Somehow, the subject of cancer came up. All six of the women, my mother included, were breast cancer survivors. We could only laugh at this uncanny coincidence. They all got cancer at different stages of life- some young, some post-menopause. Their stories were different, but rooted in similar and painful experiences. I sat and listened and was struck by the new fragility I felt as a mother: the sense that life is a gift, and that it is fragile as well. Like my tiny newborn, something to look after with care.

My mother doesn’t like the term survivor; she says it doesn’t fit what she feels like. Her cancer is done, we hope, and “survivor” is not an identity she claims. My neighbors, too, talked saltily about the nastier sides of chemo, treatment. I marveled at their ability to balance their cancer experiences within the larger scope of their lives. Some choose to be active in the breast cancer community and some prefer not to think about it. But they all fought the disease, and they all think about it every day. They did’t stop their lives, and they didn’t let it block them. I marvelled at this and felt grateful to listen in on the conversation.

It’s bittersweet that my baby shower included such a poignant and intense discussion of cancer. But its also somehow fitting. It reminds me of the cycles of female life, and the shared experiences that bring us women together, sometimes in happy circumstances, sometimes in sad, and mostly in a bittersweet way. I dedicate this post to my neighbors, to my mom, and to the community of women fighting breast cancer.

I’m supporting the American Cancer Society by blogging for more birthdays– blogging to raise cancer awareness. Please, join Bloggers for More Birthdays and dedicate a blog post to someone you love with cancer.

More links:
Darryle Pollack http://blog.darrylepollack.com/2009/09/birthdays-on-the-brain/
Catherine Morgan: http://www.catherine-morgan.com/
Julie Pippert- “Celebrating More Birthdays”

I’m not going to the Democratic National Convention, and I’m sad about it. I am obsessively watching CNN (after a 4 month self-imposed moratorium on cable news), checking my email for party invites in Denver, and questioning choices. I’m about 6 months pregnant, starting a new career, and in the light of day, staying at home instead of going to the Convention seemed like the right thing. The doctors agreed. After all- my blogging is a passion, not a financial sustenance. My BlogHer colleagues Erin Vest and Maria Niles will do an amazing job covering things- Erin even got that Nokia N95 to stream live via Qik. Go Erin.

I mentioned my ambivalence last night to a recent mother of a now 8 month old baby. She said, “get used to compromise!” You think you’re going to have to put your needs just on hold? How about having your needs completely not matter? Having everything you do subsumed by this one little creature- by someone else?

I’m sure to people with children this is the oldest story in the book, so apologies for my whininess.

But, yes, compromise. Not something I’m used to. When I read Leslie Bennetts’ underrated book The Feminine Mistake I was struck by her thesis that women of my generation just need to learn how to compromise. In Bennetts’ view, for example, modern motherhood for the working woman is not a binary question of giving up a career to become the perfect stay at home mom vs. being an addled, overachieving working mother with a kid in full time care. No, Bennetts writes, we need to compromise, Maybe be a little less overachieving at work, a little less perfection-seeking as a mother.

So I guess not going to the Convention is but a first step in the endless compromising of parenthood, its real financial and physical responsibilities. And yet, it stings.

The original poem, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

“The true goal was never “fame” at all. I wanted two things: 1) editors to publish my work, 2) people to read my work. I wanted to be like Nora Ephron – able to exist creatively with an audience and relative financial freedom…”

Ah-ha: classic female tactic. Allison claims her ambition is driven by a larger purpose and to fulfill a larger more socially acceptable role. She doesn’t want to be famous for nothing- she wants to be a writer. But still, I have to give the girl credit for creativity. It’s really hard to break through to that editorial page (84% of op-eds are written by men). If Julia Allison can get her body of work quickly noticed by using the virtues of other body parts, well, then I have to consider that. It’s not often you hear a woman so baldly cop to wanting to get ahead. Recently, I have heard many young women leaders at Harvard Business School protest their ambition. At the BlogHer conference, with hundreds of super-successful women in deep discussion, I didn’t hear the talk turn to personal ambition (even in the “Blog to Book” seminar, whose premise was that the hundreds of folks in the room had enough ambition to want to publish a book). Yesterday, a friend who is senior executive at a large company described herself as wanting to physically “shield herself’ from the naked ambition of another colleague when the two women were granted face time with the multinational corporation’s big boss. My own ambition seems to have gone on summer vacation, and I can’t reach her no matter how hard I try.

