Food for thought

A lot of tech companies provide some configuration of food/beverage for their employees. Bare minimum table stakes is free coffee/tea (which is why I was gobsmacked on my first day at the non-profit a few years ago to find out they didn’t even do that). The next tier up is sodas and snacks (some array of junk food, usually) and possibly an on-site cafeteria where the meals are subsidized.

Then there’s the free food, full stop.

Hot-shot startups tout “community lunches!” and “catered dinners!”, which only means that they expect you to work through your lunch and far into the night. The megaliths like Apple and Facebook (and, once, Twitter) have multiple cafés and cafeterias serving varieties of cuisine from morning to night—all at no cost to staff and guests. Because otherwise you’d waste time getting in your car to go somewhere to eat and then come back.

That’s it, basically. They want to keep you on campus and producing; it's worth it to them to feed you.

In the before times, my current employer had the requisite reefers of soft drinks (both Coke and Pepsi products, plus juices, canned coffees and milk), coffee machines (Nespresso as well as something that disgorges coffee and latte-like beverages, only I’ve seen the innards of that mechanism, so I don’t use it), and walls of snacks (from Pop Tarts—although there are no toasters—to chips, cookies and energy bars).

Additionally, every Tuesday we had a hot lunch, catered from an array of restaurants. My first ever Tuesday there was brioches with eggs and bacon in them, as well as trays of bacon (and, of course, vegan and vegetarian alternatives). That was, hands down, the best ever—even better than the Indian, Mexican, barbecue and other ones.

(Additionally, there were almost always leftovers, so you could have lunch again the next day.)

I never had to worry about making dinner on Tuesdays. It was great.

Well, Covid put an end to that—primarily because everyone worked remotely. A few months after they re-opened the office, they had Tuesday lunches brought in, but it was all pre-portioned into sealed containers and, frankly, not very appetizing. Yeah—a couple of times were good, but it was mostly tasteless and not much of a variety. (The fruit cups were good.)

There were rumblings among the staff; that’s how bad they are.

I brought the remains of one lunch home and set it outside for the birds, squirrels and occasional fox. The meat disappeared overnight, the rice stayed for a couple of days and the broccoli was there for weeks.

Well, then came the acquisition by Megalithic Software Company, and they took over the food provision process. The array of canned coffees and types of milk in the reefers metastasized, the two coffeelike extrusion machines have been broken for weeks and the variety of snacks was decimated. But because it’s this company’s policy to feed their employees on site (see above about not wanting people to waste time away from the computer), they promised us we’d be getting hot lunches delivered to us every day (we have no cooking facilities in the office).

Well, that was the story, but then it was, oh—it’ll start later in the week. Then, it’ll start next week. That was three weeks ago, and they finally started it up yesterday.

With the same catering vendor, Tasteless R Us.

<Sigh>

I don’t know if this is permanent—how could it be when somewhere out there there’s a vendor who stuffs little brioches with eggs and bacon?—or what. I guess we’ll see.

On the plus side, they fill bowls with fruit. So far I’ve brought home five apples and made tarts, and yesterday I took two oranges, since they cost $1.25 each at the grocery store. Girl's gotta make ends meet. 

 

 

Chasing your customers

Poor, poor JPMorgan Chase. For all their squillions in assets, and the billions they pay their senior executive team, they just do not get this whole social media thing.

It’s been five and a half years since someone thought it would be a good idea to have an Ask Me Anything Twitter session with the investment banking side’s vice chairman Jimmy Lee. Before he even got into his corner office that week, Twitter had dumped so thoroughly on the concept that JPMorgan cancelled the session.

I’m proud to say that I joined the squadrons of trolls and did my part, my first experience ever with drawing even a tiny prick of blood.

It was a classic misstep—a total fiasco—and they don’t appear to have learned from it. Because on Monday, the consumer side of the megalith tweeted something that someone thought was clever advice for their struggling customers—under the hashtag #MondayMotivation—and the response was so [predictably] overwhelmingly negative, that they took down the tweet in less than three hours.

