Happy Birthday Beth Kanter
Well, that title sounds like a bromance movie.
But I was inspired by this post from Amy Sample Ward. She wrote:
In her birthday wish post, Beth announces that she’s trying to send 53 Cambodian children to school by raising $530. Last week, Stacy Monk and I were chatting and thought that our community could help smash that goal by raising much more funds as well as awareness for the work the Sharing Foundation does in Cambodia.
How does it work?
We’re hoping to inspire 53 bloggers to publish a post today that shares how Beth has impacted his/her work and shares Beth’s birthday wish with his/her blog audience. (Of course, you’re invited to make a gift to make her wish come true as well!)
What’s the point?
We’re hoping to make her birthday a very happy one by:
1. making her wish come true, and
2. reminding her how much she’s contributed to the community.
I knew Beth Kanter from BlogHer and from blogging in general; I admired how she had developed a singular expertise. Back in 2007 she graciously agreed to let me interview her for a paper I was writing at Harvard on bloggers as entrepreneurs. I had a theory that the most successful and inspiring independent bloggers, such as Beth, were less citizen journalists than they were entrepreneurs, using social media to build their brands and create their own path by which to live and work. Who better embodies this than Beth? She has inspired me and many other women who want to work on their own terms, to do really good work while fighting the good fight. After I wrote my paper and finished grad school, I too started my own business, on my own, working for clients who focused on women in the workplace. In my paper, I called Beth “Betty.” I quoted her,
“Betty, who writes a blog about non-profits and social change, notes that her readers are very
demanding. I asked her why her readers like her: ‘The most important thing is consistency. I hear that a lot from readers — you’re consistent, you’re always right. And if I slack off, my subscriber numbers go down.’”
Beth is disciplined, innovative, and true. Happy Birthday!
Morra Goes to Washington
This Monday I am traveling to DC to sit down with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. I will be traveling on behalf of BlogHer.com’s community journalism initiative. I’ll be asking questions from the online community- as well as a few of my own. Please, submit a question by visiting BlogHer.com. You can also watch my interview live online at BlogHer on Monday morning, Dec. 21, at 9:30 am Eastern.
The goal of our community journalism initiative is to foster a frank, open, and civil discussion surrounding the current health care policy debate. We all could use a little more of that right now, so please help me out by entering a question.
Visit BlogHer and submit your question- many thanks!
http://bit.ly/4DY5z1
My prep reading list:
Atul Gawande
Ezra Klein
Julie Pippert
RH Reality Check
David Sirota
The Corner
Women leading the charge in the financial mess
I wanted to share this piece from my friend Joe Costello, whose listserv Archein is an invaluable resource and sure to stir the blood. There’s been a lot of research on the role of women as organizational whistleblowers. Women, outside of the majority power structure, have felt more comfortable stepping outside groupthink and speaking up. Make of this what you will. Ironically, Stanford Law Professor Deborah Rhode said in 2002, during the Enron mess (!): “”If you’re not one of the good old boys to begin with….it makes it easier when you see something flat- out wrong to raise your voice.” So here is Joe’s piece on the outstanding role of several women in calling the financial crisis before it happened.
In a recent piece, I talked about women leading the charge on the financial mess. I was asked in an email to, “Write a piece and send it around or something.” Ya’ll didn’t know I take requests did you? So, in my best Wayne Newton, and I could pull this off if I shaved my goatee and took off the top 3/4 of my mustache — “This one’s for the ladies: ”
1) First, I’ll start with Yves Smith, who I came across end of last summer. A bio of her states she has 25 years in financial services, worked for, amongst others, Goldman, McKinsey, and Sumitomo, and a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Business School. Her blog is Naked Capitalism. She has shown great knowledge and greater courage, from my experience, these two traits are too rare together. Her writing is exceptional and if you want a good overview of the financial mess and what’s gone on over the past year and half, I couldn’t more highly recommend, paging through her blog’s archive. The president should replace Geithner with her. Time we had our first woman Treasury Secretary.
2) Next, Elizabeth Warren. Either mistakenly, which I believe is the case, or purposefully, in which case I’d have to reevaluate my opinion of Harry Reid, Warren was appointed by Reid to head the Congressional Oversight Panel for all the money being handed to the banks. Warren is Professor of Law at Harvard and wrote the excellent book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. So, she documented the great underbelly of Wall Street’s debt bubble, that is, its destruction of a big chunk of working America. I don’t know if when Reid appointed her, he thought he was getting some doddering academic, but instead he got a strong and energetic public advocate. There’s been a pretty hard effort to discredit Ms Warren, and Yves Smith takes a look at the hatchet job done by NPR here. Here’s a good interview with Bill Mahr. I’ve been nothing but impressed when I’ve heard her talk and strongly second the motion by Greider to give her subpoena powers.
