H.W. Bush to his successor, President Bill Clinton.

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Imagine arriving at your new job on Monday morning and finding a handwritten note from your predecessor, wishing you great happiness @work. “Your success is now our success”.

What if you wrote a letter to the person taking over your desk on Monday morning? Could you convey a “sense of wonder and respect” for your workplace and your work?

Think about it. This is what leadership looks like.

While we are on the topic of U.S. Presidents, current President Obama is on vacation with family, friends and five ‘summer reads’ including Oprah’s recent Book Club selection and one of Bill Gates’ favorites.

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(A quick aside here on the Olympics. The photo at the top of the page captures the vacant volleyball nets this morning in Manhattan Beach, California. It’s the place where two U.S. Olympians, Kerry Walsh Jennings and April Ross went to work to get ready for Rio.)

Back to work, and reading, and surfing the Internet.

Kenneth Goldsmith, artist, professor and first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art, urged LA Times readers to ‘Go ahead: Waste time on the Internet’ with his OpEd this weekend.

“The notion that the Internet is bad for you seems premised on the idea that the Internet is one thing — a monolith. In reality it’s a befuddling mix of the stupid and the sublime, a shattered, contradictory, and fragmented medium. Internet detractors seem to miss this simple fact, which is why so many of their criticisms disintegrate under observation.”

He recently discussed his University of Pennsylvania course and new book ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ with Quentin Hardy of The New York Times. Drawing on his personal observations of students and family, he imagined what an educated person will look like in the 21st century.

We still read great books, and there is a place for great universities. But an educated person in the future will be a curious person who collects better artifacts. The ability to call up and use facts is the new education. How to tap them, how to use them.

I’ve got a 10-year-old and 17-year-old. They’re thinking differently from me. They stay connected all the time, and they’re smart, they play baseball, they read, they spend time online. They’re not robots. Basic human qualities haven’t changed. I can find Plato in online life. When I read Samuel Pepys’s diary I see Facebook posts. We just find new ways to express things.

Go ahead, take a break this week@work. Stream the last week of the Olympics, read a great book, and follow the tangents of Internet exploration.

The week@work – Olympic stories, author salaries, “what a feminist looks like” & the July jobs report

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

This week@work the athletes who go to work every day to pursue an Olympic dream are in Rio, Forbes announced their list of top earning authors, President Obama penned an essay on “what a feminist looks like”, and the U.S. labor market grew by 255,000 positions.

The major story of the next two weeks will take place in Brazil as the athletes of the world gather to compete in the XXXI Olympics. Journalists covered two athletes who have travelled diverse paths to reach Rio 2016.

 Kianoosh Hashemzadeh introduced us to equestrian, Lauren Kieffer, ‘An American Rider Trying to Beat the Boys in Rio’, for The New Yorker

“There are two Olympic-level athletic endeavors in which men and women square off head to head: sailing and equestrian sports. Eventing, an equestrian sport in which horse and rider compete in three phases—dressage, cross-country, and stadium jumping—has been called the most dangerous competition in the Olympics. That danger has never deterred female riders: they have competed alongside men since the field became open to them, at the 1964 Games, in Tokyo. Women do well in the sport, but they have struggled to reach its uppermost echelon: the current top-ten list of the Fédération Équestre Internationale, the sport’s governing body, is made up of eight men and two women. There are, however, six women in the following ten spots—and sitting at No. 12, eager to crash the old guard, is the top female eventing athlete in the United States, twenty-nine-year-old Lauren Kieffer.”

lauren kieffer.jpg“No woman has ever won an individual gold medal in the sport, and, while Kieffer’s focus is to bring home a team medal, an individual victory would be particularly sweet. Women are contenders in eventing, but few have made it to the very top. As Kieffer told me, “Someone has to beat the boys.”

If you’ve seen the Visa commercial that has been running during the NBC Olympic coverage, you may recognize the name Yusra Mardini, a member of the refugee team competing at the Olympics.

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Charly Wilder profiled her heroic story from her training facility in Berlin for The New York Times, ‘She Swam to Escape Syria. Now She’ll Swim in Rio’.

“Yusra Mardini, an Olympic swimmer, was an hour and a half into her first training session of the day, butterfly-kicking down the length of a pool with a yellow rubber duck balanced on her head.

Last August, Mardini and her sister Sarah fled war-torn Syria and embarked on a harrowing, monthlong journey through Lebanon, Turkey and Greece, up through the Balkans and Central Europe, to Germany, narrowly dodging capture and death. When their crammed dinghy broke down between Turkey and Greece, she and her sister, also a swimmer, jumped into the water and helped guide the boat to safety.

