Online Interview & Manners

My website gets a lot of visitors every day, and every now and then one of those visitors writes to me about something he or she has read on the site. I'm a big believer in responding to email (I used to include the words "within 24 hours" at this point, but of late even responding at all is apparently worthy of mention). Often when I respond (yes, within 24 hours), a little dialogue begins; less often, an actual business relationship or friendship blooms.

That delightful result happened with Tiffany Yu, a market strategy and business development specialist on the other side of the country from me. We've been emailing and talking on the phone for a while now, to our mutual benefit. I love mentoring younger business women, and Tiffany loves sharing her creative marketing know-how, an expertise that couldn't have popped into my life at a better time given that I have a new book out.

Tiffany is active in Women In Parking, where she serves on the Leadership Board and as Secretary, and when Lost Wyoming was published, she suggested we do an interview for WIP Matters, the organization's newsletter for members. Please click here or on the Women In Parking logo below to read the resulting interview, which is not only a great bit of publicity for my new book, but also a great reminder of why it's worth it to answer those emails.

Now Appearing on a Blog Near You

I've written another guest post, this one for M-BRANE SF, the creation of Christopher Fletcher. In addition to being a blogger, Christopher is a chef, a magazine publisher, and a fiction writer currently living "in self-imposed exile in OKC." My thanks to him for the opportunity and to GUD Magazine for introducing us on Twitter.

My guest post - "For Writers: A Story & Three Tactics" - is about my evolution as a writer of fiction, my writing process, and a few of the ways I polish my work. Please click through to read it. While you're on the M-BRANE SF site, be sure to take a look around; you'll find a lot of interesting material.

Lawyers & Their Careers

No one who knows or has worked with me would call me an apologist for large law firms. I have written, in some places scathingly, about the many, many things these firms could do better relative to their workforce, to their clients and to running themselves like sensible, for-profit businesses.

(If you're interested in reading any of my constructive criticisms, check out The Productive Culture Blueprint or browse the Careers and Feminism posts here.)

But when I met Ron Fox on Twitter and surprised him by saying that I thought large law firms, despite their many shortcomings, were still the best places for new law grads to learn the craft of being lawyers, I found myself limning the positives of what Ron calls "BigLaw" to explain what I meant.

Our ensuing email conversation was quite spirited, and Ron suggested we break it down into separate posts for publication on his Lawyer Satisfaction Blog.

Here they are:

Post #1 BIGLAW FOR NEW GRADS: FRIEND OR FOE?

Post #2 HOW DO LAW STUDENTS MAKE CAREER DECISIONS?

Post #3 ARE LAW SCHOOLS MERELY FUNNELS FOR BIGLAW?

Post #4 WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

I'm a Guest Blogger!

Charlene Kingston, who will always be @Kinchie (her Twitter handle) to me, asked me to write a guest post for her elegant and useful blog, From the Crow's Nest. Obviously, I was thrilled, and today I am also feeling quite honored as I see my post up on her site, along with her generous introduction.

Pleas click over and read my post "Finding Career Happiness." I'd love it if you'd leave a comment on the post, but even if you're not in a commenting mood, do take the time to browse around and learn more about Charlene and her company, Crow Information Design.

The tag line for Charlene's blog is: "Finding the shortest distance between your message and your audience." Her company provides services that help companies and freelance professionals present themselves in writing for online and print media. Do you see why I'm so delighted to be guest blogging for her??

Doing It All: Reality and Myth

I started thinking about balance, priorities and time management because I am frequently asked how I "did it all." I know the question is intended to be flattering and to refer to my particular combination of successful business career, happy marriage, and cheerful, interesting, grown children, but I don't like the underlying assumption. As flattering as the question is meant to be, "doing it all" is an illusion, and a bad one at that. What we need to do is "our" all. Every working mom needs to articulate her priorities and then spend her time and energy - scarce resources both - doing what matters most to her.

Getting your priorities clear isn't impossible, but getting comfortable with the notion that you get to set your own priorities - and then setting them - is evidently close to impossible for many of us. If you can discern between, on one hand, what you really care about, your spin on what's really important to you and, on the other, what's traditionally done and believed, then you can clarify your priorities and allocate your time so as to spend it on what matters most to you.

You also have to shed any all-or-none mentality you might have. It's not necessary to devote yourself 100% to your kids to be a good mother, and it's not necessary to devote yourself 100% to your career to be good at that. (Most men, by the way, understand this instinctively. They have balance issues, too, but as my character Jane says in A Merger of Equals, men don't worry that they're somehow doing the wrong thing by working when they have kids. Whether for traditional reasons or because they're just wired differently, men expect to work and be parents simultaneously. And everyone else expects that of them, too.)

Throughout all but the first few years of my intense and time-consuming career (which I loved), I also had two kids. There was never a shred of doubt in my mind about what was more important, my kids or my career. My kids won hands-down. That didn't mean, though, that everything about having children took precedence over everything else.

When my kids were babies, I found them boring and needy. Somewhat to my surprise, I learned that adoring them didn’t stop their need for constant care from making me want to jump out of my skin, their non-verbal demands from making me long for words. Who knew? Now, I could have seen this as evidence that I was a terrible mother and should never have had kids, but whose rule would that have been?

Because I had clearly articulated my priorities – and because my self-confidence gives me courage and makes me largely impervious to worrying about things like what some magazine defines as appropriate motherly feelings – I didn’t doubt my fitness for motherhood.

Instead, I tried to figure out which parts of traditional mothering were important to me as a mother and to my kids in their development toward becoming independent, happy, productive members of society. Whenever a time allocation issue arose, it was this frame of reference I fit it into and measured it against. With my priority firmly in mind and a clear framework against which to measure tasks and decide which ones were the important ones, I allocated my time as wisely as I could.

