What is an Authentic Organization?: An elevator speech

November 17, 2010

Tweet Last week I went to a program sponsored by the NYC chapter of GirlsInTech and directed towards (women) tech entrepreneurs and (potential) venture capital professionals. After the program, I had great conversation with some of the entrepreneurs about their ‘pitches’ — the 5 sentence elevator speeches that they give to convey the core idea […]

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Personal Branding: It’s Different for Girls

November 12, 2010

Tweet Personal branding is inescapable.¹ A person simply cannot participate in online forums, much less in their full career, without deliberately or unintentionally crafting and framing the way that they are seen by others. However, while personal branding is inescapable, it isn’t easy to make it work in our favor. Personal branding is fraught with […]

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For Diversity & Inclusion, Don’t Treat All Differences The Same

November 5, 2010

Tweet I’m troubled by a trend in the conversation about ‘diversity and inclusion’ in organizations. Some Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) consultants and conversations are beginning to treat all forms of difference as equally important. For example, differences in the gender, orientation, physical ability, or ethnicity of organization members are presented along with differences in cognitive […]

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Pattern Recognition: How to spot female digital entrepreneurs

November 2, 2010

Tweet Smarts. Fire. Audacity. Technical chops. Focus. Strong network. Innovative product ideas. That’s what venture capitalists look for when they are selecting which entrepreneurs to support and which businesses to fund. Unfortunately, VCs tend to see these characteristics most often when the entrepreneurs themselves are “white, male, under 30, nerds, with no social life who […]

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Want More Women on Tech & TED Panels? Reject Meritocracy and Embrace Curation

October 27, 2010

Tweet Are there enough women¹ being included in public lineups of remarkable business people? Are enough women being selected for conference panels on Technology & Entrepreneurship, for the roster of the annual TED conferences, or even for the Silicon Alley Daily’s 100 Coolest New York Tech people? No. There are not enough² women being chosen […]

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Authentic From the Start-Up: 4 Tips from Cindy Gallop and IfWeRanTheWorld

October 21, 2010

Tweet If you were building an organization from the ground up, how would you “build authenticity in” from the very start? I had the chance to ask this question of Cindy Gallop, an entrepreneur and marketing/advertising/branding guru, who is the CEO of a start-up called IfWeRanTheWorld. IfWeRanTheWorld and Cindy have both been recommended to me […]

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The Day “The Patrick” Disappeared: A story of lost identity

October 20, 2010

Tweet This is a story about a quirky little cafe that disappeared. While I lived in town, and for a few years after we moved, this cafe was a touchstone, a demonstration, of one of the experiences that made our small town so interesting. When the cafe changed just one little thing, it lost what […]

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Built to Deceive: When organizations intend to mislead us

October 14, 2010

Tweet What would you think about an organization that intentionally mislead its potential clients? — That advertised itself as providing a range of products or services, when in fact it only offered one? — That presented itself as being here to “help you”, when in reality its sole purpose is to fulfill its own mission, […]

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3 Dangerous Assumptions in Corporate Work-Life Policy

October 12, 2010

Tweet Isn’t Corporate Work-Life policy great? Here we have a progressive set of programs and strategies that: Acknowledge that every employee is more than a worker, Recognize that she or he is also a ‘whole person’ with a life that extends outside the workplace, and Demonstrate that employees’ full lives should be respected and maybe […]

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Facebook for Women vs. Facebook Designed by Feminists: Different vs. Revolutionary

October 5, 2010

Tweet What would Facebook be like if it were designed by women? In my earlier post, I proposed that Facebook would look, feel and function differently if it had been designed by “women”. [What I actually was writing about what what Facebook might look like if it had been designed by Feminists– but I used […]

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