Leadership
How Can Women Reach Parity in Elected Office?
I just finished recording this Blogtalk Radio program “Feisty Side of Fifty” hosted by the wonderful Eileen Williams. The other guest was Terry Nagel, currently mayor of Burlingame CA, now running for San Mateo County Supervisor–a woman who walks her talk.
Feisty Side of Fifty Blogtalk Radio 3/15/11
Give it a listen and let me know your thoughts on Eileen’s main question: How can the U.S. get more women in elected office?
Read More5 Tips to Carpe the Chaos and Thrive
NAFE, the National Association of Female Executives asked me to write a “Five Tips” article for their latest newsletter.
I chose to write about 5 tips to use chaos as opportunity, or as I’ve put it in No No Excuses power tool #5, Carpe the Chaos. I had recently spoken on this topic to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Women’s Roundtable and the International Museum of Women. In my experience as a leader, it has been a very useful concept that got me through tough times when many people thought there was no way to succeed.
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How Can Women Reach Political Parity in a Chaotic Time?
You know I believe chaos is opportunity. But are women carpe-ing the chaos? With all those groups helping women run for office, why aren’t we moving the dial toward political parity faster? At the rate we’re going, it’ll take us 70 years to get there. And even if we do, will it be a plus or a cruel joke if, say, Michelle Bachmann becomes the first woman president? Isn’t it time for progressive women to come out of the closet and acknowledge that a women’s agenda is more important than her gender?
I’m excited to have a chance to ask questions like these about women, power, media, and politics of three of the most politically savvy women I know at the 92Y in New York this coming Sunday night 1/23, at 7:30 pm. You are most cordially invited.
Read MoreMLK Inspires Our Power-to
Inspiration is balm for the soul and a powerful kick in the resolve to take action.
Last year, to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr on his birthday, I posted this call to share his quotes that have most inspired you. I hope you’ll go read them, for I know you’ll be inspired to use your “power to” to take action.
Upon rereading the quotes, I was struck by what King said
Read MoreDali Time Happy New Year
There’s a wonderful exhibit of surrealist Salvador Dali paintings and sculptures in New York’s Time Warner Center. They’re so alluring, they’re even upstaging the huge Botero Adam and Eve sculptures that attract much photo-snapping of people grinning slyly at Adam’s eye-level penis.
I am mesmerized by Dali’s clock sculptures. They drip time, melt time, warp time. Juxtapose fast and slow passage of time, or rather tease us for thinking such mundane distinctions exist. Apparently Dali agreed with Albert Einstein that time exists only so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
Read MoreWant to Help Start a Girlution?
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My friend Tamara Kreinin (pictured here), who is executive director of the United Nations Foundation Women and Population program, sent me several e-mails during the last couple of weeks announcing that she was about to begin blogging. Seemed a little quaint that she was fretting about whether she was getting the art of the blogpost right, given that I get messages from e-consultants daily telling me blogging is already dead.
Well, you and I know blogging is alive and well. So all of you who can’t fit an entire story into a 140-character tweet or a text, please join me in welcoming Tamara to the international league of bloggers. I am delighted to cheer on the inspiring new girls’ movement she’s initiated by re-publishing her first blogpost as a guest post here at Heartfeldt. If you want to help the Girlution in the U.S. and overseas, check out the Girl Up website to learn how.
“Real” TED and TEDWomen: What’s Next?
I’ve been meaning to cross post CV Harquail’s excellent wrap up of the TEDWomen conference and the panel held in New York to discuss ways of fostering greater inclusion for women, people of color, and ideas that have not traditionally been chosen by the TED curators. Here is it is, full force and unedited.
My only additional comment is to suggest that the value of the controversy that emerged from TEDWomen has been significant. I hope that by raising consciousness we have opened up a path for gender parity in all such conferences and other “thought leader” events. Because after all, women do have at least half of the big ideas!
I’d love to know your thoughts now that the conference is over and we’ve all had some time to process it.
“Building on TED and the TEDWomen Conference: How Can We Make Conferences More Inclusive?”
We made a big start towards answering this question at our roundtable conversation after the TEDx636 NYC/ TEDWomen simulcast event. Our panel, organized by Natalia Oberti Noguera and sponsored by NYWSE, included Brittany McCandless (moderator), Adaora Udoji, Liza Sabater, Ritu Yadav, and me.
This post offers my personal, subjective summary of the conversation and the actions steps that were recommended. As my fellow participants, organizers, and allies share their perceptions of the event and ‘next steps’, I’ll share these ideas and resources too.
Although our panel was diverse in terms of age, expertise, professional domain, culture, and racioethnicity, we shared the same over-arching goal: inclusivity and diversity not only at conferences, but also in the larger ‘world of ideas’.
Read MoreSHE Should Talk At TED: 5 Ways to Get Started
I get so excited I can hardly stand it when I see women embracing their “power-to” leadership and using the 9 Ways power tools I share in No Excuses.
When it comes to defining our own terms and creating a movement to take action for TEDparity, my “heartfeldt” belief is that women are beyond merely offering an opinion that TED should be more inclusive. We are the majority of population, voters, people with college degrees, and purchasers of consumer goods. We don’t need to be supplicants. And for sure there are plenty among us who have big and exciting ideas. Please share yours here and on twitter @SheTalkTed and the She Should Talk at Ted Facebook page.
If you’re in NY, there’s still time today to register for and attend the TEDWomen/TEDx636_11thAve follow up round table this evening, sponsored by the New York Women Social Entrepreneurs, to discuss action steps with panelists
Read MoreDo Mainly Men Have Ideas Worth Spreading?
Since my friend Ruth Ann Harnisch told me about it a few years ago, I’ve thought that attending a TED conference should be on my bucket list. I LOVE big ideas and great speeches about them. So why did I decide not to go to one when the opportunity was offered to me to attend TEDWomen in Washington D.C. December 7 and 8?
I vaguely wondered if the TED folks thought the little women still needed a conference of their own because women’s ideas aren’t as big as men’s. Organizational reputation scholar and consultant CV Harquail raised the same concerns more powerfully in this post when TEDWomen was announced. Nevertheless, I filled out the forms and proposed myself as a speaker on the very big idea of what specifically it will take for women to “reshape the world,” as TEDWomen’s tagline proffers. That was rejected based on some pretty lame reasoning, in my opinion. Then, frankly, I got so busy with my own speeches and interviews after No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power was published in October that I forgot all about the conference and let the slot I’d been offered go.
This past week, the topic of TEDWomen and TED in general heated up so much in the blogosphere and on listservs I’m on that it came back into my consciousness. About that time,
Read MoreWhat Movement Have You Started Today?
Thanks to Shelby Knox for posting this on Facebook today:
On this date in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, AL, city bus. Her arrest sparked the bus boycott and her courage fueled the burgeoning Civil Right Movement. Parks once said, “I want to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free…so other people would also be free.” A beautiful goal, achieved by a revolutionary woman.
Parks helped to spark the Civil Rights Movement by this action. Over on my 9 Ways blog this week, I’m showing examples of No Excuses power tool #7: “create a movement”–with ways we can join together with others to do everything from planning Thanksgiving dinner to world-changing actions like Rosa Parks’.
Today is also World AIDS Day. It’s a good day to think about the amazing progress that has been made so that a diagnosis of HIV/AIDS is not the death warrant is was when the disease was first identified in the 1980’s, thanks to the many people who started movements large and small to combat the disease.
What movement have you created, joined, or contributed to lately? What movement do you think needs creating?
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