But of course, the evil that tweets do live long after their bones are interrèd. Twitterati continued to pile on to screen caps of the tweet, and here are some of the examples:

Two members of Congress who have been forthright in their criticism of Big Banks (both, coincidentally, women and Democrats) had a few thoughts to tweet. First up, Representative Katie Porter, who only a couple of weeks ago dragged JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in a House committee hearing by running him through the parlous financial situation of one of his actual employees in her Southern California district. She repeatedly asked the guy who received a compensation package of $31M last year what advice he’d give this bank teller on how to make ends meet. And he repeatedly replied, “I’ll have to think about that.”

Presumably he’s thought about it and would now advise his employees to eat the food already in their fridges and stop taking taxis for three-block rides.

And then Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who famously told WellsFargo’s then-CEO to his face that he should resign over the bank’s massive and systemic fraudulent practices, had something to say:

At some point during the day, a somewhat chastened @Chase posted this non-apology:

But here’s the tweet that pretty much sums up the world’s reaction:

As for JPMorgan’s social media woes: womp, womp.

Capitalism 101

Evidently, Boeing charges its customers extra if they want safety features that could have prevented the two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft. That’s kind of like Toyota charging extra if you want brakes that work.

Nearly 350 people dead. What a business model.

Not info overload

Three years ago, as part of a company-wide “transformation initiative”, I took part in a Potemkin Village exercise involving tiger teams supposedly working toward building strategies in three new areas.

My focus was on “internal communications”, a much-needed function. (Although, tbf, most organizations are completely crap at this.) My team and I spent about 6X the amount of time we were told to commit to the project, and presented recommendations for implementing employee communications—hiring a director, comprehensive framework for multiple touch points, comms calendar, the whole megillah.

That was before executive management decided that we really didn’t need no stinkin’ transformation. There was quite the bun fight over who should control such a function; the (now-departed) HR director insisted we didn’t need to hire anyone—we could use existing resources. But in any case, HR should own the operation. Yeah, right.

Eventually they assigned the job (not at the director level) to someone in the executive office, put up a monitor with HR announcements in the lobby and reduced the amount of information shared throughout the company by an order of magnitude. Problem solved, eh?

Well, aside from various emails from HR and whatever goes on that lobby monitor that I don’t even notice, the most frequent form of communication we’ve received has been photocopied announcements of various lectures and panels taped to elevator walls.

Until a few weeks ago, when one of these appeared in each car:

I suppose that tape wasn’t good for marble walls. Or maybe someone decided that taped flyers looked tacky. Or maybe they just felt there was too much communication going on.

Tick-tock

So, this happened. Again.

I reported in January the sudden, ah, pivot in my employment status. And when last I updated you three months ago, it looked as though at least someone saw a future for me with my current employer. I mean, clear communication does not seem to be a cultural strength in this outfit, but I had understood that there would be use for me once the business plan is done this month.

With that thought in mind, I’ve been beavering away on the plan (a process that includes a not inconsiderable element of cat herding to get a straight—or even only somewhat wavy—story around what, exactly, this program is going to do). I’d got signoff from my manager to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration in September. (I went last year as part of my work managing innovations.) In fact, I got literal signoff on my expense for registering for the conference at a meeting with her on Monday, where I presented the mother-of-all-financial-models. Everything seemed fine.

Then, Tuesday evening, an email appeared in my queue from the woman in HR responsible for managing benefits—the one who balances being out of the office more often than in with seemingly being unable to deliver on your benefits choices. (It took repeated emails and visits to her office from June to November last year before the money being taken out of my paycheck for retirement got into the right accounts.)

(Look: my Outlook folder for correspondence with HR is labeled Clown Car. ‘Nuff said.)

Here’s the text of that email: “I was made aware that you may be leaving at the end of the month due to funding for your position. Do you have any questions regarding your benefits?”

Why, yes—yes, I do have questions.