I didn’t need to see my kids' first steps or hear their first words to take – and demonstrate – great pride in their development as walkers and talkers. So for me, putting them in daycare as infants was easy and guilt-free. School plays? I’d rather be working. Teacher conferences? After a memorable conference with an elementary school teacher who evidently had our son confused with someone else (the teacher referred to him as a “quiet, reserved boy” and I politely asked her if she had ever met him), my husband and I decided that he would handle this aspect of parenting. (He was also a busy professional, but one whose competencies include bedside manner.)

It also wasn't necessary to define success at work the same way others did. Like many women, I took a far from linear path. My all-encompassing job as a young lawyer was great when I was learning my craft. But after my daughter was born, I wanted to be able to spend more than 30 minutes a day with her. So I left a law firm in the city for an in-house legal position closer to home in the suburbs. Everyone told me I was closing doors; a few people even told me I was throwing away my career. At the time, I figured I was willing to pay the price of a few closed doors (the principal one being law firm partnership) for the prize of a job I could enjoy and do well in fewer than 16 hours a day.

As it turned out, seven years later I became a partner at a different law firm (where I worked part-time for 4 of the 6 years I was there) and that led me to a senior executive position at a $20 billion company. No doors closed as a result of my non-traditional decisions. Even better, other, arguably superior, doors opened.

The point is not the particular choices I made, but rather that I made choices that used my strengths (and compensated for my weaknesses) in the context of my priorities – and then I lived by those choices. I suited myself. And my kids, my career, my husband and I all flourished.

Success and contentment come from knowing and articulating what matters most to you, then living your life achieving those priorities. The balance is not going to be perfect at every individual moment, but it doesn't have to be. It’s the long-term balance over the course of the journey that counts.

(I write about balance-related issues often. Click here, here, and here for other posts you might find useful. You might also enjoy my Suit Yourself Essays.)

Oh, Boo-Hoo

Articles about the so-called "empty nest syndrome" drive me crazy. Conversely, I love that I received this one from my own 26-year-old daughter, who sent it along with a note that read "Here...this will get you all riled up. :)"

The linked article isn't as bad as some. It includes a melancholy dad in with the weepy moms, a rarity for empty-nest commentary, as well as some women who are more exuberant than misty-eyed about their new "childless" status. Still, even leaving the deeply anti-feminist subtext of articles like these aside, all this moaning and wailing over the growth, development and departure of one's children mystifies me. Isn't their maturity the point? Why would it make anyone "sick with sorrow?"

I saw my daughter off to college and through graduation with delight and pride. Ditto with her younger brother, whose departure created the much-ballyhooed empty nest at our house. I can honestly say my pride and delight were wholly undiluted by either grief or relief. (A little smugness maybe, over everything having turned out so nicely.) And I never once wondered who I was or what I might do with myself once I was no longer a resident parent - just as I never considered being a resident parent my raison-d'être or my justification for the space I take up on the planet.

Any parent who believes, as I do, that a parent's duty is to guide his or her kids on their way to happy, productive, independent adulthood ought to be thrilled to see them go off to college and then on into life. Of course, there are nostalgic moments - and in hindsight it's amazing how fast the years seem to have gone by, especially when you remember those interminable afternoons of nonstop infant fussing or the four years of siblings at each other's throats or the terrifying (and blessedly rare) hours of waiting for medical situations to resolve safely. But what's with the "I need them to pace my work life," "I'm so lonely and cranky" and "My life is too far on its way to over" baloney described in the article?

And it's not like this "it's all about me" attitude toward child-raising does kids any good either. Anyone looking forward to hiring or managing the college student in the article who thinks the best way to find Pilates studios, dentists and the meaning of words is to call her working mother in another state?

Book Announcement

Two of my works were selected for inclusion in Heart of a Woman in Business, an "inspirational collection of stories, strategies and ideas to help working women everywhere." Written by teachers, coaches, experts, businesswomen, speakers, CEOs and others, it's a "here's how" book that combines insight with guidance, ideas, stories and encouragement.

My pieces are:

• an excerpt from A Merger of Equals called "The Nature of Leadership and Personal Ambition" and
• an essay adapted from one of my popular speeches called "Suit Yourself and Become a Star"

Heart of a Woman in Business is a 288-page 6"x7" gift book that retails for $16.95. Click here to order the book from Sparkle Press, the publisher, or here to order from Amazon.com.

Sex and Parenting

Two articles, both of which struck me as very silly when I read them, apparently took root in my head and germinated because here I am writing about them weeks later. One was a story about two different couples, each of which decided to save their marriage by having sex every day for, in one case, a year, and in the other, 110 days. (Don't recall how they came up with that weird number.)

The other story was about something called "shared parenting." Could that phrase be any dumber? Given the definition of the word "shared," it seems to me that parenting by two people qualifies as such from the moment a child appears on the scene, regardless of who changes more diapers or goes to more school conferences. Actually, "parenting" is a stupid word, too, and its use is a great indicator of a sorry shift in cultural focus. Previous generations didn't "parent." They raised children. With the emphasis on the children, not the parent or the act of being a parent.

Anyway, according to this second story, couples are hiring consultants and establishing detailed time-and-responsibility models and assigning drudgery levels to tasks and entering into contracts, all in order to divvy up parental responsibilities so that neither parent feels exploited or overburdened.

What the hell? Why on earth would anyone want to turn either sex or parenting into a to-do list item?

I'm not sure what to say about the sex marathoners, other than it seems really rather pitiful to be either so unsure of your partner or so uninterested that you think the best way to recover and maintain intimacy is to calendar a long-term series of daily sexual appointments with him or her. How is transforming sex into yet another task to accomplish before you sleep supposed to help anything? And really: call me romantic or perhaps old-fashioned, but I prefer to think of sex as something one does out of desire and because it's fun, not as a means to recapture a lost feeling by simulating it.