3) In October 2007, working for Oppenheimer, Merdith Whitney wrote a report calling Citi the pile [of] junk it is. Amazingly, she was pretty much the only one in the whole industry to do so. Since then, Whitney has been straight at the big banks, holding nothing back on what bad shape they’re in. She’s the Anti-Geithner. In the middle of latest pop in the stock market, which has gotten the banks $50 billion in new capital over the past couple months, Whitney appeared here on CNBC,(excellent) and called the banks’ profits “manufactured” by the government, and stated things would begin heading south again. She’s an eagle above the weasels scurrying below on Wall Street.
4) Gretchen Morgenson writes for the NYT business section. In the last year and half, she has written far and away some of the best coverage of the financial crisis in the mainstream media. Most importantly, she put Mr. Blankfein at the meeting with Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke when the bailout of AIG was decided to the advantage of Goldman for at least 14 billion. By the way, Goldman hasn’t returned that 14 billion! Again, if you want to read some good things on the last year and half, scroll through her articles in the Times’ archive. The Nation just did an ok piece on her. Unfortunately, it suffers from the author’s “objective journalism” disease.
5) Finally, I’d throw in Sheila Bair, who was appointed head of the FDIC by none other than George W. Bush. Ms Bair has frequently tangled with the boys in the government, taking on Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, and Summers. She’s stated repeatedly the banking crisis is not over, tried to slow the foreclosure tsunami, and most recently stated again Citi is a pile of shit and needs to be placed into receivership.
These women are inspiring! Citizens all, helping breathe life into this old republic.
Work Life at the White House
Jill Miller Zimon on WritesLikeSheTalks covers today’s NYT piece on White House staffers attempting work life integration. “There has got to be a way to turn this high-profile example of what parents have been experiencing for at least the last fifty years or more into action.” Good question- but I don’t know how powerful this example is for most of us. I think most people wouldn’t have much sympathy for high level political operatives who trade family time for a few years’ work experience at the apotheosis of power. I’d say, the bright side to political life is it comes in fits and starts: there is always an off-season, or change in administration. But I can imagine Rahm Emanuel’s kids don’t see all that much of their dad.
Indeed, the article is a relief because it gives equal time to moms and dads.
Jumping Back on the Ladder: Talking With Harvard’s Christine Heenan
I wrote this for Huffington Post last week but I want to share it here. I’ve been chewing over this conversation for a week.
Brenda Barnes, now CEO of Sara Lee, has gotten a lot of press because she left the corporate workforce for a decade to spend more time with her children, and recently returned to be CEO of a major company. Barnes is indeed a rare person, and women can make themselves feel guilty and bad for making trade offs when they’re raising a family. But there are plenty of women out there who illustrate that scaling back work to spend time with family is not a professional death sentence in the long run.
Christine Heenan, who spent her twenties in the Clinton White House and later, time with little kids running her own small business, notes that even after jumping off the corporate ladder, “You can absolutely come out on top. I had a period of time I thought, I’ll never be back in those circles…” She’s now back in a demanding new leadership role at a global institution, a role that requires the whole family’s cooperation, but, “after a decade of really balancing work with my kids, we approach this new challenge as a team. I couldn’t have considered this career move if I hadn’t taken that time to be with my kids more ’til now.”
Heenan got her start on the Clinton White House policy team, and in 1995 became the head of government and community relations at Brown University, where she also taught. When Christine was recovering from delivering her first baby, her boss from Brown called Christine in the maternity ward: there was a crisis at work. After Christine had her second baby, she left Brown to start her own business, the Clarendon Group.
The Clarendon Group won a Sloan Foundation Award in 2006, for “business excellence in workplace flexibility.” Obviously Christine made flexible working a priority when she ran the Clarendon Group. Indeed, she told me a fond memory of first starting her company and preparing a presentation with her first employee, also a mother. Christine took all the kids to the local park while her colleague hammered out the pages on the ink jet printer. Heenan noted that she would be curious to measure her employees’ children’s impressions of what work looks like, since the kids spent so much time in the office with their mothers, and felt like they had the run of the place. To them, kids and work were comfortably intermingled.
As I read Christine’s story in the book Womenomics I thought, great, another “success” story about a high-powered woman who jumps off the corporate ladder to start her own business and get a life. But, Christine’s story doesn’t end with Clarendon. She jumped back on the ladder, in a major way.
In July 2008, Christine became Harvard University’s Vice President for Government, Community, and Public Affairs. I was curious, how did her ten years in a flexible work environment — her own — affect her return to a corporate role?
I asked her how she decided to return.