Mardini’s story came to public attention in March when she was identified by the International Olympic Committee as a candidate to compete on a new team of refugees, made up of athletes who are stateless or would otherwise be excluded from the Games. She was thrust into the spotlight, celebrated by the news media as a fresh-faced example of Germany’s so-called welcome culture — a story of uplift at the center of the global refugee crisis.”

Robert Kitson updated the story from Rio after the first day of Olympic competition, ‘Yusra Mardini delights with butterfly heat win for Refugee Olympic Team’

“For those minded to complain about minor irritations in Rio such as humidity in the aquatics centre or a few nibbling insects, the 18-year-old’s story should serve as a timely reminder of life’s more pressing issues.

The venue may have been far from full and her heat loaded with competitors entertaining nil hope of reaching the final but Mardini was the most popular of winners in a time of 1min 9.21sec, just over a second faster than her nearest heat rival. Afterwards she could scarcely contain her joy: “Everything was amazing. It was the only thing I ever wanted was to compete in the Olympics. I had a good feeling in the water. Competing with all these great champions is exciting. I’ve only been back swimming for two years so we’re only now getting back to my levels of before.”

The next story this week@work is for all of you commuting to work, considering a career change. Forbes announced their annual ranking of the world’s highest paid authors this week and new to the top ten was commuter, former journalist and ‘near broke’ novelist, Paula Hawkins.

Natalie Robehmed reported on ‘The World’s Highest-Paid Authors 2016: James Patterson, Jeff Kinney and J.K. Rowling Top Ranking’.

“These well-heeled wordsmiths earned a combined $269 million over the last 12 months, proving that the written word isn’t dead–although television and movie adaptations often help drive sales.

Patterson topped our list for the third straight year, earning $95 million pretax, while children’s author Jeff Kinney placed a distant second, earning $19.5 million.”

hawkins.jpg“The only newcomer to the ranking: Paula Hawkins. After “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Gone Girl,” her novel “The Girl on the Train” is the latest literary phenomenon with a calculating female character to hit the bestseller list. It sold 11 million copies worldwide; a movie version hits theaters in October.”

President Barak Obama wrote an essay linking his upbringing by strong women, his role as a father of two girls, and the nomination of Hillary Clinton, to describe “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” for Glamour magazine.

“In my lifetime we’ve gone from a job market that basically confined women to a handful of often poorly paid positions to a moment when women not only make up roughly half the workforce but are leading in every sector, from sports to space, from Hollywood to the Supreme Court. I’ve witnessed how women have won the freedom to make your own choices about how you’ll live your lives—about your bodies, your educations, your careers, your finances. Gone are the days when you needed a husband to get a credit card. In fact, more women than ever, married or single, are financially independent.

malia-sasha-obama.jpg…the most important people in my life have always been women. I was raised by a single mom, who spent much of her career working to empower women in developing countries. I watched as my grandmother, who helped raise me, worked her way up at a bank only to hit a glass ceiling.

So I’d like to think that I’ve been pretty aware of the unique challenges women face—it’s what has shaped my own feminism. But I also have to admit that when you’re the father of two daughters, you become even more aware of how gender stereotypes pervade our society. You see the subtle and not-so-subtle social cues transmitted through culture. You feel the enormous pressure girls are under to look and behave and even think a certain way.

…we need to break through these limitations.” 

Finally, this week@work, the U.S. Labor Department released the July 2016 jobs report. Jeff Cox covered the news for CNBC.

“Job creation crushed estimates in July as the economy added 255,000 positions, according to the Labor Department.

The headline unemployment rate held steady at 4.9 percent, though a more encompassing measure that includes those not actively looking for work and those working part-time for economic reasons moved up a notch to 9.7 percent. Though still mired near generational lows, the labor force participation rate ticked up one-tenth to 62.8 percent as those counted as not in the labor force decreased 184,000 to 94.3 million.

Hourly wages also moved higher, increasing by 8 cents or an annualized pace of 2.6 percent, while the average work week edged up to 34.5 hours.”

Photo credits: Lauren Kieffer – Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post, Yusra Mardini – Michael Sohn/AP, Paula Hawkins – The Daily Beast, President Obama – The Daily Mail

 

 

 

‘The Saturday Read’ The Olympics: 3 articles and 1 ‘Saturday Listen’

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

The XXXI Olympiad in Rio has begun and to get you in the spirit of the games, this week’s ‘Saturday Read’ suggests three articles and one ‘Saturday Listen’.

Beginning in the 1960’s ABC Sports opened their weekly ‘Wide World of Sports’ program with the phrase ‘spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports…the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat’. The idea was to tell the stories of athletic competition, honoring the victors while recognizing the efforts of all competitors.

