Archives for October 2011

If I ask a big enough question, I need more than one discipline to solve it

October 29, 2011 by · 1 Comment

“I’ve always been fascinated by asking why things are the way they are. It’s about how you take a questioning mind into the world around you and go somewhere else with it, into something unknown.” –Michael Singer

Michael Singer, an artist in the public realm, has been instrumental in transforming public art, architecture, landscape, and planning projects into successful models for urban and ecological renewal.

I met with Michael recently and he reminded me of the value of keep one foot in the leadership change world and one foot in the art and dance world, knowing that these worlds inform each other and challenge one another. When I ask a big enough question, I need more than one discipline to solve it.

A major theme in Michael’s work is concept of questioning assumptions. On his website, you’ll see a variety of questions. He asks these questions not to find an answer, rather to offer a different way to see what’s around him. A scientist will ask ‘why’, an engineer will ask ‘how’, and Michael asks ‘what’.  The way he uses language is very much the way he communicates with the world.

His advice for artists, changemakers and policymakers is to go out and find a problem and get people together from different disciplines to solve it. With this approach, he believes groups can rethink infrastructures to create spaces that serve more than one purpose.

Next time you are working an idea to solve a problem, reflect on Michael Singer’s approach for questioning assumptions.

First, make a list of all the stakeholders related to your idea. Then explore a set of questions: Who is asking for it? Who’s paying for it? Who’s using it?  Who in community will agree and who in community will resist? Lastly, put your idea statement into a question that can engage each of your stakeholders. When it’s a question, we ask people to engage as stakeholders and this helps us to solve the problem and observe our own assumptions.

I’ve found questioning assumptions and cross-disciplinary collaboration to be so useful in my leadership change work. When I actually question my assumptions and use more than one discipline to solve a problem, I shift my own way of seeing the world.

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized ·

Changing Wall St’s view of Occupy Wall St

October 22, 2011 by · 1 Comment


On September 23, 2011, a Youtube video went up titled “Wall Street Mocks Protesters By Drinking Champagne 2011.” In fact this was not a group of Wall Street bankers mocking protestors, this video included someone I know from my time at Lehman Brothers. I learned it was a wedding engagement party hosted at an Italian restaurant. It had nothing to do with the protests.

Needless to say, I was quite perturbed about the mixed social media about the movement. I had also been influenced by my grad school island and reading the ‘rant’ rages in the Wall Street Journal and NYTimes. I remained disgrunted about the situation for a week or so.

As the protests continued, I realized I had a choice: I could continue to complain about Occupy Wall St like some of my MBA classmates and banker friends or participate and shape it in way I believed in it. I felt straddled in between my two worlds as an ex-investment banker and as a social activist. So I chose to participate.

I went to OccupyBoston last weekend and Occupy Wall St in NYC this weekend. This time, in NYC, I didn’t come alone. I brought 2 friends with me. There were two male Wall Street bankers, one who had worked for Goldman Sachs and another who worked for Bear Stearns. Originally, they were both cynical of the protests after seeing the youtube videos and reading the rant rages in the news. I asked them to join me to have an informed dialogue with the protestors and stop relying on media news that confused us all. We used a conversation tool designed by the Presencing Institute to engage around the root causes of the economic crisis and the emergence of this movement.  The thing that struck me most is that these two communities had so much more to learn from eachother than to antagonize eachother. After the dialogue, my Wall St friends told me that they realized that this was more about a leadership problem in banking and government institutions than the ‘news rants’ or youtube videos they saw online. It made us all think hard about what should be done.

I for one am thrilled and excited to see the Occupy Wall St movement take shape. As a former Lehman banker and women’s right activist, I have been both inside Wall St buildings and outside in protests on Washington, DC.

This movement is part of a global trend. There is something really important that is happening, the voice of young and old people coming together in solidarity and wanting to participate in the solution. Just because the movement is not ‘well articulated’ yet does not mean it won’t be very soon.

From a leadership perspective, I wonder how we can make this movement more cross sector, engaging more people in the banking industry to have conversations with protestors. Occupy Wall St is engaging and sparking new conversations (see OccupyCafe), but what we also need is more cross-institutional dialogue to collectively respond to the systemic root issues that underlie the current landscape of this crisis.

 

Filed Under: leadership · Tagged With: ,

Was Steve Jobs really a leader?

October 14, 2011 by · 1 Comment

As I read the eulogies for Steve Jobs over the past week, I’ve been particularly observing what my friends and colleagues praised about him. I was most puzzled by the word ‘leader’ that was used in so many articles lauding his contributions to the world this week.

I deeply admire Steve’s message and contribution to the world. He reminds me to follow my inner guidance and live each day to the fullest.

Many blogs and articles from my peers cited his uncanny vision, his Stanford 2005 speech to ‘stay hungry and foolish’ and his leadership and perseverance to ‘accomplish the unthinkable.’ I agree with all these sentiments. Jobs’s presence encourages Gen Yers to move forward and act on our desires, rather than be paralyzed by fear and anxiety.  He reminds us that we have nothing to lose, except the opportunity offered in the present moment.

