Posts Tagged ‘Sarah Palin’
5 Tips to Thrive in Chaos (or What Good Is Vision When You’re up to Your A** in Alligators?)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWHpTQc-nhM[/youtube]
I knew there’d be pushback the minute I dubbed vision the #1 leadership characteristic.
“Get real,” several readers e-mailed. It reminded me of the cartoon a colleague once gave me, bearing the caption: “When you’re up to your a** in alligators, it’s hard to remember your goal was to drain the swamp.”
In a time of economic chaos, when many people are desperately trying to keep those writhing reptiles from nipping off their knees, lofty vision talk sounds unrealistic.
It’s difficult to keep your eyes on the prize, your focus on the vision, your hand steady to the wheel when the assumptions you thought were well grounded turn out to be quicksand. But a counterintuitive skill that can help you thrive in times of change and disruption is to embrace chaos as opportunity…
Read MoreWomen's History Open Thread: Infamous Women
In No Excuses, not all of the women I talk about have had a positive impact on women’s lives. In fact, I share a quote from Madeleine Albright that says “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” But should women support women like Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, who oppose policies that help women, such as reproductive rights, fair pay legislation, and social programs that are most likely to help women and children who constitute the majority of those living in poverty?
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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5 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 for using chaos as opportunity, or as I’ve put it in No Excuses power tool #5: Carpe the Chaos. I recently spoke 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’s a useful concept that got me through tough times when many people thought there was no way to succeed.
There IS always a way, and it really helps to see the opportunity when others see only negativity in change and chaos! Here’s the post:
Gloria Feldt’s No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power has stood near the top of Amazon’s leadership booklist since it was published last October. A teen mom who became CEO of the world’s largest reproductive health provider and advocacy organization, Gloria learned leadership on the job. Now she’s a sought-after speaker, author, and consultant. Here are her tips on how to turn chaos into opportunity:
1. Think positive. Be like Monty Python: Always look at the bright side of life. You might as well. Chaos is inevitable because change is inevitable. And whoever is most comfortable with the ambiguity change creates is most likely to thrive, not just survive.
Read MoreGiffords Tragedy: What’s the Message to Young Women?
I wrote this article as an exclusive to the Women’s Media Center, and reprint it here with permission. It can’t begin to describe the pain in my heart for those killed or injured, their families and extended networks of friends.
When an angry young man aimed his semiautomatic handgun at Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson Safeway store on Saturday, he didn’t just critically wound her and kill or wound 19 others. He fired a shot through the heart of American democracy.
It will fall to rising leaders like Giffords—and girls like nine-year-old Christina Green, killed by the assailant’s gunfire just days after she was elected to her school’s student council—to transform our political community to one where differences can be debated safely and policies decided without fear for anything but re-election prospects.
I feel a deeply personal connection to those horrendous events that occurred during the latest “Congress on Your Corner” public meeting the third-term Democratic congresswoman has held routinely in her district. Though I was witnessing them from New York, I’m a resident of Scottsdale, 120 miles north of Tucson, and from 1978 to 1996 was CEO of Planned Parenthood in Arizona. I know the state’s wild-west politics quite well. And I’m so familiar with violent extremist attacks upon reproductive health providers that my first reaction was to swing reflexively into “how can I keep colleagues safe and courageous” mode.
Ironically, a moment before the carnage, I was urging Arizona Democratic party activists via Facebook to stop arguing about arcane party rules and get on with fixing the state: to stand firm against roiling bigotry toward immigrants, slashing public education funds while advancing legislation to allow guns in schools, and other retrograde policies that threaten to make the state an object of derision throughout the country.
Almost immediately after the shootings, I received messages inviting me to a candlelight vigil at the state Capitol. It’s important for people to come together to share their grief while they are absorbing the reality of an unspeakable crime.
But as important as a candlelight vigil might be to heal the rips in our individual souls, healing the social fabric requires infinitely stronger threads.