Or maybe, in a culture that includes this shared parenting silliness, sex is merely another of the tasks that has to be allocated. The shared parenting article was about highly educated, dual-income couples seeking to assure that having children wouldn't ruin their lives or their relationships with one another. The level of worry they claimed to feel on this front was staggering (as well as selfish), and I wondered why they were having kids at all if they were so sure the results would be catastrophic. Wouldn't it make more sense to embark on starting and raising a family with joy, optimism and a plan to cross problematic bridges together as partners if and when they appeared?

But the folks in the shared parenting article were much too apprehensive and determined to rely on anything so fluffy as trust and open communication (or, evidently, any sort of continuing ability to work things out as a couple). Instead, they undertook a scientific process, using spreadsheets and everything, to apportion time, tasks and responsibilities.

A great deal of what fell into the category of "parenting tasks" seemed to be household responsibilities, raising two interesting questions (in addition to the obvious conclusion that these couples have more money than sense). First, what did they do before they had kids? Live in filth? Buy new clothes when the old ones needed washing or dry-cleaning? Starve? And second, why are they hiring parenting consultants instead of cleaning services? Wasting precious spare time on household tasks they can easily hire others to do, not to mention wasting time on drawing up spreadsheets to apportion such tasks, is the last thing busy, two-career couples should be doing. (Is anyone else noticing that the children - the purported point of all these machinations - are nowhere in this picture?)

I think good parenting is primarily about children, not parents. The point is to love your children and guide them along the road to maturity and independence. It's not about how many diapers you change or meals you cook or carpools you drive, how much laundry you do or homework you help with. And it's certainly not about making sure you don't do more of those things than your parenting partner, if you're lucky enough to have one. Parenting isn't a competition between the parents. People have different strengths and weaknesses, different likes and dislikes, different efficiency levels. "Equal" is measured more by how it feels and works than by metrics like hours spent or level of drudgery handled.

Anyone who's read my Suit Yourself essays knows that there are few things I enjoyed less than teacher conferences and elementary school talent productions (if I may use so grandiose a term for such excruciating events). My husband manned the bulk of those. But I was nearly always our family's cook and, most of the time, I loved that responsibility. (When I didn't, we went out to eat.) My husband liked the solitude of cleaning up the kitchen after meals, but he developed a complete inability to fold clothes during the brief period he was responsible for laundry. He consulted on science and math homework; I consulted on English and history. I guess we shared planning birthday parties, hauling the kids from place to place, and that sort of thing. I really don't remember, but it all got done and we all, kids included, had a great time. Of course, things periodically fell out of balance; when that happened, we talked to each other, sometimes loudly, and then cooperated to right the ship.

Isn't that what it comes down to under any circumstances? Even after the shared-parenting couples angrily wave their spreadsheets at each other and the sex marathoners cross their finish line, the imbalances must still get resolved, if at all, via straight talk, mutual regard and trust. And that brings me to the questions germinating in my brain. What kind of well-intentioned people, which the ones in these articles clearly were, want or need to transform parenting and sex into chores? What kind of relationships must they have with each other? Where is the straight talk, mutual regard and trust? What happened to being actually (rather than contractually) in it together?

All the spreadsheets and sex marathons in the world can't give you what being partners who care about making each other happy can. Lack of that is the problem, and the fixes discussed in the two articles are the relationship equivalent of taking an aspirin for a tumor.

DPG

I met a wonderful woman two years after I started practicing law. She was also a corporate lawyer, fresh out of law school, who joined the firm I was with. I thought she was terrific from the instant we met. She had the sharpest, wittiest, most ironic sense of humor, a quick intelligence, and more than the usual allotment of plain good sense. She was tall and lanky (to this day, I have never met a woman who looked better in a pair of jeans), and she had twinkly blue eyes and a shock of smooth blond hair cut perfectly to compliment her delicate, high-cheekboned face. We soon became friends outside of work as well. We liked each other's husbands (not always a given) and they liked each other, too. In fact, they developed a close friendship quite independent of us and it flourishes to this day, 27 years later.

For some reason I forgot long ago, my friend and I took to walking home together after work. Well, not home exactly. We'd leave our offices at Dearborn and Madison in Chicago's Loop and walk up Michigan Avenue to Water Tower Place, where she would head east to her Streeterville apartment and I would jump on the 135 bus up to Belmont Harbor.

On those walks, we talked about anything and everything, and the conversations were so engaging that I never even noticed the actual walking. (Anyone who knows me knows that I rarely walk even a block without complaining, and that was only slightly less true 27 years ago. Trudging, especially for over a mile through heat, humidity and Chicago's pedestrian traffic, has never been a favorite activity of mine. Add to that the more formal work clothes and shoes we wore in the 80s and you'll get an idea of how truly great our conversations were.) We cut the more pompous of our colleagues down to size, we solved legal problems, we griped about the illogicalities of our work environment, and we plotted strategies for our careers and our lives.

I'm convinced that those conversations were a big part of what set us on the road to career success. Having similarly-situated girlfriends is necessary to flourishing in settings where we are not the norm, where the rules were not written by or for us, and where we have to question our instincts because, however solid they may be in other arenas, they are not usually hardwired for naturally understanding how to succeed in male-dominated work environments. During the early years of my career, I felt like an impostor most of the time and, occasionally, like an unwelcome interloper. In addition to being incredibly supportive and reassuring, my daily conversations with my friend as we walked up Michigan Avenue kept me sane, grounded and focused. They helped me be happy at work. And they were the inspiration for the "girls club" scenes, which I loved writing, in A Merger of Equals.

After a few years, I had a baby and left the firm for a more workable schedule at a company in the suburbs. Not too long after, my friend did the same. She and her family moved west of the city; I had moved north with mine. We saw each other frequently at first, then less frequently, then rarely, although we always stayed in touch through our husbands, if not directly. I have never forgotten or stopped being grateful for our years of working together and walking together.