Psychiatrist and author Anna Fels notes that women have a difficult time copping to desiring personal recognition, and accepting it when it comes. Not the affirmation that comes with fulfilling a role, such as being a doctor or lawyer, and not the affirmation that comes with being part of a mission or larger being that is important. No, the “highly individualized” recognition that comes from just being you. Is Julia Allison an aberration or is this a generational thing?

I went to a panel at BlogHer that featured fantastic women executives in the new/old media space. Stacy Morrison, the editor in chief of Redbook magazine, also wears her ambition on her sleeve. I’ve seen her speak twice now, and it’s remarkable. Her language manages to be both collaborative and baldly ambitious at the same time. She regularly peppers he speech with phrases like, “I knew I wanted to take over the magazine when…” and refers to “her magazine” with the emphasis often reserved for one’s children. But Morrison also said her job is to be “the professional empath” for the 10 million women who read Redbook. This woman is clear, and her ambition, too, is couched in her role as (I’m imagining how she’d paraphrase it here) interpreter of the hopes and dreams of her readers.

I asked Morrison about her phrasing- I said I had literally never heard a woman speak so ambitiously before. She explained it’s because of her clarity of purpose. She’s known what she wants to do with her life since she was a little girl. This “luxury” of clarity means she is unambivalent about being ambitious. She doesn’t need to apologize for it, or temper her language, because she is doing exactly what she has to do, and that is the way it must be.

A major light bulb went on when I heard this. Do I feel less ambitious because I am conflicted about what I am meant to do, to be, on this earth? If I were less ambivalent, and if I knew how I fit in a larger puzzle, would I be ok with saying, “I want to be rich, have a book and maybe a radio show and be a damn good mother”?

cross posted from BlogHer.com

What she meant was, stop multi-tasking for a second. Stop Twittering, blogging, IM-ing, catching up on email, or reading Gawker and listen. We all hear, we’re adept at hearing and performing actions at the same time. But listening is different, and at the modern tech or political conference structure listening is out of style. Like she often does, she referenced her two teenage daughters, who according to Arianna are always online, multitasking, and sometimes think their mom doesn’t get it. What Arianna–who gets it so thoroughly it’s staggering– meant was, her daughters aren’t present. Few of us are.

The conference was fabulous but it seemed nobody listened. The entire interplay happened not in the meeting rooms, but on Twitter. At some point the Twittering grew so self-referential that those on a panel referred not to each other or to the audience but to the giant Twitter page displayed on a screen above.

The conference closed, appropriately, with a “Twitter song.”

I realized I haven’t been fully present at work in years. I rarely listen in meetings, on phone calls, at conferences, and nor does anyone else I know. It’s not so much that Google culture has made my stupider (a la the Atlantic monthly article). It’s that I am distracted. Dave Winer wrote a great post about how un-useful most conferences are boring and unilateral (only fun for the panel) and so that’s why people space out in the audiences. I think most of us have too many options to keep busy in our virtual lives, and so we prefer to do that.

In so doing, we don’t process any information. We hear it, and post it immediately. We lose the valuable thing that happens when we are confronted with information and then have to break it down, understand what it means, and re-frame. Cogitating- it’s a dying art.

Before women entered the workforce, their social networks were almost entirely female. Even still women’s networks are more female than male, and contain fewer weak ties (See Ronald Burt). Their networks are less rich in those who can bridge, broker deals, and introduce them to people with power. Women’s networks tend to include fewer cross sex contacts, which hampers women in fields that are male-driven. The critical period for entrepreneur’s life cycles are the 20’s and 30’s: this is when you accumulate resources and contacts to sustain later ventures. These are precisely the years when married women with children suffer. Their networks tend to become more female, more dense. This is changing, but there is truth to it.