So I forwarded the email to my manager, basically asking, WTF? The response I got was not entirely reassuring. The company funds covering my salary do end on the 30^th, but she’s scrambling to cobble together monies from various sources to cover me until October, when some big grants are expected to come in. “It would not make sense to stop this work now when we are getting traction and funder interest.” And she said we could talk in person yesterday “if you like.”

Well, yes; yes, I would. I mean—WTF?

In person, she started off by saying, “Your issue is a non-issue.” Well, no, it’s not; not to me. But the gist of it is that she recognizes that what I bring to the table does not otherwise exist in her organization, and it’s a necessary skillset. Great. (She also was pissed off at HR for jumping the gun in their size 11 Doc Martens. “They’re slow on everything except what they should be slow at.”)

But I do not like the notion of continually scrambling around to find funds to pay my salary, and my travel expenses and my bloody benefits. It means I’m working under a sword of Damocles, and that does not bring out my best work. So I have to up my job search game. Again.

(More and more I feel like Sergeant Murtaugh: I am too old for this shit.)

I also don’t like that she doesn’t have enough money on hand from existing grants to get me through to October, and needs to ask the CEO, through his boy-wonder chief-of-staff, for half the dosh. The only thing good about this is that I don’t have to be present at that particular discussion.

Oh—and when I replied to the benefits chick yesterday to advise her to deal with my manager, I got an automated out-of-office reply.

Because of course.

Innovate this!

As you know, I’m fascinated by how people present themselves on social media, particularly on Twitter. Those who are legends in their own misspelt minds, click follow only so they can spam you with system-generated DMs, or just go straight for the money shot in their profile.

And then there are those who—having found tweets they think are clever, or profound (in a fortune-cookie kind of way), or pithy—use some third-party app to keep flinging them out to the Twitterverse.

I follow a woman (she followed me first; at some time I must have looked at her profile and decided she did not appear to be a pornographer, RWNJ or someone eager to sell me thousands of Twitter followers, so I followed her back) who’s a prime example of this. Here’s a sample of the type of thing she tweets:

Your basic corporate platitudes. Well, earlier this week, I was scrolling through my feed and stopped at this:

My first thought was, “Well, that’s a complete crock of moose milk. Yeah, we want people to acknowledge our ideas. But one splendid form of recognition is monetary, particularly when our ideas bring in vast sums of money to the corporation. Giving us an attaboy when we’ve favorably affected the bottom line is a sure-fire way to find your innovators jumping ship, you cheap-ass skinflints.”

My second thought was, “Hey—I’ve seen this before, because it sparked the same response then.”

I don’t think I necessarily twigged that it was this woman who’d done it, but I went to her page and started scrolling. Sure enough, in addition to Tuesday, she’d spewed this recipe for a decline in morale and innovation on:

2 February

30 January

26 January

25 January*

23 January

19 January

16 January

12 January

9 January

5 January*

1 January

*On these occasions the message was slightly varied:

As though “a study”—an anonymous study—is any kind of validation. Also—she obviously doesn’t read her little platitudes before she clicks the Tweet button. (Or, perhaps she’s just not very sure about the construction of simple English sentences.)

Interspersed with that little gem were others similar to it—also repeated ad nauseam.

Well, at this point, I looked at her actual profile, and all became clear:

“Head of Global Executive Talent” for Cisco is the antithesis of an innovative mindset. Also, 5846 tweets in nine years. I’m betting that there are actually fewer than 200 unique tweets. She’s just recycled them 300 times each.

Thank God for the mute button.

Setting expectations

As I’ve mentioned, my gig until the end of June is to produce a business plan for a new-ish service for my company. Toward that end, I’ve put together a project plan, breaking down all the goals and deliverables in a multi-page schedule. It’s a straightforward plan—a matrix of deliverables, due dates, components, information sources, dependencies, comments, approving authority and completion dates. I’ve also got a fistful of assumptions, resources and constraints, because I want to be clear that I’m not pulling any of this stuff out of the ether, and that Stuff Happens. I’m just laying out what some of that Stuff might be.