My husband and I have just flown home from my friend's heartbreaking funeral. Heartbreaking because she was a superb, intelligent, humorous person the world shouldn't be without. Heartbreaking because she was much too young and she spent the last two and a half years in a nasty battle with cancer. Heartbreaking because she leaves behind three amazing daughters and an exceptionally wonderful husband, as well as siblings, a parent, nieces, nephews, and countless friends, all of whom will miss her terribly. I feel incredibly lucky to have had her as a close friend and colleague when I needed her most.

Requiescat in pace.

You Exist Even if We Aren't Watching

I just read a post written by my favorite of the bloggers I don't know personally in reaction to the apparently now infamous May 25 story about blogging in The New York Times Magazine. My husband left the magazine on the coffee table for me to read a few days after May 25, but I wasn't intrigued enough to pick it up and start reading the story until today. Having now read both the story and my favorite blog-stranger's take on it, I have to say I'm utterly mystified.

These young women (interesting writers, both) seem to crave not approval, but notice. Like little children at play who scream "Watch me! Watch me!" every five seconds (sometimes exuberantly, sometimes with panic), they seem uncertain that life without an audience is worth the effort or, for that matter, even real. Overlaying and permeating their musings, like glaze on a cake, is a yearning for the validation of their existence that only other people's awareness of it can provide.

Why do they need this, I wonder? Why do they lay themselves bare to attract it? Why are they willing to endure savage commentary to assure themselves that they have it?

Of course, I too use my private life as fodder for my writing. My innermost thoughts, feelings and experiences (including the intimate and embarrassing ones) inform, and sometimes appear in, my books and essays. But their purpose there is to make the writing true and compelling, not to assure myself that I exist or to draw attention to me personally. I love the freedom of anonymity.

I can't imagine merging my private life and my blog, not because (or only because) I have no desire to lay myself bare on the Internet or, for that matter, to be famous. I don't merge them because the privacy of my private life is what allows it to flourish. Its privacy enhances its immediacy, its authenticity and its meaning to the only person who needs to find meaning in it - me.

Perhaps this is simply the difference between a 54-year-old who has already enjoyed/endured enough notice from other people to last her comfortably for the rest of her life, however long it may last, and someone in her 20s who is, evidently, somewhat unsure about what form her career and life will/should/can take.

Maybe it's all connected somehow to social life having evolved from entirely face-to-face interaction to largely electronic interaction where no one has to know the real you and you can create any persona you like (at least until you're outed). It's hard, not to mention really rather inappropriate, to discuss the intimate details of your life face-to-face with any but your closest friends. Those of us who grew up in a face-to-face world are, I suspect, as unlikely to share intimate details over the Internet as we are to discuss them with the cashier at the grocery store or our colleagues at work.

But if your social life is conducted more from a keyboard than a larynx, maybe you don't feel the same inhibitions. When you're as satisfied with a typed "Hahaha" in response to your joke as you would be with a guffaw and the sight of someone's face creased into the wonderful-to-see lines and angles necessary to produce laughter, maybe it's not such a leap to skin yourself alive in public.

That still doesn't explain the need for external validation of one's very existence, though. I totally understand craving approval. Who doesn't crave it at least occasionally? But approval is not the same thing as notice, or even celebrity. Both linked articles evince a depressing suspicion that a life has no satisfactory meaning and possibly no actuality if no one else notices it. This goes well beyond the old "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?" conundrum. (BTW, d'uh. Obviously, it did. The existence of sound doesn't depend on the presence of ears to hear it - it's only the meaning of the sound that requires ears and the consciousness that goes with them.)

Two very successful 20-somethings told me over lunch recently that they know many people in their generation who can't overcome a certain aimlessness and lack of passion for their careers and their lives. My lunch companions said they thought a big part of the problem was that young people feel overwhelmed by all the options open to them and incapable of choosing among those options and getting on with their lives. This is hard for any Baby Boomer, especially a woman, to hear. We would have killed for the options available to today's version of our 22-25 year-old selves. (As one of my 50-ish male friends said when I repeated this to him, "That's total crap! What a bunch of crybabies! How can having lots of options be a bad thing?!")

Now I'm thinking that there's a similarity between responding to virtually unlimited options with paralysis and needing other people to assure you that you actually and meaningfully exist.

Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost our faith in internal standards. What happened to to living your life and pursuing your dreams and making your contribution to satisfy yourself? What happened to using your own ears to validate your existence and suss out its meaning? Other people can't really do this for you, and why would you want to let them even if they could?

Know When Not to Fold

I played blackjack yesterday, and the experience turned into a valuable object lesson about the relative importance of protecting against downside and going for upside. I started with $500. It grew pretty quickly into $900, diminished (even more quickly) into $200, stabilized and then, in one of those beautiful runs that gamblers live for (like the occasional strong, true golf swing that shows golfers how it's supposed to feel and keeps them coming back for more), mushroomed into $1400.

Had the original $500 reached $1000 instead of $900, I would have invoked my "double your money; go home" rule. When the $900 started hemorrhaging, I thought about stanching the bleeding at the original $500. After deciding against that and watching the $900 shrink all the way to $200, I probably should have taken the money and run the minute I recovered that original $500. But I'm stubborn - I hate to "give up" gains I once had, and breaking even doesn't do it for me. My conviction that the good luck will return is always stronger than my fear of the admittedly more likely recurrence of the bad luck. So I stayed in the game and ended up winning big.

The parallels to career and, I suppose, to life as well are obvious. There's an element of chance in every arena. You can limit its impact by knowing your stuff - learning how to play, developing the required core competencies, practicing, continuously improving, and the like. But you can't eliminate the element of chance. You have to learn how to ride it instead. It's important to protect against the downside, but it's more important to dream big about the upside. You'll limit your upside if you leave too soon, whether at the first signs of adversity or because your dreams are too small. If you're too afraid of the downside to stay in the game, you won't win. And while not losing is better than losing, it isn't the same as winning - not in blackjack or in anything else.

