Bird's Eye View

Talking About Breast Cancer

I spent some time today talking with a friend who is recovering from a double mastectomy.  Her story is interesting to me on several levels.  A little background:

First, she is a recognized business leader, a star in her industry, with a loyal employee base.  Her leadership was unquestioned and her team depended on her for critical strategy thinking, on making the big decisions.

Second, she is a trim, physically fit, healthy eating woman who has always been so.  True, her mother had breast cancer, but she figured her odds were pretty good that she might be spared.  When she learned, after a routine mammogram, that she had a lump in one breast, she was totally shocked.  Then she decided to do some homework before deciding on which of several treatments she would choose.

To her surprise, on both her mother's side and her father's side of her family tree, there were numerous cases of cancer.  Breast cancer.  In fact, her aunt had two different kinds of cancer in one of her breasts.  How could this be, my friend asked?  Why did I not know this?  Turns out no one talked about it, it just wasn't discussed.  For generations of women in her family, it was a disease without a name.  And some of them died of it.

So my friend decided the silence would stop with her.  She talked not only with her family, she shared her situation with friends, even acquaintances.  And she gathered her corporate team around her and shared it with them.  She said she could not hold back her tears when she told them.  Nor did they.  She told them that because she had elected to have significant surgery done, she would need them to step up to more serious leadership duties while she was away. 

 

She says the level of decision making has increased, the ability to strategically work through issues--what had been assumed was her domain--has become more sophisticated.  She is impressed with her company's employees even more, now that she is not with them on a day to day basis.

And they all talk about it. This goes beyond Brandversation, the kind of conversation leaders initiate to turn employees and customers into evangelists for their brand.  This is communication that is simultaneously basic and lofty.  It has brought out the best in my friend's employees.  And the best in her as well.

She says she is less likely now to sweat the small stuff, that piddling stuff that gets in the way of an organization's ability to really sing in unison.

Her breast cancer talk has sparked a new kind of harmony at her company.  Yes, there are major challenges as there always are.  But this time everyone seems to have the same page in the song book.  Bravo!

  

 

 

Talking On The Bus

I've posed comments here before of how much I love the bus ride to Washington, DC from Manhattan.  Well, more accurately, to Arlington, Virginia.  I come down at least once a month to spend weekends with my husband, while he has been working at the Pentagon (and, yes, lots to talk about there...a million stories.  At least).

I did the air shuttle thing many times at first, thinking it was faster, though expensive.  Yes it was expensive but no, it wasn't faster.  In fact after twice being stranded at Washington National airport for hours because of cancelled or delayed flights, I moved to Amtrak trains.  But that wasn't a big improvement.  The train goes to Washington, not Arlington, and it takes nearly an hour for me to get from the DC train station to my husband's apartment in Arlington.  And then--twice--I managed to get myself on trains that got delayed, seriously due to mechanical problems in one case, weather in the other

And then a friend told me about the Vamoose bus, which goes straight from Penn Station in New York to Arlington, just minutes away from my destination there.  But the bus, I said, voice loaded with derision?  You are suggesting I take the BUS?  Well, I tried it.  And loved it.  And I'm hooked. It's a bit about the comfortable seats, and the free wifi and the smoothness of the ride, and the dependability of the service.  And it's also about the occasional conversations with seat mates that turn out to be worth the ride by themselves.

 

I've met some marvelous people, among whom is the Yale professor who teaches gay rights.  Amazing guy.  And Monique Leahy, the attorney who runs a firm of lawyers who do outsourced legal work.  Monique and I became friends after I asked to borrow her cell phone, since I had forgotten mine.  And we began a conversation that is still ongoing.  She, too, has a husband who lives in the DC area while she lives and works in New York.  She, too, has amazing children...and she, too is a lawyer like me.

Today it's not conversation with my seatmate (who is asleep).  It's the conversation between two people who have talked since they got on the bus.  That can often be an unwelcome distraction but this time it is simply fascinating.  One has been married three times, and regrets it.  One has lived in Florence, Italy, and has great stories about that adventure.  They are both good listeners, and are enjoying the exchange, building on each other's comments in a marvelous way.  It's live entertainment.

