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
May 2, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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.
Cultivating Leadership
April 29, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
My passion for feminine leadership development stems from a desire to connect with others and help them connect with themselves. Last week, I met Jennifer Berger from Cultivating Leadership based in New Zealand. We discussed two key questions that I am thinking about:
- How do I use my leadership work at Harvard and develop it into something into my career?
- How do I create spaces for others to learn this that will conducive to their learning and stage in development?
Most of our development is not a beautiful path, it is a tangled web of vines as we try to figure out what belongs and what does not. Many people commonly take personality profile indicators such as the Myers Briggs test to better understand themselves. I had three major takeaways from our conversation:
1) “In order to understand anything well you need at least three good theories” -Bill Perry
The more we can gain new theories of thinking, the less we hold to one but combine a set of theories to push our own thinking. More theories help us be psychologically spacious.
2) “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers he poses the right questions” -Claude Levi Strauss
What helps me ask different or the “right” questions? Often having the space and time to reflect, whether a meditative process, asking people you know well or connect to, and finding community to be curious with. Again, this is about how to live with the questions and not just about solving problems.
3) “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust
What helps me get out of one perspective and take multiple perspectives? This could be travel, getting into uncomfortable situations, creating dissent, stepping into shoes of other person, reading, writing, conflict, or failure. These interventions help us take notice of what is around us.
The big news of the 21st century is that the world as a whole has got to be managed, not just its parts. What has helped me look at systems? It is about constant learning and development. We can all come up with new ways of working if we become the author of our own story, make time for reflection, and observe and experiment to create new structures and practices.
On being wrong
April 20, 2011 by · 1 Comment
“The miracle of your mind isnt that you can see the world as it is, its that you can see the world as it isn’t.”
Spend these next 18 minutes watching Kathryn Schulz talk why we need to avoid ‘being wrong.’
[ted id=1126]MIT and Gender Inequity
March 31, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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.”
Speak with Conviction
March 30, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Taylor Mali’s Speak with Conviction reminds us all what matters in today’s debates, dialogues, and conversations. What has happened to our conviction? How will our generation express our true beliefs and opinions? Check it out here.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEBZkWkkdZA]
Applying Feminine Values to Finance
February 28, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
“It’s not about women being better than men, it’s about women being different than men. ” -Halla Tomasdottir
[ted id=1030]Happy Valentine’s Day
February 15, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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.
[ted id=204]Positive Deviance
December 22, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people all remark
We have done it ourselves.”
~Lao-Tzu Tao Te Ching
Positive Deviance is grounded in the belief that community transformation can be realized by the discovery of innovations and wisdom that already exist within a community. Positive deviants are the individuals or groups with the same resources and challenges in a community, but who have successful strategies enabling them to provide better solutions than their peers.
The Power of Positive Deviance is an incredible book which showcases success stories of innovators who are tackling some of the largest global problems. In Vietnam, a 30-50% reduction of childhood malnutrition in over 41 communities worldwide arose from sharing the practices of families, with similar resources, who were able to keep their children healthier.
Positive Deviance is a valuable approach for any changemaker who is trying co-create solutions with a local community. It demonstrates that it is possible to find solutions today before all the parts of the problem are addressed. Check out here for a basic field guide of the positive deviance approach, facilitator tips, feedback questions, and more.
Find passion in your work
December 21, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
How do you turn your passion into your life’s work? Start-ups are a great way to figure out what you love, what you hate, and they can also bring you closer to living out your passion.
This semester, I worked with two of my brilliant colleagues, Shayna Harris and Adah Chan, on two social ventures: SupplyChange and Mujer a Mujer (see MaM video in my last blog post and more info here). In this post, I want to give a short update on SupplyChange, our upcoming plans, and some of my personal goals for the future.
SupplyChange, which came out of our Development Ventures class, is a venture that seeks to address the global problem of post-harvest loss. We are investigating processing produce that is traditionally wasted in developing countries and turning it into valuable ingredients for large US food companies. In January, we’re spending a month in Paraguay to identify ways to address supply chain inefficiencies: post harvest loss, logistics, coordination, etc.
As part of SupplyChange, I worked with two computer programmers to develop the first prototype of Mobile Information Aggregator (MIA), a mobile application to help farmers gain access to global markets. Though a text message on a simple cell phone, the MIA tracks the crop type, quantity of production, and quantity that farmers sell via a text message, which then links into a central database system. The MIA provides historical and real-time data to farming cooperatives so that they can make better business decisions, and will help cooperatives understand what they are producing and help farmers aggregate demand, connect with markets and increase their income. This idea originated out of a meeting with farmers and was incubated in NCIIA’s VentureLab in March 2009. If you know farming cooperatives in India or around the world that may be interested in pilot testing the MIA over a 1-2 month period this summer, please reach out to me.
My passion: SupplyChange has brought me closer to my deepest passion: to enable women through economic, social, and technological opportunities. Providing women with opportunity yields equal rights and helps entire nations, families are more likely to be healthy, and children are more likely to survive. According to Women to Women International, “women’s agricultural empowerment is the next frontier of the global women’s movement. Currently, women produce the majority of the world’s food but own less than 2% of the land, it’s an issue of economic as well as gender justice.” As part of my agricultural development work, I’m very keen to work and partner with groups focused on enabling women, who make up 70% of the world’s farmers and produce 90% of the world’s staple crops whether through technology and investments.
In January, I plan to blog about my trip to Latin America, especially my lessons learned, my passion, and next steps for the future!