Risks & Rewards

I played blackjack this week with a table-full of hard-core gamblers who considered me a lightweight because I have rules about when I leave based on how much I've won or lost. Apparently, discipline is not the hallmark of self-described "real gamblers." The two men and two women I joined at the table are people I've played with before. I like them because they play well and aggressively, they mind their own business, and they don't complain constantly (as if the cards or the dealer or the casino were on a personal crusade to separate them from their money or as if they were chained against their will to the table). I can't say they ever seem to be having a wonderful time, but they aren't the pictures of misery you sometimes find at blackjack tables, especially on late weekday afternoons at local casinos.

I had a nice run of luck and was within $100 of doubling my money within 40 minutes. The guy to my right noticed me counting my chips during the shuffle and asked if I was ahead. I nodded, then told him I always leave when I've doubled my money. He was astonished and his exclamations prompted a table-wide discussion of how bizarre it is to have a financial goal and to leave when you reach it. They demanded to know if I had similar rules on the downside and were amazed to learn that I do. Each had a story of giving back significant winnings. The stories were confusing, but the motives for continuing to play as big stacks of chips went away included the conviction that the good luck would return (notwithstanding temporary setbacks), the need to catch up with large overall losses (kind of a "we'll make up our losses with volume" theory), and the belief that there was nothing more compelling to do.

I thought it would be tactless to say I don't have overall losses, but I did say that, like them, I could play again the next day if I didn't feel finished and that I wasn't usually up for marathon playing anyway (it's not that challenging a game and, after a while, the house advantage gets tiresome). These statements struck them as crazy. They told me I wasn't a real gambler and we all laughed. When I made that last $100, colored up my chips and prepared to leave, they shook their heads in bewilderment that was, as far as I could tell, not at all tinged with envy. If anything, they pitied me.

I think it's interesting that they consider discipline and limits to be signs of lack of authenticity where gambling is concerned. Could this also be the reason so many people are so risk-averse? Taking the right risks is the foundation of progress and success in every arena, but it's certainly a gamble - and not a particularly good one if you approach it pell-mell, without planning ahead and thinking about consequences. But there's no requirement that you approach it pell-mell. Discipline and limits aren't anathema to the real deal; they're what make intelligent risk-taking possible.

The Farther, The Better

I've written before (here and here) that I love to think about time as something other than a straight line. The notion that the past and future might exist simultaneously with, and influence, the present is both cool and intellectually challenging. I saw the movie Next last night and realized that time and its unfolding also have an impact on thinking strategically and not confusing outcomes for goals.

Next is not a great movie, but it's a good one. Much tighter and more taut than Déjà Vu, although that movie also raised intriguing time issues (in and among all the explosions). Both movies illustrate the sequential, consequential nature of actions and events - how one thing flows from and is shaped by another - while, at the same time, clarifying that the slightest change, including awareness of past and future, can utterly transform outcomes. Next goes several steps further and demonstrates (correctly, I think) that if your goal is too short-term and specific, you'll end up with the wrong outcomes even if you achieve it.

I've always been struck by how willing people are to plow ahead without first articulating what they want to achieve and why they want to achieve it. You need to think ahead and figure out which actions and paths will get you what you really want, whether you're driving a car and will have to turn left at some point (it makes more sense to move into the left lane a block or two before the turn, right?) or you're trying to succeed in your career or retire when you're 45 or whatever. You also have to understand what a goal really is. Many of the things usually labeled goals are actually outcomes - financial security, teamwork, career success, marriage, saving someone from a particular disaster, etc. Set up as goals, things like this, however desirable, won't by themselves make one set of actions clearly better or more effective than another, and they can easily lead to skewed results.

This isn't news to me - I wrote about it a long time ago in Madison, Wisconsin. But I hadn't focused before on time's impact on the distinction between goals and outcomes. The skewed result in Next demonstrates that even something that looks like a well articulated goal may turn out to be only an outcome if you think far enough down the road - and so the farther ahead you can envision, the more directed and pertinent and successful your actions will be.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

Warning: This is more an essay than a blog post, but I got carried away.

I like intellectual patterns and I tend to see them in very disparate occurrences and situations. Today, it's (a) the recent flap over the 2007 performance of the New England Patriots and (b) women lawyers so timid that they are still - in 2007 - waiting for permission to have rewarding, significant careers rather than grabbing the opportunities in front of them with both hands. To me, both phenomena (and I use the word in two of its senses for the Patriots' performance) are part of a pattern I don't like that says nothing is pure and everything must be measured by reference to what the least charitable someone else might think. They also seem to be part of a pattern that says something about power.

When the Pats scored 52 points against the Redskins, there was a lot of grumbling about running up the score as well as some dire predictions about how such superiority of attitude and dominance of play might well lead to, among other negative repercussions, a deliberate attempt to injure the quarterback. I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about how any such attempt would be reprehensible and possibly criminal or about how provocation does not excuse violent behavior however much it may explain it. And regardless of that 52 points, it's hard to imagine that the Patriots' exceptional play hasn't already turned them into a hunted team that everyone wants to knock off. (Nice try, Colts - and I mean that sincerely.)

But I'm on a different track today. As I watched the Patriots play in Dallas the week before the game in question, it occurred to me that their coach might well be trying to build a perfect football team. His insistent focus on what his talented team could have done better in every game, which is evidently how he coaches and also how his players look at results, seemed beautiful in light of how very good the team is. By normal standards, they were already well past good enough. When I watched the game in question with this notion in mind, it seemed to me that the Redskins were basically irrelevant. The only worthy opponent the Pats had encountered up to that point on the road of the 2007 season was the Pats themselves. They looked to be trying to beat their own previous best and the result was football played gloriously, at a giddily high level.