Over the next two weeks 306 events in 28 Olympic sports will take place in 32 venues in Rio and soccer stadiums in Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Manaus, Salvador and Sao Paulo. This ‘constant variety of sport’ will include new additions: rugby and golf.

ABC Sports also brought us ‘up close and personal’ profiles of athletes preparing for their competition, often visiting remote corners of the world, providing both travelogue and local context for each competitor.

The four ‘up close and personal’ stories selected this week begin with a multi-media ‘long read’ about one of the most famous athletes in Brazil, Lais Souza. The two-time olympic gymnast joined her country’s efforts to build a winter sports team, entering a training program in aerial skiing. In 2014 she became the first Brazilian aerialist to qualify for the Olympics. That’s when the real story begins.

The next three features introduce the US women’s beach volleyball team of Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross, the refugee olympians, and American swimmer Katie Ledecky.

‘A Life in Motion, Stopped Cold’ Sarah Lyall for The New York Times, May 13, 2015

“At 25, Souza was one of Brazil’s best gymnasts, a tiny two-time Olympian, and she had just heard exciting news: She had qualified for yet another Olympics. But this was the 2014 Winter Games, something completely new, and it gave her accomplishment an added resonance. In less than a week, Souza would be traveling to Sochi, Russia, to compete in aerial skiing, a sport she had never even heard of before taking it up seven months earlier.”

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“For an athlete from a sultry tropical country who had spent her career following the summer around the world, aerial skiing had presented Souza with an extraordinary new challenge, accordioned into an extraordinarily brief period of time. She had never skied. She had never seen anyone doing aerials. She had barely even seen snow.

Souza’s mood was buoyant as she looked down the slope that day, Jan. 28, 2014. Giddy with excitement from her Olympics news, she was reveling in a morning of freedom before the pressures ahead…It was to be the three skiers’ last run of a long and happy morning before they broke for lunch and called it a day…But something was not right.”

‘Kerri Walsh Jennings Seeks Olympic Success With a New Partner’ John Branch for The New York Times, July 7, 2016

“At the beach volleyball women’s final at the 2012 London Games, Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor clinched their third straight gold medal. They beat April Ross and Jennifer Kessy, who earned silver.

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After the final point, the four American women congratulated one another, and Ross was a little surprised to hear Walsh Jennings’s whispered words.

“At the net, she said, ‘Let’s go win gold in Rio,’” Ross said. “We hadn’t had that conversation. I was caught off-guard, but it was a no-brainer for me. I was like, ‘Yeah, for sure.’”

‘The Refugee Olympians in Rio’ Robin Wright for The New Yorker, August 2, 2016

“The United Nations estimates that there are now more than sixty-five million people forcibly displaced from their homes. More than twenty-one million are refugees, most under the age of eighteen. More than half of these fled from one of three countries—Somalia, Afghanistan, or Syria. Ten million forcibly displaced people are stateless. The number of the displaced goes up by an average of thirty-four thousand every day.”

155665.jpg“When the Games begin in Rio de Janeiro, the opening ceremony, on Friday, will pay tribute to the world’s displaced and stateless persons. During the parade of nations, a team of ten young refugees will enter Maracanã Stadium as their own team—a first in Olympic history.

In announcing the team, Thomas Bach, the president of the I.O.C., said, “These refugees have no home, no team, no flag, no national anthem. We will offer them a home in the Olympic Village, together with all the athletes of the word. The Olympic anthem will be played in their honor, and the Olympic flag will lead them into the Olympic Stadium.” Bach continued, “These refugee athletes will show the world that despite the unimaginable tragedies that they have faced, anyone can contribute to society through their talent, skills, and strength of the human spirit.”

‘Olympic Swimmer Ledecky Is This Century’s Perfect 10’ Frank Deford for NPR, August 3, 2016

Frank Deford’s narrative give us a thumbnail portrait of the modern olympics when the marquee events of track and field were placed in the second week and swimming took a back seat to women’s gymnastics beginning with Olga Korbut in 1972. But gymnastics has changed their scoring system, and there are no perfect 10s, so we switch our attention back to the pool and swimmer Katie Ledecky.

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“In the television era, the second week of the Olympics is reserved for what is considered the marquee event: track and field.

So, the shared premier showcases of the first week are swimming and women’s gymnastics. While swimming was always a spotlight sport, I was, if you will, sort of present at the creation when gymnastics became the new star lead-off hitter.”

