I received the email message 20 minutes before our coaching session was about to begin. This young woman executive was asking to reschedule – again – because she had just been called into a meeting that was very important and she was very, very sorry! When we finally got together, I pointed out to her that this was the third time she had rescheduled at the last minute, plus she had cut one session short due to a work emergency, showed up late to one session because a meeting ran over and she hadn’t completed her goals yet. “Your company is paying me whether you show up or not,” I reminded her. “But this is an opportunity to focus on you…

I have always used my own career as proof that knowledge, skills and a driving work ethic were “all” you needed to succeed. I entered the business workforce not even convinced I wanted to be there, believing that an academic path was still my sure route to success and this first job was just a way to pay the rent. I’ve told you what happened: I fell in love with business, helped in no small part by serving the mission of The New York Times, and, in the blink of an eye, I ended up on a career trajectory that led me to assume the stewardship of an information services company for more than a decade. I was smart and hard…

The bottom fell out of the U.S. economy in the fall of 2008 and most businesses – and individuals – didn’t quite know what hit them. The business I ran was heavily dependent on the consumer magazine industry, which was already beginning to feel the effects of consumers’ move to the Internet. We had begun to shift our strategic direction earlier, paying even more attention to the treasure trove of data that we collected each year and mining it for broader use and additional revenue streams. Our head of marketing, a smart and hard-working woman who had created a smoothly functioning and strategically focused department from not much more than shoe strings and tape, was releasing data nuggets to the press…

The business section of The New York Times on Sunday, August 20, 2017, contained an article, “Exposing a Toxic Milieu for Women in Economics,” by Justin Wolfers, that, for me, added one more brick to the wall of an already awful week. We saw clansman and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, resulting in violence and death. We saw terrorism attacks in Spain and Finland. We saw our national leaders respond inconsistently, offering little moral or ethical leadership designed to bring us together. I wanted nothing more this beautiful Sunday morning than to curl up with good coffee and read The New York Times. Then I came across this article and was smacked in the face with the reminder that there remain many…