It's called managing expectations.

It’s not the most sophisticated thing—it’s in Word, not even Excel, much less Project. But it’s easier for me to work with it in this application, and since I’m the sole actor in this project, I don’t see why I should have to wrestle with Excel, or try to get IT to buy Project (and then try to learn how to use it). After all—I’ve only got until June to deliver a business plan.

One of the milestones was to have said project plan reviewed and approved by today, so I sent out a draft version (with DRAFT watermarked on each of the 12 pages) on Friday. My former manager had already given me his input, so the only thing I needed was feedback from my new manager, which she returned over the weekend.

With two exceptions, all her comments were regarding the content of milestones/deliverables—i.e., she was not responding to the elements of the project plan, but to what I speculated will be elements of the business plan. (The business plan is the end result of the activities outlined in the project plan, which is how I propose to produce that end result.)

I puzzled over those comments for a while on Monday. Then I wandered into my former manager’s office and asked, “Is the concept of a project plan new to this organization?” He replied, “Yes. Yours is the first one anyone here has ever seen.”

Huh.

Well, I don’t know whether to be amused or dismayed by this. On the one hand, no one’s going to be peering over my shoulder and tsk-tsking me about my lack of project management finesse. On the other…oh, dear.

Well, nevermind. I got the plan approved on Monday, and I’m working toward my next milestone. Plus, you know, networking for my next gig.

I'm just a party girl. Or the Mother of Dragons

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing last week was quite the experience for me. Aside from the sessions (most very interesting, some meh and a couple of clams), I entered a whole new world. Viz:

I Ubered and I Lyfted for the first time. (Thank you, Darline, my first Lyft driver, for showing me how to do it!) By the end of the conference I was indistinguishable from the 17,999 other Hoppers standing at the front door of restaurants, hotels and other venues, staring at my mobile device and waiting for my ride.

(And really amusing upon arriving at Dulles to find people’s grannies using Uber and Lyft. Although my Uber fare home wasn’t really any cheaper than my taxi ride out had been.)

It was interesting that both apps give you your driver’s name, vehicle and license plate; Lyft was better because it shows a photo of the actual car. I have no notion of what different cars look like, and in the dark this becomes even more problematic, so this was helpful. Also, the license number is useless in Florida, which doesn’t require a front plate.

The hospitality events were first-rate. As I’ve mentioned, the companies in attendance were focused on recruiting tech talent with the XX configuration, and they did not scrimp on the budgets for these events. I only went to about ten or twelve in the three-and-a-half days I was there, although if I’d wanted to, I probably could have done a lot more double-booking and party-hopping than I did. Let me just give you a sampling from two evenings.

I started the first one by hitting the Cisco Disco at the pool area of my hotel. Bar, canapés and an ice cream bar. The latter was certainly welcome in the heat and humidity of Orlando, but it was hard to eat with the Medusa-like head gear they handed out as you entered.

From there I went through the convention center to the hotel at the other end and spent about 40 minutes at the Facebook pub trivia quiz (beer, wine, sodas and nibbles) before wandering into the #TwitterNightOut. I’d RSVP’d, but thought I wouldn’t make it because it was at another hotel. However, they moved it from wherever they were going to hold it to one of the ballrooms across from Facebook (kind of ironic, actually; like when Microsoft Stores get set up across from Apple Stores at malls), so I dropped in. This was full-blown rave mode, with multiple bars, canapés and some glow-in-the-dark swag.

After that, I drifted upstairs to the function rooms, where the Federal Reserve Bank was serving…something. I picked up a large cookie and hobbled back to my hotel room to make chamomile tea and eat the cookie.

Of the parties I went to, only a minority limited themselves to a couple of types of wine, fleshed out by sodas. I’m talking full bars taken over at restaurants and well-stocked, professionally-tended bars at hotel event rooms. The more exotic were at the iOS dinner, held at a Cuba Libre, and the HBO “Fire and Ice” Game of Thrones jobber at the Minus 5º Bar nearby. This was on the second night. I had my first mojito at the former, and my second, before I had to leave.