Watching an ‘Olympic Preview’ on TV Thursday evening, I thought I had tuned in to ’60 Minutes’ with coverage of Zika, terrorism, street protests and environmental concerns. Now the story will shift, to be written by the athletes. Let’s celebrate these athletes who represent their home countries and compete “in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams.”

 

 

 

The week@work – a historic moment in Philadelphia, a ‘profile in courage’, the culture @Fox & @Bridgewater Associates & an adventure ends

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

It was a week of firsts: a solar powered aircraft completed the first circumnavigation of the globe and the Democratic National Convention nominated the first woman as a candidate of a major party for U.S. president. The corporate culture of Fox News and hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates continued to be scrutinized. And one man, took the stage in Philadelphia for seven minutes, proving we can all make a difference.

On Thursday evening Hillary Clinton, former U.S. Senator from New York and former Secretary of State, accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party as their candidate for President of the United States.

“And so, my friends, it is with humility, determination, and boundless confidence in America’s promise that I accept your nomination for president of the United States.”

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For 50.8% of the American people, a career milestone was achieved; ninety-six years after the ratification of the 19th amendment granting the right of suffrage to women.

University of New Hampshire professor of history and author, Ellen Fitzpatrick reflected on the moment and it’s ironies. When a woman finally checks all the ‘pay your dues’ boxes, in any career field, doubts about their motivation and abilities linger.

“One of the most powerful ironies in a political season full of perversities is a paradox that now defines Hillary Clinton’s campaign: The first female presidential candidate to overcome the obstacles that sank every single woman before her now confronts criticism for overcoming those very same difficulties.

Time and again, Americans have deemed men worthy of the White House if they could succeed on the national political stage, raise sufficient money, rally the support of party leaders, appeal to voters and point to domestic and foreign policy experience. That these assets are suddenly negatives, at the very moment that a woman finally achieved them, is curious, to say the least.”

Curious, but not surprising.

On Saturday The Los Angeles Times responded to readers who took exception to coverage of the historic moment with a front page photo of former President Bill Clinton.

“Like other newspapers, The Times illustrated its main story Wednesday on Hillary Clinton’s historic nomination for president with a photo — of her husband.

Of course, Bill Clinton is no ordinary spouse of a candidate (and neither was Hillary Clinton when her husband was president). Still, many readers detected a whiff of sexism in The Times’ decision to feature a large photo of the former president basking the adulation of the Democratic National Convention crowd when it was the former secretary of State who received her party’s nomination for president.”

Like other newspapers? Apparently imitation is the new competitive advantage.

Three reader comments were included; my favorite from Janet Kinosian of Santa Ana – “I’m sure the Suffragettes would not have been surprised, though I am.”

One of the most memorable moments of the convention in Philadelphia occurred when the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq four months after arriving in 2004, stepped to the podium.

Annabelle Timsit chronicled ‘Seven Minutes That Shook the Convention’ for Politico Magazine.

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“He walked onto the convention stage Thursday night with his wife beside him, the Constitution to guide him and the pride of a father who knows he has a story to tell.

“Tonight,” said Khizr M. Khan, “we are honored to stand here as the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, and as patriotic American Muslims with undivided loyalty to our country.”

That was the beginning of a 7-minute speech that became an instant sensation—eloquent, emotional and notably original, coming as it did at the end of four days of highly processed political cliche. Khan, a 66-year-old immigration lawyer from Charlottesville, told the story of his son’s death in combat in Iraq, but he turned that elegy into a viral rebuke of Donald Trump: “You have sacrificed nothing!”

In 1957, before his presidential candidacy, President John F. Kennedy wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning book, ‘Profiles in Courage’.

“In the preface to ‘Profiles in Courage’, Senator Kennedy discusses the “problems of political courage in the face of constituent pressures, and the light shed on those problems by the lives of past statesmen.’’ He describes the three types of pressure faced by senators as pressure to be liked, pressure to be re-elected, and pressure of the constituency and interest groups…the book is about his admiration of the courage shown by elected leaders in the face of adverse factions like their electorates, popular opinion and political action committees that pull these elected men in different directions.”

Khizr M. Khan is not an elected official, but he is a citizen. And on Thursday evening his remarks filled a leadership void, demonstrating courage “in the face of adverse factions and popular opinion” – a contemporary ‘profile in courage’.

Each week The New York Times publishes the ‘Traffic Report’, a list of the most-read business articles on nytimes.com for the previous week. Three of the top four stories this week centered on corporate cultures that enabled sexual harassment of employees at Fox News and Bridgewater Associates.

Jim Rutenberg, Emily Steel and John Koblin covered the number one story, ‘At Fox News, Kisses, Innuendo, Propositions and Fears of Reprisal’.

