When I was being interviewed for the top job at MRI, the process was long and arduous.  United Information Group owned the company at that time, and, toward the end, I was flown to London to undergo a series of interviews and assessments with the UIG consultant.   I was offered the job and up to my neck in problems when I received a packet with my “results” in the mail.  The assessments and interviewer had scored me on a number of dimensions: intellectual ability, thinking style, relationship management, drive and resilience, change capability, risk management, teamwork, commercial and customer skills and international potential.   But it was the assessor’s comments that left me fascinated and disturbed.  I won’t bore you with all…

Today is my birthday and on my birthday I wear a tiara.  No kidding. I wear it on the subway and the bus and to client meetings.  Last year I wore it to the mall, much to the delight of the sales staff in Sephora where boys and girls took turns trying it on and taking selfies (no fear – I carry a spare just for sanitary reasons when the occasion requires sharing). Over the years it’s become an amusing joke among my staff and my friends in the industry.   Why do I do it – other than the fact that I am an attention-seeking extravert who is an only child and grew up listening to Sally Starr sing that your…

The company for which I was hired to be CEO played an important role in the advertising industry, so I was surprised when I actually arrived and learned how lean the staff really was. In my first week the office manager was diagnosed with an advanced cancer and went out on sick leave, never to return. Adding insult to injury the head of sales quit during my second week. We had no head of sales, no strategic plan and no marketing department, let alone any bench strength. If someone came down with a bad cold an entire area could grind to a halt. I still didn’t know where to find the pencils. But I knew that there many things that needed…

Many years ago I took my two sons up to the Omega Institute for Family Week and enrolled them in an experiential workshop called “Little Forest People.” They played in mud and snuck up on the adults and identified plants and generally were supposed to have a terrific time being kids in the woods, shepherded by enthusiastic teens.  Except one son – the one who currently has a subscription to Outside – hated every minute of being outdoors and was miserable every stinking minute of the entire week, leading me to miss most of my workshop, “Wanting What You Have Instead of Having What You Want.”  Blame him for my next decade of materialism! But I have always been intrigued and…

I’ve often heard managers say to employees that they expect them to go above and beyond their job descriptions.  Even most performance review forms have a category labeled “Exceeds Expectations.” As managers, we all know that the standout employee does just that; not content to just satisfy requirements these people see wider or dig deeper or broaden the context of an assignment creatively.  As I became a new manager, we looked for employees who “took initiative.”  I was great at taking initiative, seeing ways to expand assignments that allowed for a better execution or for the results to have a more far-reaching impact.  As I grew in business knowledge and managerial experience, I got better at making the decisions that allowed…

I write this essay to honor my friend Dan, another friend who died recently, and another friend whom I met at work.  To describe my friendship with Dan I first have to describe my relationship with myself at that time of my life: I was self-conscious, believed I was not good enough, acutely aware that I was the first person in my family to go to college and every day felt unworthy.  And Dan was part of the family who controlled The New York Times.  He scared me.  To be truthful everybody scared me, but few more than Dan.  He was brash and direct and funny and biting and quick-witted and I could not keep up. We were assigned to a…

Can you stand ANOTHER essay on work-life balance? The phrase is one of the most written about and studied over the last four decades as post-Feminine Mystique women entered the professional ranks in unprecedented numbers. But I think it is still a jumbled up topic that is too often focused on workingwomen and not often enough on workingmen; too often focused on children and not often enough on the other aspects of a full and a fulfilling life that we’d all like to have. As recently as June 2016 The Wall Street Journal ran an article in their Management column titled, “Male CEOs Detail Their Work-Life Rules.” The article acknowledges that male executives traditionally haven’t been expected to feel conflicted about…