The HBO thing was pretty amazing (as they intended). First off, you had to not just RSVP, but say why they should let you in. I don’t recall what I said, exactly, but I did mention that if I were to go, I could throw some serious shade on my GoT fan friends. Apparently that was enough. (I don’t know why I was let into the iOS event, either, since they also wanted you to say why and I flat out told them I’m not an iOS developer.) Turns out that the Minus 5º Bar is an ice bar—as in, you walk through an airlock portal to get into a room carved out of ice.

They had it tricked out in what I took to be GoT schtick (I’ve not seen it, so I’m clueless), and they were offering two GoT-themed cocktails. (This was billed as “Cocktails and Conversation”.) I can’t recall what the first drink was (since it was post-mojito iOS), except that it had gin in it, and I don’t drink gin. Therefore, I chose the Mother of Dragons, which had some kind of non-gin booze (probably either rum or vodka), blood orange juice, lime juice and a splash of jalapeño, served in a glass carved out of ice.

Lemme just say that that Mother of Dragons was one tasty beverage, and it was quite interesting drinking it out of ice. (BTW: they give you big old parkas to put on, and there’s a pile of gloves in the airlock, so you don’t freeze.)

They held the presentation in the non-ice section of this establishment—multiple screens showing scenes from GoT with the visual effects stripped out and then layered in. (They were recruiting for engineers to help with this magic.) After a while I left, because frankly, it was hard on my joints to be standing still for that length of time after a full day of walking from one end of the Orange County Convention Center to another. So I missed the raffle for the GoT-related stuff, although they handed out $25 gift cards to HBOnow when you picked up your name tag.

And I definitely get to throw shade on my GoT fan friends.

From there I went to the Microsoft-sponsored Codess event (my fourth of the evening; I started out at the PowerToFly cocktails and convos, without imbibing), which was held at a place called the Sugar Factory. This turned out to be a bar attached to a candy shop. (You know—it might have been a restaurant, but they’d cleared everything out of it except a few high tables, the sort you find in a cocktail bar.) I got there around 2100, which was about halfway through the cocktails event.

Turned out to be more standing, but I had a fascinating conversation with three women—one from SAP (in Germany), one from Oracle and one from I don’t remember. The two latter were Orlando residents, and they were curious about our impression of their hometown. Sadly, we both used words like “artificial”, “plastic” and “Vegas”. They assured us that Orlando is actually a very nice place, and it was a pity that the only parts of it we were seeing were the touristy ones.

Which was of course true.

The Codess goodie bag consisted of being handed two little containers and being set loose in the candy shop. I really didn’t fancy more sugar at that point, but I did get some chocolate covered almonds and coffee beans, and a few gummy critters, which look disgusting, but I have a friend who will probably appreciate the gummy gators.

A couple more hospitality highlights:

The breakfast put on Thursday by Square featured their CFO, Sarah Friar, who spoke eloquently about how her company’s tech was making a difference to small businesses. (I’ve certainly seen that: from taco trucks to hair salons to electricians, that little credit card reader has opened up my wallet to businesses that would have lost me if I’d had to carry cash.) They’re also moving into small business lending, which is an interesting expansion.

The goodie bag at each of our places contained three things Friar cares about: a Square reader, tea and honey. I loved the personalization of that swag.

God bless Slack for putting on the Ladies who Launch lunch that had actual food—both pork and chicken, salad, veggies. This was enough to see me through the entire afternoon and past the last night bash (where food was served, but the sliders, sushi and whatnot just didn’t look appetizing).

The panel discussion on issues around diversity and inclusion was excellent, as well.

(Another aside: the "tips for surviving GHC" all said to bring snacks. Between the mid-morning and mid-afternoon spreads of pastries, fruit, eggs and yoghurt on the career fair floor, and the various sponsored meals, I never needed to touch any of the protein or granola bars in my pack.)