She said,
“My kids are now at an age where we could make the decision as a family.” She said that because so much of her time during the past decade was spent “as a mother and a professional had been considering those needs I thought it was the right time” to take her own career goals into account again.Still, “It’s been an adjustment of a year- but it’s been more of a team spirited discussion because of how the decision was made.” Christine told me that recently she was walking the dog with her ten year-old son and complained to him, “‘I have 100 emails- I don’t want to work any more today!’ And my son said, “‘Mom, we talked about this.’”
I asked her if she actually worked harder running her own business than for someone else?
She said,
“I restructured my relationship with Brown into a consultant role after her second son was born. Two years into that, I hired my first employee who was actually my neighbor, whose background was banking and non-profits, but was home with her three young children at the time. She and I, and our next employee – also a career professional now home with a new child — and our moved into a sublet office, then gradually grew.“As your own boss, it’s not so much working harder as much as work always being with you. It’s your name on the door. But for me it was an easy trade off for being able to do what I wanted. No one could tell me I couldn’t.”
“Our flex policy was fairly organic. When it was just me and my neighbor we traded off aspects of work and time with the kids. The way we ended up having so many moms working flexibly was that’s what we became known for. At any given time at the firm, there was at least 50% of the staff working flex schedules. It wasn’t always women- for example we had a male colleague whose new wife was beginning a brutal schedule as a resident in Boston, and he worked two days a week [from his home] in Boston.”
Q: Could you describe a little how you negotiated when considering the Harvard job? Was flex on the table?
A: I did raise it in my first meeting with the search firm. I had nothing to lose; I wasn’t looking for a job. If they had explained that this was where [considering me] would have ended, fine. I was prepared to be out of the running due to my family demands. But it was actually the two women at the search – one pregnant with twins – convinced me to interview for the job. They argued: why not at least have that conversation?. So I did go forward with the search process, and I did raise it in my first meeting with the search committee. The most honest and important piece of advice I got in that first meeting was from a senior level colleague at Harvard who said, “It’s pretty safe to say everyone at this level is 24-7, and no one much cares where you are at 3 in the afternoon….”
Since taking the post, Christine has noted that both men and women model that attitude. Christine noted she has a colleague who is general counsel whose son is a very competitive high school wrestler. “There have been times that Jeff’s wrestling matches meant tied up evenings or weekends, and that is not hidden from view — everyone shares in and endorses those priorities here. It is really nice.”Q: What do you miss about being your own boss?
“After school; I miss that after school window. Both my children are boys. If you ask them at 6 pm to elaborate on their school day, they’ve forgotten it! They’re like, that was 5 hours ago mom! But we manage phone conversations after school, and I try to go home for homework time and the backpack download. I learned from not doing it right at first. When we started this year, I felt very disorganized and out of a groove. Now we have better check-in structures… We’re much more attuned to the family schedule, we all review the week on Sunday.”
Q: In Womenomics you talk about the loss of status you first felt when you left the DC-NY power corridor. How has that changed over time?
A: “One thing I have learned about myself in the last year is that the most important status I confer myself is, at the end of the day, my performance as a mother and a wife. I feel as though I’m more often challenged now by ‘am I doing everything right as a mom?’ than when I was worried about “am I off the fast track as a professional?” for the decade I was out of Washington DC.
“If you are committed to trying to do it all, you have to let yourself off the hook. It’s easy to assume anything you’re not doing right in one sphere is because of devotion to the other sphere.” She noted, your son would still have that problem if you were home every afternoon!
Q: What quick tips do you have for making work and family work?A: “Try to live as close to the office as possible. I am three miles from desk to door. If you can’t live close, when you get that call someone has a fever make sure you have a relative or friend who can do emergency pick ups.
“I think having at least one colleague who is really aware of your commitments outside the office — who knows next Thursday is your son’s birthday — is very helpful. It’s helpful to have an outlet to be supported in your family responsibilities at work. At Harvard my assistant Monica — she’s really my partner in helping me balance. I think its ok to be explicit about your family commitments with your team — to say please make sure your note this day in my calendar for family.
“And, we have the Sunday night ritual of calendaring. Who has kung fu on what day? When are this week’s baseball games? My husband travels a lot so it’s important we all understand what the week looks ahead.
Finally, let yourself off the hook! Women are so inclined to let themselves beat themselves up… Rather than focus on the fact that you got to the pickup five minutes late, or to the office meeting 5 minutes late, focus on the fact that you got there.”
About Me
Morra Aarons-Mele utilizes social media strategies to help employers, employees and communities connect. She also consults with leading organizations on how women can use the internet for professional and personal development. In her spare time, Morra enjoys blogging about women and politics. Read her full bio >>
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