Don’t leave until you leave

Sheryl Sandberg’s words from her Barnard commencement speech have been echoed again and again across blogs and media over the past month. Her heartfelt message for young women is to lean in, not lean back, put your foot on the gas pedal, and own your career.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY&w=560&h=349]

Habits of Highly Effective CEOs

Last week, I heard from Adam Bryant, writer of the Corner Office in the NYTimes, in a Harvard course. Adam Bryant has spent the last few years asking CEOs not what they do but how they do what they do and how they learned what they do. The Corner Office column took off quickly with a compilation of leadership and life lessons from these CEOs.

Adam wrote an interesting piece on the “5 Habits of Highly Effective CEOs” in mid April that summarizes his takeaways.

Here are some highlights on his CEO interviews from his visit to our course:

  • A CEO what must understand what they need on executive team: a visionary, an enforcer, classic manager, and a customer representative.
  • The importance of listening:  CEOs limit the distractions of technology by turning off the iPhone and blackberry when they know it is important for a manager to feel they are being listened to.
  • The importance of giving direct feedback: It’s not what you say it’s how you say it. Good CEOs are more of a coach to people who work for them, rather than the boss. One CEO offers ‘office hours’ to his entire staff to offer time for this coaching.
  • Effective CEOs study a system before they shift it. Young graduates often run into companies thinking they are going to instantly change a system but he reiterates patience and listening as crucial here.
  • Of the fortune 1000 companies there are 13 female CEOs. Women have been seen to understand team smarts and group dynamics more than men. The future  of companies will be working on ad-hoc teams, not an organizational chart model and women have a leg up.

MIT and Gender Inequity

Walk the halls of the MIT corridor and you’ll feel a much more balanced gender ratio these days than in 10 years ago. But have gender quotas inevitably caused resentment at today’s universities? Perhaps they have replaced the resentment that marginalized women have faced and created a more connected, aggressive resentment from a larger pool of men?

This NYTimes article shows that gender awareness needs to happen at an undergraduate level. Both young women and men need to be sensitized to sterotypes, negotiation habits, and marginalization.

“To women in my generation, these residual issues can sound small because we see so much progress,” said Nancy H. Hopkins, a molecular biologist who instigated the first report. “But they’re not small; they still create an unequal playing field for women — not just at universities, and certainly not just at M.I.T. And they’re harder to change because they are a reflection of where women stand in society.”

Happy Valentine’s Day

It’s been a whirlwind week of changes: Egypt’s emancipation and the recent NYTimes success of Community Solutions, an social enterprise I worked with in Guatemala in 2007. Both centered around the power of mobilizing women, which brings me back to my greatest passion on this day of love: women’s equality.

Happy V Day to everyone! My gift to you is to watch Isabel Allende tell the tales of passion as she discusses women, creativity, and the definition of feminism.

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