And I was rather amused to see this little fellow as I was walking around the venue for the Stripe Coffee and Crepes breakfast. I don’t think he was part of the official décor, and I thought he might be fake, but he was as real as I was at that point.

I’ll write more about GHC later. Because swag.

Ram raid

Let’s take a break from the sad events at the DC office building, where workers were shocked and saddened to discover Steve, their K5 security robot, had drowned his sorrows (and himself) in the building water feature.

Let’s instead go to Colorado, where another office building was the scene of activities that were first assumed to be criminal—vandalism, if not theft. But then security camera footage revealed that the smashed-in glass door was the work of what NPR refers to as a “rogue goat”.

Well, really—I don’t know how “rogue” a goat is for ramming…well, pretty much anything, tbh. I mean, that’s entirely within male goat behavior patterns.

It’s interesting that Billy (if the robot is Steve, surely this goat can be Billy, no?) seemed surprised at the first shattering, but then went back to finish off the second door. And yet…having smashed both of them, he just kind of drifted away.

Can this behavior be mere coincidence in a state that’s legalized marijuana? Hmm.

However, this occurred to me: is there something unique to male goats’ head-structure (and possibly rams as well) that enables them to engage in this sort of activity all the time without them suffering TBI? (Although, maybe their brains are liquefied jelly, and no one notices; I suppose that’s possible.)

But if there is something that protects their crania, can some lessons be applied to the prevention and treatment of TBI in humans? Man—I’d sure like to see our soldiers protected from this kind of thing out in the field, and it would be great if both soldiers and civilians could be given post-trauma medical treatment that reduced brain swelling and other aftereffects.

I for one ain't too proud to learn from goats, rogue or no.

Tripping out

So this happened: out of the blue, completely unsolicited spam from…Sears.

Seriously, I didn’t know Sears was even a thing any more, and I will never make "a trip to sears.com".

Moreover, they did not include a way to “unsubscribe” (in quotes, because I never gave them permission—AKA subscribed—in the first place), which is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Dudes: this is not a way to expand your market share.

Gratitude Monday: Email is my friend

Have I mentioned before that I’m pretty sure my manager has ADD? It’s a huge challenge trying to keep him on track in any particular conversation, because he’s like a pug chasing a housefly most of the time. I frequently find myself having to wait until he’s exhausted his diversion and then waving him back to the topic at hand.

(The one single comment I allowed myself on the 360-degree review I was compelled to give him was, “I’m never quite sure when he’s heard what I’m telling him.”)

This has, on more than one occasion, led to near disaster, as when I’d got down to words of one syllable explaining why, given everything that was going on organization-wide, we had to run a planned course every week for six weeks, he nodded agreement…and then sent a memo to senior management announcing that classes would meet every other week.

(Actually, it’s worse: I’d drafted the email and sent it to him, stipulating the weekly schedule, and he changed it to what he’d lodged in his mind.)

Last Monday, he sent round a meeting request for a “[department Name] Team Holiday Celebration”, for the early evening of Wednesday the 14^th. It occurred to me that, had he only looked at my Outlook schedule, he could have seen that this particular block of time was not free, but he doesn’t typically bother with such niceties.

(As an aside: he was in the habit of not actually sending meeting request acceptances until one time when I queried whether he was, in fact, attending some meeting. He said he’d accepted; I said I hadn’t seen the response, and he replied, “I don’t send a response unless I’m declining.” I looked at him for some time before pointing out the blazingly obvious, “So, it’s up to me to root around and see if you’re coming or not? Oooookay.” Only since then has he expended the great energy suck of clicking, “Send response now.”)

I declined the “celebration” invitation and told him that I would be unable to attend that time on that day because I’m having hand surgery that afternoon and don’t know whether I’ll be fit for anything. His reply?

“We can help you numb the pain?”

No, I am not making that up.

