I’m lucky that my job has taken me to Chautauqua Institution for the next few days. Chautauqua is a summer learning community that hosts daily lectures from leading minds on a range of topics from science to art to music. This week is focused on early childhood education, and yesterday’s speaker, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, [...]
Entries from June 2009
June 29, 2009
The Maternal Manager
Last week a friend who is a female senior healthcare executive in her early sixties told me the following story: one of her employees, a woman in her mid-twenties, came to her and said she wanted to pursue a master’s degrees in public health at a nearby university. To make the 4pm classes she would [...]
June 26, 2009
Management Friday: Moving from Manager to Executive
Want the corner office? You’ll have to figure out how to transition successfully from senior manager to executive — the time in a career when previously successful employees are most likely to fail. As the Korn/Ferry Institute reports in their paper The 6 Qs of Management, “over half of first-time general managers stumble, some never [...]
June 25, 2009
Dinner Thursday: Coconut Curry Chicken
Coconut milk is a great addition to the pantry, especially the healthier “lite” versions. I love trying new Indian and Asian-style recipes using this rich, easy ingredient, that can be paired with meat, vegetables or rice equally well. Check out these eight things to know about coconut milk at The Perfect Pantry for more facts, [...]
June 24, 2009
Talking About Womenomics: Katty Kay on The Colbert Report
A few weeks ago I caught this interview with BBC reporter Katty Kay, one of the co-authors of Womenomics, on The Colbert Report. Though it’s one of the fluffier interviews Kay and her partner Claire Shipman have done around the book, I thought there were some troubling moments in the piece.
Kay opens by saying “We [...]
June 23, 2009
The Space Between Pro-Choice and Pro-Life
The other day I was catching up on my podcasts, and I caught this interview with Ayelet Waldman on Fresh Air. I usually disagree with Waldman’s style — I think she writes to provoke, and her very privileged stay-at-home-mother life is not representative of her readers — however, I unexpectedly found that she moved me [...]
June 22, 2009
Are Working Mothers Better Off in Other Countries?
For the past few days I’ve been reading about Iris Evans, the Minister of Finance in Canada’s Alberta province, who announced in a recent talk that at least one parent should stay at home to be with children, even if it means sacrificing income. The story is interesting for two reasons: first it shows that [...]
June 19, 2009
Management Friday: Playing Defense
Earlier this week Mindy Roberts at The Mommy Blog responded to my post about a recent “Momversation.” Reading Mindy’s thoughts on the matter, I got defensive. How could she think not see that Momversation misrepresented working mothers? How could she accuse me of “sneering at” or “tearing down” other women, when I try to do [...]
June 18, 2009
Dinner Thursday: Franks, Potatoes and Beans
Every Thursday I post a simple, quick recipe for working parents who cook.
No matter what I do, I always seem to have a surfeit of potatoes from our CSA box. Any way I can find of making them the centerpiece of a meal, rather than just a side dish, is welcome. One way of doing [...]
June 17, 2009
Bringing Baby to Work
When this article about bringing your baby to work came out in The New York Times a few months ago, I was skeptical. Trying to get real work done with a baby — much less a toddler — in your office seemed impossible. But recently I’ve heard several stories that have changed my thinking on [...]