Hurrah for the Vamoose bus.  I wonder how many people have met on this bus and fallen in love.  Who knows?

 

 

The Lady From Dubuque Says Let's Talk About Death

I come from a straight-talking Midwestern family, where people didn't substitute what my father considered "phony" words for real words.  He took great delight in this, even seemed to get some sense of superiority out of using the word "toilet,"  for example, when others would say "bathroom." 

And you didn't want to get him started about the language and rituals surrounding death.  He thought it was wrong to refer to people "passing away."  In our house, people didn't "pass," they died.  As for the rituals, he spoke with appreciation for the Capuchin monks who, when one of their order died, placed the deceased on a board, slid it into the grave, and then pulled the board out to use when the next monk died.

 

He trained us to write notes of condolence and insisted that we say "die" and "death" in the note rather than skirt around the issue.  It wasn't easy.  It still isn't. 

So I was fascinated by Edward Albee's play "The Lady From Dubuque" which I was lucky enough to see last night at the Signature Theatre in New York.  The cast is superb and Jane Alexander, who plays the lady from Dubuque, is remarkable.  It is never clear just who the lady from Dubuque is.  Is she Jo's mother, who has finally shown up as Jo is dying?  Or is she death itself, come to claim Jo for eternity, there to ease her departure from life to whatever--if anything--will happen next.  There is discussion of Jo's being as light as air, almost not there, or her nearly as light as dust. 

But no one faces the "D" word head-on.  Except Jo, who says several times "I'm dying."  She wants to talk about it, but her husband and their assortment of hangers-on friends-- over for cocktails even as Jo is suffering terribly from the pain of her illness--want none of it.  They are hoping it will all go away. Her husband wants a miracle; the others are too wrapped up in their own pettiness to pay much attention.  In some ways they are more dead to their world and each other than Jo is.  She speaks exactly what she thinks, and for the most part she thinks they are unworthy, petty, lousy friends and says so.

 

I found it ironic that the play's title is a reflection of my geographical core, the Midwest of Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and all.  The Lady from Dubuque is a character that is focused, it appears, on the business of dying, but she too does not mention the word.

Just what would the conversation have been like in Albee's play, if people were honest with one another?  The character that appears most able to face who she is, besides Jo, is the girlfriend Carol who may or may not marry the crude thrice-divorced Fred, who treats her badly.  At one point she identifies herself as pretty much a loser, who "doesn't have anything else to do this week" so she may as well marry Fred, even though she has no illusions about his character.

The character who suffers most, however, is Sam, Jo's husband.  He is unable to express to her how frightened he is to be left alone.  Especially because he has not reached that point of maturity where he knows who he is and is able to embrace himself.  At the start of the play, in a game of Twenty Questions he asks "Who am I?"  And he is asking the same question at the end.  As the play ends, we see only his devastated face as he looks beyond us, perhaps seeing himself as the vulnerable, lonely man he is, especially now that his wife has, yes, died.

At one point, the Lady from Dubuque says that when all is stripped away, nothing else matters except for who you are.  The ability to answer with honesty the question "Who am I?" is central to a life well lived.

If she had just been able to say the word "death" my Dad would have loved this play.

 

 

 

 

The Conversation About Trayvon Martin

Everyone in America, I mean absolutely everyone, has something to say about this case.  At least I hope that everyone has something to say about this case.

Something very wrong happened here.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  We should all be upset about a situation in which an unarmed teenager--wearing a hooded sweatshirt-- is slain by someone with a gun who was advised not to pursue this kid.  President Obama's comment that "If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin" is poignant, true, and frightening.

Laws in states like Florida that underscore the importance of someone defending himself with a gun, even on an open street, from those that most of us know we should run from as fast as possible, are destined to cause trouble.  Big trouble. They call these laws the "Stand Your Ground" laws.  

 

What is it about people and their guns?  And if you kill someone who can no longer tell us what really happened, then hide behind this law of "Stand Your Ground," what does that say about the culture in which we live? 

I'm impressed that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has weighed in.  He points out, rightly, that the shooter in this case, this Zimmerman fellow, had some time ago been arrested for attacking a police officer and was the subject of a court order to prevent domestic violence.  Why would this guy be allowed to carry a gun in public at all?  This is nuts!

My primary interest is  in the conversation this should be initiating throughout our Nation.  Not just among blacks and our elected officials, I mean among all of us.  In our schools, in our churches and temples, in our homes.  We need to talk about gun control and we need to discuss the racial profiling that people of color are subject to wherever they turn.

We need to talk about this, folks.  Now. 

And by the way, I'm getting out my hooded sweatshirt and plan to wear it tomorrow. 

 

 

 

Liberals, Conservatives, and Jonathan Haidt

I feel fortunate to be going to a dinner this evening where I'll meet Jonathan Haidt.  Well, truth be told, we've met before, but it was at TED and I don't expect him to recall those brief conversations. 

I was fascinated by Haidt's take on the real difference between conservatives and liberals when he first discussed it at TED in 2008 (here's his 2008 TED talk so you can see for yourself).  That initial interest has been heightened by the fact that his latest book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is getting great uptake, starting with its jumping to #6 on the NY Times bestseller list in its very first week.  That is huge.

 

 

Moreover, in yesterday's New York Times, a review by William Saletan included Saletan's comment that Haidt's book is "a landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself."  Yes, the kind of statement that authors would kill for and yes, it will sell lots of books.

Haidt is a professor at the University of Virginia and I recall his 2008 TED talk vividly and how I thought then he would one great professor from whom to take a provocative class like those he teaches about what makes people happy, why we think the way we do, that kind of stuff.

His TED talk this year was not as successful, at least not for me.  I found it much more "produced," much more "made for the TED video audience" rather than the one sitting in front of him.  The kind of gratuitous jokes he threw off in his 2008 talk didn't show up in this one.  Yet, it was provocative, and talked of the kind of ecstatic experience people have (rarely for some, never for most), whether prompted by drug use, prayer, sex, even combat (yes, it is true that many war veterans agree their most out of body experience took place during battle).  His 2012 TED talk is here, if you would like to view that.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about tonight and what I can possibly add to his conversation,  I'll mostly be listening, and actively so.  Anything I can learn about how we can get liberals and conservatives in this great nation of ours to talk with each other civilly, will be helpful. 

Stay tuned.

 

 

Alexander McQueen And The Hummingbird Rug

I'm still thinking about it.  Can't get it out of my head. 

Funny, too, because as a New Yorker, I get to see some pretty amazing works of art--as all New Yorkers do--not only in the City's many world-class museums, but in world-class stores, and in the many cultural and social hangouts where beautiful people congregate and wear beautiful clothes and jewelry, some of it even rising to works of art, as a matter of course.  You can get jaded in this city, thinking sometimes that it has to be pretty spectacular to touch your soul since you've--yawn--seen so much.

But I was knocked out a couple of weekends ago when my husband and I were strolling in downtown Manhattan and stopped at the window of The Rug Company.  We were drawn in to the store to get a better look at the amazing run hanging in the window.  It was one of the six designs Alexander McQueen did for The Rug Company before he died.  And yes, they are all knockouts, but this one took my breath away. 

 

Forget about even standing or walking on this beauty.  If it were mine, I would hang it on the wall and wouldn't care about any other furnishings in the room.  It is stunning, timeless, and to my mind it rivals the tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection at The Cloisters uptown.

It pictures hummingbirds taking off in flight.  Hand-knotted, each of the rugs takes years to make apparently.  The birds shine like jewels, set against a black background to offset the iridescent colors in the bird feathers, enhanced by the lustre of silken yarn.  The rugs are cashmere-backed. 

We had an amazing conversation with the saleswoman, making it clear this rug was out of our price range but that we appreciated the chance to look at it.  She graciously told us all the details and showed us many more, but we kept coming back to look and enjoy this work of art.

I've thought of the rug many times since that stroll a couple of weeks ago.  Alexander McQueen was a genius and his ability to create beauty that elicits gasps of awe and pleasure while stirring the soul is unparalleled. 

 

I wish someone I know could afford to buy this rug, so I could feast on it often. I can't imagine anyone seeing it without engaging in conversation about it.

 

Trayvon Martin And Fox News: Just Who Frames Our National Conversation?

By now it has lots of folks talking: the recent tragedy in Florida that ended with a 17 year old unarmed teenager dead and his assailant, a gun-toting "neighborhood watch" citizen (not a police officer) remaining free.  No arrest.

The story has gained momentum as it rightly should.  There are lots of angles to it, and people are mad, although not as outraged as they should be.  I'm especially incensed about it having heard the amazing TED talk by Bryan Stevenson who talked of the injustice in America towards young African American teens caught in the justice system.

 

But here's the thing.  It was fascinated over the last couple of years when the Chinese artist Wei-Wei was arrested and served time in prison for his remarks and activities hostile to the Chinese government.  Westerners were outraged and the story was kept alive in media of all stripes.  But when I was in China on business several times during that period, people there were virtually unaware of the Wei-Wei issue.  The story was censored by the Chinese government and the media was thus silent on the subject.  There could not be a conversation about it in China because no one was informed. The few people who knew about it had learned of it on their travel outside China.

I remember thinking at the time of how fortunate I am to live in a country where freedom of the press is so highly valued.  Our press gets the truth out, no matter what, right?

 

Well, maybe not so much sometimes.There's a twist to the Trayvon Martin story, coming to light in a disturbing way: Fox News has chosen not to cover the story.  Oh, they've had a smattering of comments about it, but have focused on a story angle that is shameful.  Fox News has linked the death of the teenager to what it apparently views as a frightful increase in activity from gun-control activists.  They see the Killing of this kid as a threat to the NRA and those who oppose gun control. So they have all but sat on what should be the heart of this story, the need for a national conversation on just how we often treat young black men shamefully in this country and what can be done about it.  I cannot imagine, if the roles of people in this story were reversed, that there would not have been an arrest and non-stop media coverage.  And it would have been swift.

I cannot imagine the anguish I would feel to know that my teenage son or daughter were killed in this fashion.  And to know that Fox News chose to use my kid's death as the basis for arguing in favor of gun ownership. 

We need to talk, Nation.

 

Where Is The National Conversation About War?

I often tune in to BeastTV, the Daily Beasts' quick and dirty coverage of what's up in the news.  Usually led by John Avlon of Newsweek, the group includes Alison Yarrow and, on occasion Michael Daly. 

 

 

Today Daly talked about Sergeant Bales, the US Army sergeant accused of massacring sixteen Afghan men, women and children in cold blood.  It's a tough story.  Michael laments the fact that for ten years "we have not had a conversation in this country about the wars we have been fighting" and that we have acted as if there is no war going on, leaving it to the 1% of our population who have directly involved, some of them on tours of duty that extend and get repeated over and over and over.

Daly says "Yes, it appears that he is guilty...and so are we.  All of us." 

He's appalled that we have presidential candidates who do not even mention this war.  Ignore it completely.  He noted that when asked yesterday his opinion about the war in Afghanistan, Mitt Romney replied that "he needed more facts."  How can someone who is running for office that includes the role of Commander in Chief of our armed forces not have an opinion on the war?  That's just wrong.

Daly is right.  Where is that conversation?

 

 

 

Jim Collins Says Companies Can Be Great By Choice

So far so good.  I've been a Jim Collins fan ever since his first book Good to Great in which he set forth the reasons a group of companies that out performed their peers had done so well.

He followed that book with one called How the Mighty Fall, explaining why the success of the companies in the Good to Great list was not sustained.

In Great by Choice, Jim gives us yet another list of companies that have outperformed--to an impressive extent--their peers, based on stats he and his co-author, Morten T. Hansen, have analyzed over the last fifteen years of the companies' performance.

As I said, I'm a Jim Collins fan.  I like the fact that he points out the rules that every company, big or small, needs to follow, and he does it with memorable sound bite titles like "productive paranoia," "empirical creativity," and "fanatic discipline."   But as one on my Inner Circle attendees recently said, "Jim's an academic and looks at the business world in a rear-view mirror.  He talks about what it took to get to a particular level of success.  Fair enough, and impressive.  But he doesn't talk about what you need to do to get from this current level success into the future.  And I know for sure that whatever got these companies to this level of success, it doesn't guarantee that doing the same thing will continue that success.  In fact, I'm sure it won't."

When I noted that the data analyzed in the Great by Choice book was collected from the past fifteen years of corporate history, several of the Inner Circle executives commented on how different a world it is now than it was fifteen years ago.  And how dramatically the skill sets needed by today's business leaders differs from those necessary fifteen years ago.

They gave me reams of info as to what is different about the business world of today than fifteen years ago.  We all could rattle off many of them: The pervasiveness of technology; the speed of change; mass media; social networking; globalization; big data in the hands of virtually everyone; near-shoring, off-sourcing; urbanization; rise of the global middle class; nano-technology...the list goes on.

One of my Inner Circle attendees answered the question by saying: "Think of the things we take for granted today,that will likely be eclipsed by something else."  Here is the list she gave me:

television

newspapers

tablets

PC's

doctor visits

nursing homes

retail vs. on-line shopping

movie theaters

access to music

cash checks

credit and debit cards

water

fossil-based fuels

What do you think?  Seems to me no matter how successful a company is today, if their success is even partially dependent on one of the things on this list, they could be eclipsed unless they re-invent their business.  And the list could be lots longer.  So rather than choose to be great, it may be more about choosing to re-invent to survive.

Libya, Visas and the Ultimate Conversation Starter

Last week I went to a fascinating dinner party hosted by Felix Marquardt.  Among other things, Felix runs a public relations firms that specializes in advising governments on matters that require special handling in getting the story right--whatever story that may be--for their constituents and for the world at large.  So he is a jet-setter extraordinaire and has plenty of stories to go with that gig.

Additionally, he hosts dinner parties that he calls the Atlantic Dinners.  This one wasn't called that in the invitation I received, so perhaps it differed in some significant way from his usual gathering.  But whatever it was called, it was marvelous.

And Felix Marquardt really knows how to create an icebreaker.

There were thirty of us, and many of the guests with whom I spoke had not actually met Felix before.  I, too, met him for the first time that evening, having been recommended to him by a mutual friend of mine who lives in Hong Kong and talked with at TED a couple of weeks ago.  The people with whom I spoke during the course of the evening included a Finnish woman just on her way back to Helsinki from having attended South by Southwest in Austin, an Indian couple who moved from Boston to New York just last week, a woman originally from Guyana who now works for JP Morgan, someone from South Africa, and another from Paris, and several Brits...you get the idea.  Felix himself was born in France and lives in Paris but is the most Americanized Frenchman I've ever met.  Perhaps safer to say he is truly a global citizen.

The bulk of our dinner conversation stemmed from Felix's suggestion at the beginning of the dinner that each of us think about one object in our lives that means a great deal to us.  As he said, "It could be something your grandmother gave you, or perhaps something you keep in the office, or it could be an article of clothing..."  He gave us ten minutes to gather our thoughts (panic set in as people struggled to come up with a cool response to the question) and then he took the first turn.  Felix told the story of his trip to Libya directly following the revolution and spectacular fall of Libya's leadership.  He needed a visa to enter the country, and the entire visa process, like just about every other formerly government-run process in the country, had been dismantled, abandoned.  So the Libyans who had taken over the the task of just who should be allowed into their country (these people had apparently had never done anything like this before) took out a sheet of white tablet paper, tore a piece off, and put two "official" stamps on it.  That was Felix's visa to enter Libya.  So he showed it to all of us, stapled to a page in his passport.

 

Well, that was a tough act to follow.  When he instructed us to think of an object, an image popped into my head of something I swear I have not thought about since kindergarten.  But there it was, that little pink metal box with the two handles, in which every day I carried to school my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some fruit.  Yes, every day I had the same lunch.  Insisted on it--my mother has told me--for the entire year of kindergarten.  I have no idea what has become of that box but somehow it made it to the front of my brain in response to Felix's question, so I shared it with the table.

There were many more exotic responses, from the woman who talked of a locket she had had for a lifetime, to the young man who talked of losing something that had been given him by his grandmother and has felt guilty ever since.  And there was the Indian woman--who lives in Hong Kong--who told us she has made it her task to value no objects, to renounce materialism. 

One thing's sure: this is definitely a great conversation starter, this "think of an object" suggestion, even if you don't have a makeshift Libyan visa with which to start things rolling.