But to my surprise, the reaction the day after the game was an indignant chorus of how unsportsmanlike and classless it was for the Patriots to have made the Redskins look so hapless. Huh? I suppose the Redskins did look hapless, but isn't that a Redskins issue? Was it necessarily the Patriots' motivation? Their goal? Their fault? Couldn't it as easily have been an unintended byproduct of the superb performance occasioned by their pursuit of football perfection? And, if so, should that pursuit of perfection be hampered by potentially unfortunate byproducts? Frankly, I don't even see what's so unfortunate about this byproduct. If the Redskins can't handle the Patriots without looking hapless, then the Redskins should get better. (And, if they do, they are free to prove it by soundly beating the Patriots the next chance they have.)

It's ridiculous to suggest that the Patriots shouldn't play to the best of their abilities and pursue something extraordinary because their opponents aren't up to it and will look bad by comparison. Why is it unsportsmanlike to do your best in a game that is about winning and entertaining the masses? Why is it more sportsmanlike or respectful to do only what's necessary to beat the other team, then sit back and coast? Is that somehow less disheartening to the loser? And anyway, why is it even relevant in this context how the loser ends up looking or, for that matter, feeling?

I've always believed that too many people worry too much about what other people inclined to think badly about them will think of their behavior - and, as a result, they make cramped, coerced, conservative decisions instead of big, free, innovative ones. I had a boss once who asked me apropos of an interpersonal mess created by a peer's discomfort with the exceptional results generated by one of my groups, "Would it have killed you to make XYZ comfortable with what you were doing?" I was astonished by the question. It wouldn't have killed me at all, but it never occurred to me - both out of respect for XYZ (why would I do him the discourtesy of assuming he had to be managed?) and because I never dreamed that he (or anyone else) would perceive my group's success as a way I was trying to make him look bad. I was just doing my job. It wasn't about him or directed at him in any way; he was completely irrelevant to my motivations, my intent, and my group's performance. But, apparently, I should have foreseen his discomfort and found a way to make him comfortable, too. Sorry to be repetitive, but huh? Why on earth would he think my group's results had anything to do with him? Why couldn't they be purely what they were? Why did my group's success justify his attempt to blame his own feeling of inadequacy on me? Why couldn't he give me the benefit of the doubt? Do we have to correct for the upside of success by slamming the people responsible for it?

And it's not like any of this helps the weaker. A woman lawyer recently told me she wanted to get on an important committee, but “because I deserve it, not because I’m a woman.” I told her she shouldn’t care why she got on the committee. In a place like her firm, where women still don’t routinely find themselves on important committees, it’s silly to turn down a leadership opportunity because affirmative action is or might be behind the invitation. The goal is to get there and then prove via great performance that you deserve to be there, not to wait for the powers that be to recognize that you’ve earned it the “regular” way.

She looked unconvinced and added that she didn’t want “the guys down the hall to hate me because as a woman I got it instead of them.” This, too, is ridiculous. If she has a contribution to make and she’s willing to stand or fall by her performance on the committee, why should it matter to her that a few sour-grapes types may grumble or doubt her merit or think she got an unfair advantage? Does she hate men because they routinely get opportunities, advantages, mentoring that she doesn’t? Does she think they hate each other for this reason? Of course not. She might hate the system, but there’s no percentage in hating the beneficiaries – unless they intentionally work to exclude you. In her case, they weren’t doing that, but her fear that the traditionally powerful would attribute bad motives to her for not doing it their way was very effectively achieving the same result.

I'm thinking all this has to do with the one-size-fits-all relations that are assumed to exist between the strong and the weak, regardless of the particular situation. The strong are assumed to be so at the expense of the weak. The weak are assumed to be at the mercy of the strong and also to be trying to cut them down or curry favor with them at all times. None of these assumptions is inevitably true.

I agree that it is incumbent on the strong not to use their strength to harm the weak and to deploy the advantages of strength appropriately. But the weak have an obligation too, and that’s not to blame the strong for weaknesses they did not cause and are not exploiting. Whether you're strong or weak, there's still room for effort and for excellence. There's still room to pursue great performance, to innovate, to challenge yourself, to stay in the game and succeed spectacularly. If your motives are pure, you shouldn't have to give up in the face of strength or weakness. You shouldn't have to stop and rest on your laurels the instant you achieve the lowest common denominator with which the least capable or charitable of your fellow strivers feels comfortable. You should be able to give it your all, give others the benefit of the doubt, and count on being given the same in return.

I'll Give You Aggressiveness!

Sometimes I wonder if the media is on a deliberate and targeted mission to disempower women. Articles like this one, which states that women don't start businesses as commonly as men because women "aren't as aggressive," are legion. It's basically impossible to read the financial press without being hit in the face by some denigrating depiction of women's abilities, motives, moxie or stick-to-it-iveness.

A statement like "women aren't as aggressive" is just stupid. First, it describes an impact, not a root cause. Second, it's far more likely that women don't start businesses as often as men because the business world is still preeminently a man's world, delineated by male rules, personalities, organizational structures, time demands...and men. It's indisputable that women don't have the same access to big-time networks, financing or other resources. Third, is it even true that men start far more businesses? I seem to recall reading years ago that women-owned businesses employed more people than the Fortune 500 companies combined. Fourth, as Natalie Angier points out in the exhilarating and gorgeously written Woman: An Intimate Geography, watch little girls at play or bands of junior high school girls bully members of lesser social groups and then try to make the case that females aren't naturally aggressive.

You have to wonder if this demeaning characterization of women is meant to be directive or prescriptive. Even if the onslaught is not intentional, the constant attempts to define us disadvantageously are demoralizing. A woman has to be made of pretty stern stuff to withstand them and choose to succeed anyway. To be fair, I suppose statements like "women aren't as aggressive as men" dictate how men are supposed to be, too, and also in a limiting way. But whether or not anyone likes it in the abstract, aggressiveness is a prized characteristic in the business world we've got. Until our organizations and societies and operations demonstrate parity, the impact of these one-size-fits-all characterizations will always be harder on women. Given the current state of affairs, a woman seeking to succeed as an entrepreneur or, indeed, as a businessperson of any other stripe already has a tougher hill to climb. To call women as a gender "not as aggressive" isn't helping.