“The investigation by Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, focused narrowly on Mr. Ailes. But in interviews with The New York Times, current and former employees described instances of harassment and intimidation that went beyond Mr. Ailes and suggested a broader problem in the workplace.

The Times spoke with about a dozen women who said they had experienced some form of sexual harassment or intimidation at Fox News or the Fox Business Network, and half a dozen more who said they had witnessed it. Two of them cited Mr. Ailes and the rest cited other supervisors. With the exception of Ms. Bakhtiar, they all spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing embarrassment and fear of retribution. Most continue to work in television and worry that speaking out could damage their careers.

They told of strikingly similar experiences at Fox News. Several said that inappropriate comments about a woman’s appearance and sex life were frequent. Managers tried to set up their employees on dates with superiors.”

And while a spokesperson for the parent company 21st Century Fox detailed the corporate sexual harassment policy and reporting procedures, Michael Grynbaum and Emily Steel noted ‘A Stony Silence at Fox News After Ailes’s Departure’.

“The Fox News skybox here turns into a hive of activity as the network’s star anchors analyze the Democratic National Convention for millions of viewers.

When the cameras blink off, however, the banter has been replaced by something rarely heard in the television news business: silence.

Megyn Kelly and her co-hosts, including Bret Baier and Brit Hume, have not been speaking during commercial breaks, according to two people with direct knowledge of the anchors’ interactions, who described the on-set atmosphere at Fox News as icy. During ads, the hosts are often absorbed with their smartphones.

…employees say there is a continuing split inside the network, with one camp of old-guard Fox News loyalists — some of whom owe their careers to Mr. Ailes — upset at his ouster. Some are resentful toward Ms. Kelly for cooperating with lawyers brought in by the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, to investigate Mr. Ailes’s behavior.” 

Alexandra Stevenson and Matthew Goldstein reported on the culture at the hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates – ‘At World’s Largest Hedge Fund, Sex, Fear and Video Surveillance’.

“Hedge funds tend to be a highly secretive bunch, yet even within their universe Bridgewater stands out. The allegations, as well as interviews with seven former employees or people who have done work for the firm and a filing by the National Labor Relations Board, open a window into the inner workings of a $154 billion company that, despite its mammoth size, remains obscure. The firm is governed by “Principles” — more than 200 of them — set out in a little white book of Mr. Dalio’s musings on life and business that some on Wall Street have likened to a religious text.

In his complaint, Christopher Tarui, a 34-year-old adviser to large institutional investors in Bridgewater, contends that his male supervisor sexually harassed him for about a year by propositioning him for sex and talking about sex during work trips.”

Sexual Harassment remains a significant workplace issue. The popularity of articles covering high profile incidents reflect the reality of workers looking for guidance beyond mandatory training sessions, trying to navigate the workplace to achieve success based on merit.

For the last story, a question, what is the definition of adventure? The pilots of the Solar Impulse 2 told CNBC “that having both elating moments and setbacks made the solar-powered flight the “definition of adventure.”

Samantha Masunaga reported for The Los Angeles Times on the journey’s end of Solar Impule 2. On Monday, pilots Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg guided their craft into the airport where their experimental flight began.

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“After 16 months and a 17-leg journey, a solar-powered plane finally completed its around-the-world flight attempt Monday evening when it touched down in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

The plane, called Solar Impulse 2, landed at Al Bateen Executive Airport a few minutes after 5 p.m. Pacific time, marking the first around-the-world solar flight.

Inside the plane, pilot Bertrand Piccard shouted, “We made it.”

In a week@work of firsts, I echo the sentiment. We made it.

 

Photo Credit – Solar Impulse 2: Jean Revillard / REZO/Solar Impulse

The Friday Poem ‘To the Indifferent Women’ by Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman

Eileen Kohan 1 Comment

Last night a woman accepted the nomination of a major political party for the first time in the history of the United States. The next president will preside over the commemoration of the centennial of the 19th amendment, which extended suffrage – the right to vote, to women.

To mark history, the Friday Poem this week is ‘To the Indifferent Women’ and was first published in 1911. Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman called herself a humanist. She was a poet, author, magazine editor and feminist in a lifetime that began with the civil war and ended in the great depression.

Although the words were set to paper over a century ago, the message resonates today.

“We all may have our homes in joy and peace
When woman’s life, in its rich power of love
Is joined with man’s to care for all the world.”

To The Indifferent Women

A Sestina

You who are happy in a thousand homes,
Or overworked therein, to a dumb peace;
Whose souls are wholly centered in the life
Of that small group you personally love;
Who told you that you need not know or care
About the sin and sorrow of the world?