The concept of network analysis provides a rich framework to analyze why women don’t run for office as much, don’t become CEO’s as much, don’t become Masters of the Universe as much. This is based on the assumption that women are disadvantaged because they are excluded from key social relationships. For decades now, scholars have concluded that women tend to have more dense networks than men (in which contacts all know each other and talk to each other, without expanding out, or forming “weak ties,” those people who are casual acquaintances but help you get ahead.

Women, scholars say, should see if they are sacrificing diversity for density- strong ties overhwhelm the weak ties that are so valuable for business and politics. Those with children are characterized by all-female reference groups. A practical example includes investigating salary negotiations: women tend to ask other women in their social network what they earn, which makes us feel better about ourselves but causes us to lose perspective on what the men in similar positions might earn (see Robin Ely).

So it was with interest that at the PDF Conference today, I was watching a presentation of a visual map of the blogosphere in politics and technology. “Mommybloggers,” according to Matthew Hurst from Microsoft Live Labs, occupy their own dense hub of the political blogosphere, but they’re not interconnected with other nodes in the blogosphere, such as DailyKos, or big tech bloggers, or just big deal bloggers like Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine. According to the chart, “mommybloggers” occupy a dense and busy spot on the network map of the poli-tech blogosphere. But like women’s social networks in general, our networks are dense and familiar, and not as outreaching as others. We link to each other, and talk to each other a good deal. Do you think that’s a fair characterization?

Do tight-knit online blog communities hold politically-motivated women back? If women spent less time blogging and linking to our online friends and more time cross-pollinating with larger sites in the political blogosphere, would we gain political might, or perhaps just new perspectives?

“Imagine if you were interviewing John McCain and Barack Obama for a CEO post. You might ask:

Tell us about a high performing team that you’ve built. What made it high-performing?

Can you give us an example of how you have overcome resistance to bring about a needed change?

Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive. Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble?

These are questions recently drafted for Barack Obama and John McCain by a room full of leaders from many walks of life. While we would consider such questions crucial insight to gain from a potential senior executive, to my knowledge we’ve never asked them of our presidential candidates. Here are some more leadership questions for our potential chief executives:

What are the attributes and competencies you value most in yourself that will serve you well in the White House?
The internet and technology have flattened the political playing field, allowing for more participation and collective decision making. How will you create a more participatory democracy and give people the opportunity to influence decision making?

The president’s role requires decisiveness. Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive. Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble. In retrospect, what would you have done differently?

Tell us about a time when your judgment was tested in crisis. What do you want us to appreciate about your judgment?

And so, a group of eminent leaders from many domains, from popular leadership authors such as Ken Blanchard and Patrick Lencioni, to social entrepreneurs to military leaders and clergy gathered at Harvard to develop a list of core questions about presidential leadership.

Leadership is not a soft skill. It directly impacts the bottom line in business, and I hope good leadership will lift our country’s bottom line. Research from the consulting firm Hay Group shows 35% of the difference in employee engagement and discretionary effort is directly a result of the work environment leaders create. How would that translate into Congress’ ability to get things done? Plus, the climate a leader creates accounts for up to 25 percent of the variance in an organization’s performance – and this is the bottom line: productivity, growth, profit.

But what does presidential leadership mean? What, indeed does leadership mean? It’s an overused word, aligned more with airport paperbacks than the true test of one who can help us find our way in the dark. When I spoke with many of the day’s participants, their answers varied, but they came back to the same core qualities: a leader must serve as well as lead. A leader must listen, learn, and be willing to fail. A leader can’t go it alone. Sounds trite. But imagine if our current Chief Executive had developed such attributes. Would you ever hire a CEO without knowing how he makes decisions? What if George W. Bush had said to the American people when asked, “well, I prefer to make unilateral decisions based on the advice of a small, inner circle of advisors and I never, ever listen to people outside that group.” Next candidate, please.

For more, click here for the Center for Public Leadership

I first got the idea from my colleague Matt Wilson at the Kennedy School, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Obama’s real power to change this country doesn’t end on Election Day: it begins on Election Day. Citizenry is a job, a vocation. We’ve forgotten that.

Winer’s Sunday Gang with Nicco Mele and Morra Aarons

Scripting News here

Erik Erikson, Womanhood and the Inner Space, 1968