An Unforeseen Consequence

Evidently, a lot of younger women entered the work world utterly bereft of the coping mechanisms that years of sexism at the high school, college and grad school levels built into their predecessors (including me). It's certainly great that it's evidently no longer weird for a girl to be smart, ambitious and career-focused in high school, college and grad school, but a disappointing side effect of that progress is the shock that young women feel when they hit the wall of institutional blindness to their differing approaches, needs and value propositions. Judging by the opt-out revolution and the questions I get whenever I give speeches, many younger women are not only ill-equipped to handle the sexism - or even the inhospitability - they encounter once they start working in traditional places of business. They are also astonished by it.

Sexism is alive and well. It's impossible to look at the number of women in top positions in any arena (business, law, government, academia, entertainment, the media, medicine) and conclude otherwise. For all sorts of reasons - some related to institutional inflexibility, some to narrow-minded biases, some, no doubt, to white male protectionism, some to women's own failure or unwillingness to understand how the games are played and won - the flood of women who enter all these arenas thins to a trickle at the management and decision-maker levels and then dries to a few drops at the top. It's very troubling to me to think that the progress we've made is itself helping to impede further progress.

A Nod to the Entitlement Mentality

The entitlement mentality that people started bringing to work in the 90s originally struck me (and many other older managers) as negative. The younger generations didn't seem to get it. New hires showed up at work and behaved as if they expected rewarding careers to be delivered to their office doors. They seemed to lack fire in their bellies and, for that matter, a clear understanding that job satisfaction, getting good work, doing good work, and getting ahead were up to them, not to some institutional equivalent of the mommy or daddy we suspected had done their homework for them and otherwise rendered them clueless about taking initiative and personal responsibility. I remember being appalled that my kids' high school insisted on submitting their college applications for them. A better instance of making soon-to-be-adults dependent, irresponsible and unable to fend for themselves was hard to imagine - and this seemed like only one among many examples of how post-baby-boomers were being infantilized.

But, apropos of my last post, the entitlement mentality clearly has a plus side. The blithe assumption that one gets to do it any way he wants and still garner the rewards of working in a traditional work environment may have annoyed us burgeoning old fogies in the 90s, but it has indisputably transformed our work environments - and for the better. Aided by their sheer numbers - and the obvious need businesses have for them now and going forward - younger people have forced a more realistic assessment of what employees want and need and must be given if they are to be recruited, retained and deployed effectively. Whether this is a silver lining of a largely unhealthy phenomenon ("adultolescence," anyone??) or a broad and deep intentional change effort on the part of the generations we suspected didn't get it, the impact of their "suit yourself" approach is loud, clear, impressive - and good.

Transformation vs. Assimilation

I've just noticed a very interesting thing. Generational differences have had a much larger impact on work environments than the large influx of women into the workplace ever had. When I give speeches, when I hear from my children about their workplaces, when I listen to the questions working people ask and the issues they care about, I realize that work has changed utterly in response to the attitudes and demands of people under 35. It's routine for people in once-formal workplaces to dress as if they were bar-hopping or heading to a baseball game rather than going to work. The definition of "working like a dog" isn't what it once was even in sweatshops like law firms and investment banks. A surprisingly large number of working people can be found "available" on gchat during business hours. My website gets most of its hits during business hours, and I'm sure it's not alone. Everyone seems to feel Friday afternoon is for leaving early or, if you do stay in the office, for doing something other than work.

People in post-baby-boomer generations seem to feel none of the pressure - internal or external - to conform to the traditional definitions and requirements of work institutions founded by white men in the 19th or early 20th centuries and maintained largely by same up to and including today. Younger people have stamped their mark on these work institutions indelibly and apparently without a lot of sturm or drang. Women, on the other hand, particularly in the years just before and after I joined the work force in 1979, felt strong pressure - internal and external - to conform, to fit ourselves into the establishments in which we were determined to succeed. Instead of obliviously being who we were and expecting the organizations to assimilate us, we engaged in various versions of trying to remake ourselves in the traditional white male mode. Dressing for success (if you'll forgive the expression), denying, resisting or trying to keep under wraps traditional female activities like marrying, having kids, looking sexy, giggling, crying and so forth, taking sexual harassment in stride, never "going to lunch" but always "going to a lunch meeting" - most of us thought the price of success was being as much like men as possible. Even I, someone who has never been much of a panderer or an appeaser, didn't understand for years that my differences were competitive advantages I could use, differentiators that helped me far more than they hurt me. And to this day, even as they wear their stilettos and flip-flops to the office, women worry about being considered slackers or somehow frivolous or unprofessional if they don't approach work like men.

How interesting - and eye-opening - that younger generations are apparently oblivious to the ways in which people with old white guy attitudes disapprove of them. Younger generations aren't ambitious in the same ways. They have different goals for their careers and a different definition of both where work fits in their lives and what they're willing to compromise. They evidently have no problem insisting on a work/life balance that would be the envy of anyone who worked in these environments 30 years ago. They change jobs frequently and don't worry about gaps in their resumes. In fact, they seem to assume the availability of more manageable work schedules and to consider opting out altogether if they don't find them to be a more attractive and acceptable option than knuckling under to traditional models - an eye-opener all on its own for career women still fretting about looking like slackers if they ease off a 2200-billable-hour-per-year pace while they bear children or manage families.

And all this blithe younger generation assuming has had a huge and very visible impact on how companies operate. Upper management may still look pretty much like it always has, but it now worries in a big way about offering work/life balance, ongoing education, concierge services, onsite day care (for kids and even pets), and a wide array of other benefits designed to appeal to the actual workforce (and not just the people with wives at home to handle all of life's non-work-related vicissitudes).

Of course, the under-35 crowd can enjoy the attitudes and freedoms it does thanks in no small part to the paths blazed by those of us who came before and the ones before us who first broke into the once all-white, all-male domains. Still, I have to hand it to these new generations - they have transformed the look and feel of the work world in a way that career women, even after a much longer time horizon, still have not.