Do you believe the sorrow of the world
Does not concern you in your little homes? —
That you are licensed to avoid the care
And toil for human progress, human peace,
And the enlargement of our power of love
Until it covers every field of life?

The one first duty of all human life
Is to promote the progress of the world
In righteousness, in wisdom, truth and love;
And you ignore it, hidden in your homes,
Content to keep them in uncertain peace,
Content to leave all else without your care.

Yet you are mothers! And a mother’s care
Is the first step toward friendly human life.
Life where all nations in untroubled peace
Unite to raise the standard of the world
And make the happiness we seek in homes
Spread everywhere in strong and fruitful love.

You are content to keep that mighty love
In its first steps forever; the crude care
Of animals for mate and young and homes,
Instead of pouring it abroad in life,
Its mighty current feeding all the world
Till every human child can grow in peace.

You cannot keep your small domestic peace
Your little pool of undeveloped love,
While the neglected, starved, unmothered world
Struggles and fights for lack of mother’s care,
And its tempestuous, bitter, broken life
Beats in upon you in your selfish homes.

We all may have our homes in joy and peace
When woman’s life, in its rich power of love
Is joined with man’s to care for all the world.

Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman  ‘Suffrage Songs and Voices’ 1911

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Convention photo credit: Marcus Yam for The Los Angeles Times

 

‘The little blue dress’ – Christian Siriano finds success in ‘designing’ a career of inclusion

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

Clothes make the woman. Forget the ‘little black dress’. Last night at the Democratic National Convention, designer Christian Siriano created a new fashion statement in his dress for First Lady Michelle Obama – the ‘little blue dress’.

Mr. Siriano, winner of season four of Project Runway, has become the ‘go to’ wizard of real women’s clothing design.

On June 28  ‘Ghostbusters’ actress and Saturday Night Live cast member, Leslie Jones tweeted, “It’s so funny how there are no designers wanting to help me with a premiere dress for movie. Hmmm that will change and I remember everything.”

Mr. Soriano responded within an hour “@Lesdoggg ✋🏼👋🏼”

In a follow-up tweet he expressed his long held work values.

“It shouldn’t be exceptional to work with brilliant people just because they’re not sample size. Congrats aren’t in order, a change is.”

One could guess it’s this attitude of inclusion that put him on the First Lady’s radar.

The New York Times ‘On the Runway’ columnist, Vanessa Friedman noted the link.

“Lest you think Mrs. Obama’s wardrobe choice was just happenstance, however, know that the convention appearance was only the second time she has worn Mr. Siriano; the first time was this month, at the funeral for the police officers killed in Dallas.

Throughout her time in the White House, the first lady has made something of a secondary cause out of supporting new, independent American designers, and choosing her clothes not only because she likes them but because their back story has a certain resonance that goes beyond the aesthetic. Monday night was no different. Fashion is not known for its embrace of togetherness (more for its exclusion). But Mr. Siriano is.

Think that’s just a coincidence?”

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We make an impression with how we dress. For those in the public eye, where you are one wardrobe malfunction away from a twitter storm, what you wear communicates who you are.

For the rest of us, not a size 2, figuring out what to wear to work is more than dress selection, it’s choosing the ‘costume of the day’ that will enhance our confidence and  communicate our individuality and work ethic.

You never know who may be paying attention.

I look forward to following Mr. Soriano’s career and hope others will follow his leadership to create contemporary fashion for today’s diverse workplace reality.

 

Photo credit: Mrs. Obama – Reuters

 

 

 

The week@work – heat dome, plagiarism, ‘Pokemon Go’, Yahoo, life/work coaches, and classical music

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

This week@work was hot, with a meteorological ‘heat dome’ encasing most of the continental United States. When I saw the photo above in The New York Times on Wednesday, I just wanted to be transported to a barge in Venice where the cast of Amazon’s ‘Mozart in the Jungle’ were filming. (Enjoy the view from Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times)

In other stories this week, the Republican Party chose their candidate for president and initiated a valuable conversation about plagiarism. The ‘Pokemon Go’ app provided a much needed diversion as thousands engaged in this new high tech sport of creature collection. Vindu Goel took a stroll down memory lane to a time when Yahoo reigned over Silicon Valley. Life/work coaches are the new workplace perk, and classical musicians are returning to the small screen.

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No that is not a photo of Zeus expressing displeasure with politicians in Cleveland. It’s Port Washington, Wisconsin photographed by AP photographer Jeffrey Phelps.

Rebecca Herscher reported on the weather for NPR.

