I have always believed that working in communications involves creative thinking. My day-to-day work involves a great deal of creation—messaging, stories, language that I hope will resonate with target audiences. And this is the part of the work that I …
Tag: Leadership
Help more women lead
I admire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the U.S. representative for New York’s 14th district in Congress, very much. I don’t agree with all of her policy positions, many of which feel difficult to achieve on a practical level, but I believe that …
Taking the first steps towards change
I am a lifelong devourer of books, but I rarely read nonfiction. I don’t know why, but reading big, fat books about building the Brooklyn Bridge or Lincoln’s cabinet just don’t grab me, narratively, the same way that fiction does. …
Going back to the office
Out of the many TED talks/articles that turned into books that then turned into consulting businesses, I think “radical candor” generated some of the funniest stories for me. Radical candor, for the blissfully unaware, was an approach to delivering candid …
Job Skill: Integrity
It is one of those days—weeks, really—where I am feeling sick and tired of the happenings in the world, and particularly, the happenings in the United States. Violence against Asian-Americans, voter suppression, the trial for the murder of George Floyd: …
On standing still, and moving forward
This post is not about the heartbreaking deaths of George Floyd/Breonna Taylor/Ahmaud Arbery/Philando Castile/Michael Brown/so many other Black people at the hands of police officers and white supremacists, and it’s not about the wave of anguish and rage, that’s being …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The need for space
There are many ways to define the word “space.” You can think about space as the realm that exists beyond our planet and its atmosphere; you can also think about space in terms of your own body, and the places …