My graduate school grants had run out, I was writing my dissertation, up to my eyeballs in student loans and I needed a job.  The fifth floor studio walk-up in Spanish Harlem cost us $175 per month (yes, this was a long time ago) and no matter that it “rained” in our only closet when the upstairs tenants let their sink overflow.  We didn’t have any good clothes anyway.  I had been applying for entry-level assistant professor jobs around the country but all of them required that my dissertation be completed and awarded.  It was going to be tight. Then one Sunday morning, combing through the classified ads in the New York Times I saw an ad for a Research Supervisor…

  I didn’t know very much about the working world when I had my first experience with a really bad manager.  I would write a report for him and, shortly after handing it in, he would call me into his office and force me to sit there and watch him read it.  “Scottie,” I said, “I could be working on something else until you finish.”  He replied, “Why should I waste my time finding you if I have a question?” Today, when I coach young professionals complaining about their “awful bosses” I tell them that this is probably not the worse boss they’ll ever have and they look at me as if I’ve lost my mind, thinking how could it get…

“You are who you pretend to be.”  Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut was a favorite book among my circle of friends in college, and that quote, “You are who you pretend to be…” was one of our anthems arguing for authenticity.  Young women of that generation, at least the ones I hung out with, were nothing if not authentic!  I attended an all-women’s college housed within a large university, and we young women were challenged to stretch our minds and stretch our ambition.  We had female professors and a lot of them!  We had classes that were sometimes all women, and we expressed our ideas and argued our points and didn’t worry about impressing the guys at that moment.  There was…

  The title of this column will surely convince my male readers that they were correct all along: any person calling herself a Crone is really and truly only writing for women.  But I would urge you to not judge so quickly.  If you are managing people you will probably have to manage a dress code, or lack thereof, at some point in time.  Even my young readers, safely toiling away in start-ups where dressing down is the norm, might face these issues some day. Recently I was sweating away on my elliptical machine, watching reruns of  “Murder She Wrote” and realized with great embarrassment that at one time I owned three of the suits that Jessica Fletcher was wearing in…