Ten years ago, I moved with my family to our present home in Mountain View, California. Mountain View is the home of Google, in the heart of Silicon Valley—two towns over in one direction lies Stanford University and Facebook, and …
Winning narratives that matter
I am a big one for research in all areas of life, including parenting, and one of the evidence-based recommendations I took to heart is to have dinner with your family as often as possible. Apparently, research showed that sitting …
A plug for managers of the future
I have a remarkable memory, for some things. Once I share experiences with people, I remember everything about them: what they said and what they wore on particular occasions, the names of their spouses and kids and their friends, stories …
Company values: It’s complicated, I guess
At most organizations where I’ve worked, if organizational values were not already a thing, they became a Thing while I worked there. People realized that it’s not enough to have a clear mission; you also need guiding principles on how …
Knowing what you want in a job
In the two years since I left my last full-time organizational job (the two months in May and June of this year at a corporate comms job, I do not count), many, many people have told me that they are …
Going beyond work as identity
I have four nieces and two children and all of them are involved in some early stage of the process known as Real Life: college, jobs, first apartments, etc. Because of my very particular set of skills (channeling Liam Neeson …
When to say something
I once worked with someone who was a well-known expert in her field. Her name frequently came up for advisory committees, invited journal articles, and she had had a federal political appointment job under a previous administration. Our respective jobs …
What I learned from work
I have been thinking about how a résumé captures what one has done or accomplished in previous jobs; but I am hardly ever asked what I learned. Which is, to me, one of the biggest rewards from the effort I …
It’s all in the follow-through
When I was 10 years old, my well-intentioned father came into my room where I was reading a book at the time, I’m sure, because at that age, I was spending approximately every waking minute outside of school and cartoons …
Answering the question
I am always struck by how damn stupid binary our political and social discourse has become, when human beings and our feelings and values and beliefs and even the words we use are not binary at all. Like the hotly …