Read MoreAre These GOP Women Candidates Good for Women?
This Time Magazine article— “A Breakthrough for the GOP: More Women Running”– is prime proof of why the Democrats must prioritize recruiting and supporting progressive women candidates.
These “Mama Grizzly” GOP women candidates are co-opted into being just like their right-wing male counterparts–doing nothing to help women. Like Sarah Palin, most oppose the Fair Pay act and economic policies that would enable women to have equal opportunities in the workplace. They oppose a woman’s right to reproductive self-determination even as they claim their own. Women make up to 60% of the Democrats’ voter base. Will the Dems step up to the plate?
Watch this video of the panel I moderated at Netroots “Why Women are the Key to Progresive Electoral Victories” to see what panelists Joanne Bamberberger, Pam Spaulding, Barbara Lee, Roxanne Conlin, and Maria Teresa Kumar had to say on the topic.
Read MoreWhat’s Sarah Up to Now?
I’ll betcha Sarah Palin’s mother had to ask that question often when she was a child: What’s Sarah up to now?
I’ll be talking about that along with Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn Monday early morning on “Canada AM”, which is CTV’s equivalent of the “Today Show”, so I’ve had to think about the answer to the question more than I might have liked.
Palin has officially stepped down from her post as governor of Alaska as of today. And we’re all abuzz asking why and what is she going to do next: Were some of those ethics charges about to bring her down so she struck a deal? Was she unable to deal with the stress, as her daughter’s baby-daddy Levi Johnston speculated? Is she just after the money she can make with her book and speaking engagements? Was she angry about her treatment by the media? Did she calculate that if she wants to run for president in 2012, she’d be better off not racking up more of a record since her political juice with her state legislature seemed to have been heading south?
Any and all of those are possible. And perhaps she simply had the audacity of nope. As in “Nope, I won’t finish my term because who wants to be a lame duck?” By that logic, if my child is going to reach majority at 18, should I stop being a mother when he’s 16 1/2 so that I’m not a lame duck? If the PTA president is elected to a two-year term, should she step down after a year-and-a-half so as not be a lame duck? Or wouldn’t we call all of those examples blatant abnegation of responsibility?
Read MorePalin Out But Not Down
America’s most famous female point guard has dribbled off the court…for now.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
But don’t count her out. Linda Lowen at About.com describes cheering crowds for Sarah Palin in Auburn NY last month when she visited the home of William Seward, whose purchase of Alaska was deemed folly at the time. Little could the public back during Andrew Johnson’s presidency have known our frozen new territory would one day spawn Palin.
Read MoreAfghanistan to Alaska–Who Respects Women Less?
The Twitterati loudly retweeted their rightful shock this past week as women around the internet e-mailed one another to organize protests against Afghan president Karzai’s signing a law a that allows fundamentalist Muslims to enforce Sharia, including requirements that women must submit to sex with their husbands at least every four days, thus effectively legalizing marital rape.
Meanwhile, 300 courageous Afghan women exercised their right to protest this barbaric law by staging a public march to their capital. They were met with over 1,000 counter-protesters, some of whom threw stones, spat, and called them whores, which tells you exactly where their stupidly misogynist heads are.
For those who want a way to voice their opposition immediately, here’s an action you can take to persuade President Obama to act on his statement that this law is intolerable. And here’s how to deliver the same message via text to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
But lest we in the U.S. become too self-righteous, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s nomination of far-right attorney and her longtime Hummer (what else?)-driving political ally Wayne Anthony Ross for attorney general is clear evidence that the same misogynistic strains are yet to be rooted out here.
Read MorePow! Bam! Comic Books on Today’s Women Leaders Pack a Strong Message
Superheroines, Quemosabe! If art imitates life and pop culture depicts contemporary life most real and raw, then these new Female Force comic books deliver a powerful message that women in top political leadership have truly saturated our cultural consciousness. Embedded video from CNN Video There’s irony in that Female Force’s creators at Bluewater Productions are male,…
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