Whose Rules Are These?

I've had a potential blog post kicking around in my head for the last week or so, prompted by questions I got at a recent speech from working women, some of them already mothers, some just projecting ahead, about feeling guilty by reason of being a working parent. I've confessed before that I don't experience guilt properly, but, even so, I'm realizing that these questions - which are as inevitable during a speech that touches on work-life balance as are the mystified looks on the faces of the men in the audience - reflect a perceived conflict over having a career and children that is both a uniquely female characteristic and really rather quixotic.

Don't get me wrong: I'm sure men worry occasionally about whether they're spending enough time with their children, and I'm equally sure they sometimes feel as if their work-life ratio is out of balance. But I seriously doubt that there are many men, if indeed there are any, who worry that they're doing the wrong thing by working when they have small children. Whether for traditional reasons or because they're simply wired differently, men expect to work and be parents simultaneously. For that matter, for reasons of economic necessity, so do the vast majority of the women in the world. It's a peculiarity of well-educated, affluent women to feel the need to define career and motherhood as separate, non-interlocking spheres and to feel conflicted about trying to cram both into one balanced life.

If you think about it logically, there are about 4 years after the birth of a child when the child needs full-time care, another 5-6 years of intense, if part-time, supervision, and then 8-9 years of loving oversight. I feel comfortable as a child-raising veteran in saying that it is not possible to devote one's full time and effort to raising children - they're simply not around enough. As infants, they spend a lot of time asleep and as older children, they spend a lot of time in school and with their friends. And that's how it should be. Kids are not trophies for their parents. They are independent human beings, and the goal in raising them should be to guide them in becoming happy, civilized, self-sufficient contributors. They are not, and should not be viewed as, substitutes for a career.

It seems to me the questions about guilt - and indeed the feelings of guilt - are misplaced. They have more to do, I think, with an overly romantic definition of motherhood and a conflict in the working mother's mind about her career. A wonderful mother I know who is also a high-powered and very busy professional used to tell me often that she felt guilty and wondered whether she was doing the right thing by her children. At dinner one night, as she fretted about this, I realized that it was all bullshit - she was the kind of person who would have left her career behind in a heartbeat if she really thought it was harming her kids. Her problem wasn't that she actually felt guilty about having such a full life. It was that she thought she should feel guilty and was conflicted about that. From her own mother, from the media, from some of her colleagues, every message she got was that she had to be failing as a mother by reason of her fancy career. She refused to buy into that, but felt guilty instead - as a sort of penance for having it all.

Who defined motherhood for upper middle class educated women as stay-at-home, full-time, and entirely incompatible with a job? Do even stay-at-home moms actually have nothing in their lives but their kids? Of course not - a woman wouldn't be much of a mother or a human being if she had no other interests, activities or concerns. So isn't the problem really more a confusion of career goals, maybe even a lack of passion for or commitment to career or a worrisome suspicion that career goals are somehow unwomanly? Being a working parent requires accommodations in how one approaches one's career - and, from pregnancy through child-raising, being a working mother requires more accommodations than being a working father. Moreover, traditionally male work institutions (i.e., practically all professions and businesses) were set up and are maintained with the working-father accommodations more front of mind than the working-mother accommodations. It's hard to find balance as a working mother in a professional or business career.

But that is not a reason to opt out or to feel guilty. It's more properly viewed as a reason to opt in, to change institutional realities so as to ease the experience for working mothers, to figure out what works for you and your family and go for it, and to quit letting other people push you around. There's no one right way to be a mother or a career woman, any more than there's one right way to be a father or a career man. It's your life. If you want to stay home and raise kids, do it. If you want to be a working parent, do it. But what a waste of time it is to feel guilty about failing to exemplify some half-baked media-induced notion of what a real mother or businesswoman is.

Specifics and Generalities

Some wise wag (I think) once said something along the lines of "I love mankind. It's people I can't stand." I've been thinking about this ever since a woman in Los Angeles last week asked me an interesting question during a conversation about the different ways men and women approach things like work, work-life balance, one another, etc. She noted that in A Merger of Equals many of the female characters have pretty cynical attitudes toward men and the predominantly male institutions they work in, but that most of them nevertheless find great men along the way. Her question was: were the women's cynical assumptions about men unfounded or were the women just lucky? The question has stuck in my mind, and I've realized that my underlying belief about all this is sort of the opposite of the "I love mankind. It's people I can't stand" attitude.

The relationships between specifics and generalities intrigue me. I've always been amazed by how quickly the specific becomes the generic at work relative to out-of-the-mainstream people. One woman or person of color quits or doesn't do well in a traditionally white male work environment and the institutional powers that be very quickly start fretting about the commitment or suitability of every woman or person of color - a phenomenon that does not occur when an individual white male quits or doesn't do well. As a woman at work, I often felt like a representative of women, a flagbearer of sorts, and that was a heavy additional burden to shoulder. And like the aphorism, while I wholeheartedly believed (and believe) in the rights and abilities of women as a group, I, like everyone else, came across a few individual women I had to grit my teeth to support.

But it goes the other way, too. There are certainly jerks and assholes among the male population, in fact and in my book. And a male-tinged inhospitability certainly pervades a lot of traditionally male work institutions. As a group, particularly at work, men can seem deserving of the cynical and distrustful attitudes that women trying to succeed often have of them. But my experience with individual men, like that of my fictional characters, has been overwhelmingly good. As individuals, most men are decent human beings, and many of them are great. Just like women. So I guess my female characters are both right and wrong to start off (and, in some cases, continue) with such cynical attitudes. And a better answer to the interesting question than the one I gave last week is that you'll get farther with a trusting attitude, hedged by whatever private skepticism suits you, than you will with a cynical and distrusting attitude. Mankind in general may or may not deserve cynicism, but individual people generally do not.