I have some great links for you today, but I only want you to read them if you hold tight to the Leadership Turn caveat while you do it.
In case you don’t remember, the caveat is that leadership information is useful to you whether you are still in school, a stay-at-home parent, a worker, middle manager, or the person in the corner office. Everyone leads at one time or another, so tweak the information to fit what you need at this moment.
First, some useful information from a book review called 7 Lessons for Navigating the Storm, the 7 actions listed …read more

I came across a neat little book of quotes today and thought I’d share some of them with you. Each quote is actually a postcard, but there’s no way I’ll ever tear the book apart and mail them.
A few I chose are fairly well-known, such as Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment, “Remember, no-one can make you feel inferior without your consent” and I’ll add that you should retract it every time you notice you did it.
Jane Austen said, “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery;” good advice, but we all have negative times in our lives.
When you do, remember Katherine Mansfield, …read more

Today, a compilation study tell more about women’s efforts to achieve executive roles and three CEOs talk about why, how and what they did to outperform the competition.
Ladies first, so let’s start with the women. The ‘glass ceiling’ has been blamed for women’s inability to reach top executive levels, but a new study out of Harvard says that it’s more than that. Instead of one major barrier to hurdle, it’s a series of obstacles along the career path.
But women do make it. Women such as Dany Levy, founder of DailyCandy.com, who talks about managing, founding and running a company and …read more

For all the talk about bullying, one dirty little secret is just starting to see the light of day.
Bullies are split 60/40 (men/women), but while men are equal opportunity bullies—they stomp on anyone— women are more likely to bully other women “more than 70 percent of the time.”
That doesn’t surprise me, all my life I’ve always gotten more mentoring and support from men than I have from women.
I’ve seen too many women crushed because whatever was done to them was done by another woman, so there was a major betrayal factor added to whatever else was involved.
I never bought into …read more

That’s right, guys, you are obsolescent whether you realize it or not.
At least, that’s the conclusion that seems to be offered on a post at Bizzy Women, based in part on job loss stats from Peter Coy’s 2008 Business Week article and also quotes heavily from Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon’s Alpha Girls. (Klindon also wrote Raising Cain and Too Much of a Good Thing.)
Granted that women gained 300,000 jobs between November, 2007 and April, 2008 while men lost nearly 700,000, but the stats aren’t straight across.
“Simply put, men have the misfortune of being concentrated in the two sectors that are …read more

Great insights for you today—all as true now as when they were originally written.
You’ll have to forgive Galileo; he wasn’t a chauvinist, just a product of his times. Feel free to add ‘hu’ to ‘man’ if it bothers you too much.
“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.” –Galileo (Early exploration of MAP.)
“I never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.” –Galileo (Often more than from the educated ones.)
“Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.” – Lois Wyse (Does that make out-of-control ego and …read more

Did you read the links from yesterday? I hope so, because some of these quotes play off those articles.
“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” –Agatha Christie (Good words to remember these days.)
“A woman is like a tea bag, you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.” –Eleanor Roosevelt (This is one of my all-time favorites; it’s stood me in good stead for a long time now.)
“The naked truth …read more

“Behind every successful woman there is an astonished man.”
Last year I wrote about the global glass ceiling; today I have seven fascinating articles on corporate women. More of the same—or are things changing?
Kids don’t think so; in fact they’re more pessimistic.
“The percentage of girls who say they believe that today both men and women have an equal chance of getting a leadership position has declined from 35 percent to 24 percent between 2007 and 2008.”
And the guys still seem to have problems if women “get tough” (like them), especially in male-dominated fields.
“Speak lowly and slowly, but smile frequently…This advice…was …read more

Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: danaloganphotography
Cynic that I am, I never really bought into the idea of “sisterhood” and that women supported each other because they were all in the same boat. Nice idea, but I just couldn’t swallow it, partly based on my own experience and partly on what I saw happen around me.
For all you doubters I offer more proof from a brief item in Business Week synopsizing a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

 
Researchers at George Mason and Rice universities had 105 people (56 men, 49 women) play the role of interviewer as nonpregnant …read more

Don’t get the wrong idea. I am not a hairy-legged, man-hating, ball-breaking feminist. But I AM a woman, and what has been going on with Kathy Sierra really got me riled up last night. It sent me on a journey through women’s sites on Google, and for that I am glad.
I have joined BlogHer and have saved several other women’s sites to my favorites. So I guess at least one good thing has come out of this mess, for me anyway. I have found places where I feel that I will fit in and maybe do some good. But …read more