Tuesday morning, he appeared at my office doorway in floppy puppy mode, full of enthusiasm about the opening session of that weekly course I mentioned above. When I did not display all the excitement he reckoned the occasion warranted, he eventually asked if something was wrong. I believe I exercised admirable restraint when I said, “You know, a better response to me telling you why I couldn’t join the party would have been something like, ‘Oh, right—I’ll reschedule, then.’”

He bounced right back—yes, yes indeed; I was 1059% (his figure) right. He’d been distracted by board issues, but, yes, he dropped the ball. He did not actually use the words “my” and “bad”.

However, the days of the week passed, and there was no rescheduling of the “team celebration”. Like I said—you just never know when he’s actually heard you, or he’s too busy googling dogs that are half poodle and half Saint Bernard. (Yes, that happened. In the course of one conversation, I referred to something as “a dog”, which prompted his announcement that over the weekend he and his family had seen a dog that of that half-and-half configuration. I couldn’t get him back to our topic until he’d found photos to show me.)

Fast-forward to Friday, when we were meant to have met for our weekly catch-up. (He ordinarily spends about 70%-75% of his time on the activities of the other, non-[Name] staff, which is fair enough, as there are seven of them and only one of me. I get 30 minutes, aside from whatever specific project meetings he needs to be a part of.) As it turned out, I was massively late getting back to the office from an external appointment, so we did not get the chance to meet before the company holiday lunch and his kid’s swim meet.

I got back to my office after the lunch to find an email from him suggesting we reschedule the catch-up for Monday. I replied with a single word, “Sure.” And this, I swear I am not making up, was his response:

“10a Monday? Also, buy you lunch the week of the 19^th to make up for messing up the holiday outing?”

Ah. Well.

I actually said a very, very bad word when I read that, directly into the sound-amplifying atrium outside my office, but fortunately no one else was back from the lunch, so I don’t believe anyone heard me. Because, look—the guy has degrees from Amherst and Harvard, and I do not have enough sock puppets to explain what I’d have thought shouldn’t have need dramatizing to begin with. I already pointed out what the issue was, and he professed to understand. But obviously not well enough, or obviously I did not give him the necessary quiz afterward to check that he really did understand the whole “team” issue.

(Or, well—perhaps I’m the one who doesn’t understand the definition of “team”? Could be, I suppose. Perhaps I should ask Mr. Harvard about that.)

I have to say that a lunch à deux with him under these circumstances would not be a pleasant experience for me. That being the case, and given the fact that I do not have what is known as a poker face, it’s not really anything I want to have to live through. Because: Career Limiting Move.

So I waited some time before I clicked reply and wrote, “With respect, that would not be equivalent to a ‘team celebration’, so no, thanks.” And I hit send.

Now, you might well be wondering what this story has to do with Gratitude Monday. So here’s the hook: I am truly grateful that the latest exchange in this comedy of errors did take place via email. Because I would not have been able to keep the disgust, disbelief and disappointment off my face if he’d popped by my office in floppy puppy mode and asked that.

(Also, tbh, I'm grateful that no one heard me bark that very, very bad word.)

Some days, you just put what you can in the wins column.

Corporate matters

My job is to guide ideas for new revenue streams through a vetting process not unlike that of a product manager. I find it interesting (and not a little frustrating) that my colleagues are not enthused by the notion of new business innovation.

Well, actually—they don’t particularly welcome the notion of anything new.

I do get it—I don’t think there’s any organization that volunteers to change much of anything. The usual motivation to do so is some kind of gun to the head. You don’t change unless you have essentially no alternative. Change means uncertainty, and it’s not for nothing that there’s that saying “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.”

Well, anyhow, acknowledging that I myself am not packing enough firepower to entice my colleagues to think in terms of either new products or new markets, I’m researching how other organizations implement this sort of new business innovation.

Which of course means that I’m researching innovation consultants.