“A heat dome occurs when high pressure in the upper atmosphere acts as a lid, preventing hot air from escaping. The air is forced to sink back to the surface, warming even further on the way. This phenomenon will result in dangerously hot temperatures that will envelop the nation throughout the week.”

NASA reported on Tuesday that ‘2016 Climate Trends Continue to Break Records’.

“Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The six-month period from January to June was also the planet’s warmest half-year on record, with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late nineteenth century.”

We are hot. We are busy. We live in a time of ‘short-cuts’. Workplace deadlines force creativity into ‘cut and paste’ document creation. Original thought becomes a casualty of increased workload. Sometimes we forget to give credit to other’s ideas and find ourselves on the slippery slope of plagiarism.

Last week the Republican National Convention became the unexpected catalyst for a discussion of this topic, an essential component of every college new student orientation program.

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Writing on huffingtonpost.com, Karen Topham offered ‘An English Teacher’s View Of The Trump Plagiarism Issue’.

“Plagiarism is any unattributed content. It’s kind of like pregnancy: you can’t plagiarize just a little because even a little is plagiarism.

I had my last case of plagiarism late last winter. A girl was under the gun and copied an essay from the internet. I explained to her (as I’d done so often before) that she was probably lucky in the long run that I had caught her. Anyone who gets away with this stuff is likely to try it again. In high school, it’s a zero and maybe a chance to do it over. But in most colleges, it’s a violation of academic honesty that can get you expelled. And this is my point: we hold college students to this very high standard.”

You have been warned.

On the lighter side, David Streitfeld gave a first person account of ‘Chasing Pokemon In Search of Reality In a Game’: downloading the app, setting out to capture a few creatures, and meeting fellow gamers along the way.

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“In this season of random assassinations and political uproar, who could resist the temptation to supplement a high-strung and frightening reality with some gentle make-believe?

Fifty years ago, the F.B.I., worried that the youth of America might foment revolution, would infiltrate San Francisco demonstrations. Now the tech companies are doing the monitoring, wondering if games like Pokémon represent a threat that must be neutralized or an opportunity to be exploited. That’s progress for you.”

In other Silicon Valley News, Wall Street Journal reporters Ryan Knutson and Deepa Seetharaman confirmed the Verizon acquisition of Yahoo.

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“Verizon Communications Inc. has agreed to pay $4.8 billion to acquire Yahoo Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter, ending a drawn-out auction process for the beleaguered internet company.

The price tag, which includes Yahoo’s core internet business and some real estate, is a remarkable fall for the Silicon Valley web pioneer that once had a market capitalization of more than $125 billion at the height of the dot-com boom.

For New York-based Verizon, the deal simply adds another piece to the digital media and advertising business it is trying to build.

The deal is expected to be announced early Monday. The news was earlier reported by Recode and Bloomberg.”

In an article earlier in the week, Vindu Goel revisited a time ‘When Yahoo Ruled the Valley’.

“Back in the mid-1990s, before Google even existed, the world’s best guides to the internet sat in Silicon Valley cubicles, visiting websites and carefully categorizing them by hand.

They were called surfers, and they were a collection of mostly 20-somethings — including a yoga lover, an ex-banker, a divinity student, a recent college grad from Ohio hungry for adventure — all hired by a start-up called Yahoo to build a directory of the world’s most interesting websites.

Today, with more than one billion websites across the globe, the very notion seems mad. Even then, there was a hint of insanity about the enterprise.”

Two additional articles of interest from the week@work cover a new benefit for employees transitioning back to work after a leave and a TV series providing classical music performers with visibility not seen since the days of Ed Sullivan.

‘A New Perk For Parents: Life-Work Coaches’ by Tara Siegel Bernard

“At a time when new parents may find themselves overwhelmed — even sobbing late at night as they deal with their new at-home responsibilities while trying to hold down a full-time job — a growing number of companies are making efforts to soften the blow. They are providing employees with coaching sessions, either in person, over the phone or through small group sessions that may be broadcast over the web. The services are often available to new fathers, too.”

‘Classical Stars Seek TV’s Elusive Spotlight’ by Michael Cooper

“It was after midnight on the Grand Canal here, and Plácido Domingo was standing on a floating stage slowly motoring toward the Accademia Bridge, singing the opening lines of a duet from “Don Giovanni.”

With this operatically over-the-top spectacle last week — which drew squeals and flurries of smartphone photos as people passed on a vaporetto, or water bus — Mr. Domingo became the latest classical star to shoot a cameo for “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Amazon comedy about a fictional New York orchestra.

