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…

I was one of four department heads working at a publishing company, reporting to the EVP of advertising, when our company was acquired by a large global publishing firm, based in the U.K., that was looking to establish its footprint in the U.S. The financial markets considered it a smart acquisition, as the companies held titles with similar audience bases and no overlap, but there was speculation that the global company had overpaid.  As soon as the acquisition was complete it seemed like our new owners flipped a switch:  we were constantly doing research on launching titles in the U.S. that were successful elsewhere and there were persistent rumors about layoffs and downsizing.  Expenses that we always took for granted were…

It was still early in my tenure as a CEO when I learned that this job was going to be about a lot more than developing a smart, compelling strategy that reflected the changing dynamics of our marketplace and executing same with the high quality performance for which our company was known. No small task by itself but I knew I worked with some of the smartest people in the business. The founder of the company was still very much present and, hard as it may have been for him, he left the running of the day-to-day operations to me, offering advice and counsel only when I asked. I asked every day.   But his counsel and wisdom didn’t prepare me…

  I had been in my CEO role for about 10 months and, after the initial few weeks of terror, I was settling in.  I had endured three in-person quarterly budget reports to the CEO and CFO of the parent holding company, tortuous meetings during which you sat outside a conference room at the home office in London and waited to be called.  Sometimes you sat for hours.  Home office staff walked by sympathetically, offering you tea and cookies, and sometimes even proffering advice as to the mood of the head man as you sat and reviewed your numbers.  Finally, when it was your turn, you took your place at the head of the table, began your overview of the business…