I’m just the teensiest bit jaded about this prospect. Yes—it’s sometimes worth money to have outside subject matter experts (what one of my colleagues self-importantly calls "SMEs", pronouncing them "SMEES") explain to folks in words of one syllable what you’ve been telling them for months to no avail. On the other hand: “thought leader”.

Here’s a possible example:

If you’ve just nouned an adjective to describe your value proposition, is that a sign of being terrifically innovative, or just really ignorant?

(In addition to the consultants I’ve also researched the usage of “corporate” as a noun. By digging past the first SERP page, I have found that it has very limited use in the financial world, and in the production of films for internal business use. In both those cases “corporate” is still implying an unarticulated noun—“corporate [bond]”, “corporate [film]”—and those usages are not applicable in this instance.)

So I’m calling bullshit, and this crowd moves to the bottom of my contact list.

Woman wonders

Mixed feelings about Women’s Equality Day, which is today. As a commemoration of the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution on this date in 1920, well, hurrah.

(Hello? The Nineteenth granted women the right to vote across the nation. Only 131 years after the implementation of the Constitution itself, and 50 years after certification of the Sixteenth Amendment declaring “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”)

Basically, the Nineteenth Amendment certified that, yes, surprise, surprise: women are full citizens and therefore cannot have their right to vote denied or abridged by the United States or any state. The campaign for female suffrage had its beginnings at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and the push for a Constitutional amendment to sort it out once and for all began in 1878, so as you can imagine, there was considerable discussion of the matter. And you might have thought that with its implementation, we’d be ready to accept that equality in citizenship should imply equality of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and move on.

But you’d be wrong.

Ergo the creation of Women’s Equality Day in 1971 by Bella Abzug. And my dismay about it. Because even 45 years after that attempt to keep the issues of equality before our eyes, we still seem to be unclear about the fact that this includes equal opportunity in the workplace, in housing, in access to healthcare and education, and…like all that.

Some very depressing global statistics on these issues here. And I’ll just close my eyes and throw a dart at the myriad posts I’ve written about some of the ludicrous events in the worlds of business and politics. Because this sort of resistance to making room at the table is more ubiquitous than Starbucks, and even more pernicious. It’s as though we were demanding at gunpoint some revolutionary upturning of all that’s held sacred.

Oh, wait…

I get it: if you have a scarcity mindset, you think that the pie that comprises all worldly (and possibly unworldly) things is finite. Money, status, power, space on the bus, love—whatever portion someone else has of any of those things means there’s less for you. And every alteration to the status quo becomes a threat to your existence, to your happiness. That scarcity mindset is what’s been driving marketing and political campaigns for…well, a long time.

But what if you consider a different proposition: by allowing women, non-white folks, people with disabilities or indeterminate gender to join the enterprise on an equal basis, and contribute to their full capabilities—what if that expands the pie, and creates more for everyone? What would that world look like?

Also consider how it would reduce the stress that all that anger, fear and bile puts onto your system.

In a conversation I had with a colleague about the variety of attacks made on female political candidates (Clinton, Fiorini, Palin, Pelosi—all the way back to Geraldine Ferraro, and probably to Margaret Chase Smith), I pointed out that it didn’t matter which side of the political spectrum either the candidates or the attackers were on. Right, left, progressive, conservative—the slime thrown is almost universally tied to one's chromosome configuration. She’s had cosmetic “work” done! Her glasses! Her pantsuits! Her hormones! The same holds true for women having the nerve to take leadership roles in business or the military or other fields.

And said no one ever about a male candidate, commander or CEO. Ever.

I told my colleague I really hope that by the time his daughters (one in high school, one in elementary school) hit the workplace some of this will have diminished. I could see him processing the idea and rejecting it based on what we experience today. That saddened me.

So here’s my fond wish: that we can hold out the ideal of true women’s equality, and that we won’t just think of it one day a year, but that it’ll be so commonplace that we can look back and say, “Hey—so glad we don’t have to deal with this anymore, and can focus all our considerable capabilities on solving sustainable energy and delivering safe drinking water to all homes globally.”

Ah—a girl can dream.