At the same time, I wonder: How exactly is Generation Y defining leadership and praising Steve Jobs as a leader? When I talk to those who knew Steve and read old articles about him, I’ve heard another story.

“He was completely ruthless, hard-nosed, unwilling to listen to others, and was used to get what he wanted to get done” said one Apple employee. Others who have worked at Apple thought he was also extremely top-down and unfair. He was described as a brutal micromanager who didn’t source wisdom from his employees. Instead he used his inspirational force to guide people towards a vision he led.

On October 6, Mike Daisey wrote a NYTimes op-ed entitled Against Nostalgia which said “We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to.”

To what extent is this top-down approach a healthy leadership model for Generation Y? To what extent is it not?

We tend the praise leaders who were ruthless about their creativity and vision and inspired a pack of followers. While I do believe Jobs was an inspirational genius, I am left wondering if we are also lauding a ‘leader’ who was in some ways a dictator who only listened to his own intuition. Most leadership books read that CEOs must listen to others as well as be creative and brilliant. Is Steve just an outlier to these rules?

I admire Jobs’ genius, yet I want to be wary of how we interpret this period of tributes. Being true to yourself as a leader doesn’t mean you have to be exactly like Steve Jobs. You can be an inspirational genius and you don’t have to be top-down, stop listening to others in your community, or ruthless.

Filed Under: Uncategorized ·

The Girl Effect: Invest in Girls

October 4, 2011 by · 2 Comments

Today is the launch of the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign, a collaborative effort of hundreds of bloggers coming together to write about The Girl Effect on Oct 4, 2011.

To start, watch this 2 min video.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53yuF64UgSM&w=420&h=315]

It’s clear. The studies show that investment in women and girls can change the world and the way we live.

Growing up in a South Asian family of physicians, there was always a ‘conventional path’ for a girl to take. When I was 17, I attended a global entrepreneurship program where I met non-traditional women entrepreneurs and innovators who expanded my own view of my possibilities. The next year, I founded a high school Young Women’s Leadership conference where I invited female business leaders to tell their stories to girls in Pittsburgh.

Soon after, as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, I turned my passion for women’s leadership into activism and began to work with Choice USA, a national women’s rights organization.  I became one of ten national leaders who mobilized the largest youth delegation of over 3,000 college students to attend the March for Women’s Lives on April 25, 2004, a gathering of over 1.15 million people in Washington, D.C.

As an organizer of the March, I worked tirelessly in college to find ways to further the causes of women’s health and reproductive freedom. I fondly recall the image of thousands of sleeping bags around me in Union Hall in Washington DC. Standing together wearing orange shirts, our youth contingent stood out in the sea of one million people on Capitol Hill. This unforgettable image was captured on the front page of the New York Times the next day. For my work organizing the march, I was named one of Teen People’s “20 Teens Who Will Change the World” and one of “15 Students You Don’t Know But Will” in Newsweek’s college edition.

When I look back at these formative years and my activism work, I can’t help but think about the investment that was made in me by women leaders. Now it is our turn to invest in the next generation of girls and women around the world who don’t have the same choices and possibilities.

Choice is not just a privilege, it has a moral dimension. The Girl Effect campaign is helping us invest in girls to change our world.

So, what can you do?

Follow or blog about the Girl Effect Campaign, join the conversation on Twitter/Facebook, donate to a women’s organization, or just be a MENTOR to a girl or young woman. Often, the biggest differences that we make are in our daily lives are to the young people we can touch in our everyday encounters.

And here’s a few more stats for your next conversation….

  • When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. (United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 1990.)
  • When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man. (Chris Fortson, “Women’s Rights Vital for Developing World,” Yale News Daily 2003.)
  • One girl in seven in developing countries marries before age 15. (Population Council, “Transitions to Adulthood: Child Marriage/Married Adolescents,”  www.popcouncil.org/ta/mar.html [updated May 13, 2008].)
Filed Under: leadership, Women ·

3 years after Lehman, where do we stand?

October 3, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

On September 15, 2008, I sat at a trading desk at Lehman Brothers (my first job out of college) watching the collapse of the firm and the Dow’s 500 point drop as a panic period peaked across the world.

Three years later, I wonder, where do we stand now?  Watch this BBC video hosting a trader who frankly said that the Eurozone Market will crash in the next year.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC19fEqR5bA&w=560&h=315]

This video gives me recurring chills-it was direct, confirming, and shocking all at once.

At the same time, I’ve been following the #occupywallst protests escalating as we speak in downtown Manhattan. I still wonder how much Generation Y is preparing for these crises, as we enter the workforce, launch ‘hot’ start-ups, and amass the tuition loans of undergraduate and graduate education. This is the leadership challenge of our generation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized ·