According to the Urban Dictionary, your freak flag is your unique, eccentric, creative, adventurous or unconventional self that is unsuppressed by social anxiety. I don’t know about you, but I want that. In a new business proposal last week, I included the following sentence: “If you’d like to read more on the topic, I blogged about it […]
What 5th Grade Peer Pressure Can Teach Us About Achieving Success
My sister, Jackie was 12 years old when the guidance counselor came to her class for a guest presentation. But he realized he had left something in his office. He asked for volunteers to retrieve the items and everyone, eager to get out of the classroom for a few minutes, raised their hands hoping to […]
It’s Easier When You See The Finish Line
Novelist Jess Walter said he hates when authors say it took 15 years to write a book; and in the next sentence, he concedes it took him 15 years to write a book. Beautiful Ruins is one of the best novels I’ve read in recent memory. Maybe it’s the backdrop of 1960s Italy, present day […]
Meetings: The Alternative To Work
Back in the early days of my corporate career (I really wanted to start with that line because it makes me laugh and makes me sound old), we used to joke about meetings being the alternative to work. No one is to blame; that environment just lends itself to the necessity of meetings. It’s hard […]
Big Leaps Are Made of Baby Steps
“You guys, we seriously need to get organized.” My family still makes fun of me for saying this on a pit stop during our road trip down to Rehoboth Beach. The car was a mess! And it was driving me nuts! There were games scattered, and trash on the floor. I couldn’t continue on the […]
Real Bosses Like Chick Flicks
In college I fancied myself a feminist. I was a French major and my thesis advisor, a French woman, was one. She was supremely cool and I wanted to be her. The topic I chose was about the great women behind the kings in 17th and 18th Century France, and the very influential role they […]
I don’t have an accent; everyone else does
I spent Sunday night deep in the farmland of Kansas visiting my stepdaughter and her family. You’ve more than likely seen this countryside as you whizz by on the interstate, but we were at least an hour from the nearest interstate highway – off one of those exits with a long straight road that disappears […]
Write it Down
It drives me crazy when the server takes your order without writing it down and either gets it wrong, or has to come back to verify a detail. But actually that’s not what this is about. This is about why I think the book The Secret is a crock. The recession affected our household in […]
I’ll Have What She’s Having.
SxSW Interactive credits much of its explosive growth to Twitter. Twitter went live a few months prior to the event which proved to be a huge launchpad for the social network. This is one of many things I learned from Hugh Forrest, SxSW’s Interactive director in his keynote this weekend at Counselors Academy Spring Conference. […]
If You Can’t Hire Well, Don’t Hire At All
I was reading Erika Napoletano’s take on the Taco Bell debacle when I was suddenly flooded with memories of the time I had to hire a staff. It was the first and last time. But first, if you didn’t know, Taco Bell had a little issue with an employee licking a stack of taco shells […]