Paul Weitz, who was directing the episode with Mr. Domingo and is an executive producer of the show with Roman Coppola and Mr. Schwartzman, said that the possibility of reaching those viewers was especially enticing to the musicians who have appeared.

“Obviously, it’s a huge issue, and it’s something that is dealt with in the show a lot, about whether classical music is going to be passed on to a new generation,” Mr. Weitz said between shots in his director’s chair. “And all these artists, the reasons that they’re doing this show is because they feel like it’s good for that aspect of the art — that it can bring the music to different people. And anecdotally, I think that’s actually the case.”

Stay cool this week@work with a favorite piece of classical music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The generational divide – #wearehere and #Brexit

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

A collection of amateur photos taken by ordinary British citizens, on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, served to bridge a century, and punctuate the generational divide that led ‘the lost generation’ to war, and ‘the millennials’ to #Brexit.

The topic #wearehere started trending early Friday morning as British citizens headed to work and encountered young men clad in the uniforms of World War I. For a few hours, in London, Aberystwyth, Birmingham, Sheffield, Salisbury, and Plymouth, the ghost soldiers of the Somme walked among their contemporaries.

Many of those first encounters were recorded on Twitter and Instagram, as commuters received cards from these ‘soldiers’.CmRNYS-UkAUqr3d“Thousands of volunteers took part in a UK-wide event on Friday 1 July 2016, as a modern memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. 19,240 men were killed on the first day of the battle in 1916 – the bloodiest day in British military history.

‘we’re here because we’re here’ saw around 1400 voluntary participants dressed in First World War uniform appear unexpectedly in locations across the UK. Each participant represented an individual soldier who was killed on that day one hundred years before.”

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Charlotte Higgins reported on the day for The Guardian newspaper. “The event, which unfolded without advance publicity, can now be revealed as a work by Jeremy Deller, the Turner prize-winning artist…Deller worked with Rufus Norris, the artistic director of the National Theatre in London, and theatres throughout the UK to train the volunteer army.

Deller was approached to devise an artwork to mark the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme by 14-18 NOW, the body responsible for art commissions commemorating the war. “I quickly realised that what I didn’t want was a static memorial that the public went to to be sad,” he said. “In the 21st century I felt we had do something different. So I thought about the memorial being human, and travelling round the country. It would take itself to the public rather than the public taking itself to the memorial.”

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“And also the public wouldn’t know in advance that there was this thing happening – they would encounter it in the shopping centres and carparks and outside schools and in everyday British life. And I wanted to avoid heritage places – churches, war memorials. I wanted to take it to the public.” His key idea, he said, was to “avoid sentimentality”.

Look at the photo of the finale at Waterloo Station. A group of soldiers at the center are surrounded by their contemporaries, telegraphing the moment to social media. Two generations, a century apart facing unknown fates @war, and after #Brexit.

CmcwkjWWcAAb1sy.jpgThe politics of the early 20th century led to over a million British, French and German casualties in the Battle of the Somme between July 1 and November 18, 1916.

The rhetoric of current political leaders called into question today’s younger generation’s European identity.

So what have we learned in 100 years?

Someone thought it would be a great idea to preserve the peace and form a European Union. For all its frailties, its crowning achievement was replacing nationalism with an overlay of a ‘European’ identity; a multilingual, multicultural generation that travels freely across the continent to study, work, live and love.

Francesca Barber, a self-described ‘transnational’, gave voice to this dilemma of altered identity in the wake of #Brexit.

“I was born in Washington in the late 1980s, grew up in Brussels, moved to London and then returned to the United States, where I lived in New York City; Providence, R.I.; and San Francisco.

My parents are English. My first language was French. I went to a Belgian school and the European School in Brussels, where my classmates almost always spoke at least three languages.

My childhood was defined by endless car journeys across Europe. And as an adult, I have enjoyed the benefits of cheap deals on low-cost European airlines. Most of my friends have gone to school and worked in at least two European countries. I am part of the Erasmus generation. My friends and my roots are everywhere — and only now do I realize how much I took that for granted.

The “Brexit” vote on June 23 was the most serious geopolitical event for Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But lost in all the geopolitics is another important message: It was a resounding vote against globalization from a country that has for so long been a proud champion of globalization.

But this vote was also a rejection by my fellow countrymen, from my parents’ generation to mine, of everything I cherished about Europe, Britain and my own childhood: the sense that our differences were less important than our shared experiences.”

Maybe it’s time for a ‘we are here’ for the European millennials – a ‘counter Brexit’, public art project.  What if, on a Friday morning, all over Britain, young workers approached commuters with CV profile cards, each participant representing a dream lost to Brexit? Mr. Deller, Mr. Norris we could use your help here.