Go Sun Chips!

WOW, last night as we stopped at Maplefields in Milton for our "milk, soda stop" before we traveled across the causeway to the Islands, I wandered over to the snack aisle to see what spoke to me. I LOVE Sun Chips and now I LOVE them even more. The first thing I noticed was that the bag was noisy. OK, they changed their packaging, that is great and now everyone in the store knows that I am snacking on chips. Next, as I tried to get it off the shelf, I literally had to pry it out of the shelf and that brought more noise. I LOVE them so much, I eventually pried them loose.

Murg's first comment was something like, "Wow, that is a noisy bag!"

When we got out of the store (after I bought the most delicious cookie, which will probably be a regular routine now, when we stop for "milk and soda" at Maplefields) I looked at the writing on the bag. 100% compostable and a picture is worth a thousand words, so I am including two for this post.

So not only do I love LOVE sun chips because they are the best tasting, I love them for being 100% compostable, and I love them because they announce to the world that I am buying great, "green" chips.

Shout Out to Sun Chips!

Diversity - Leadership Nugget

With the continuing appearance in my life of leadership topics, a neuron fired this morning in a conversation with a manager. I have tried to communicate this during coaching sessions with managers, many times so now I am documenting it here.

When you are thinking about diversity it is easier to have more than one voice / instance / resource / person. If you are the only woman on a staff, when the men want to hear from women, all eyes turn to you. In fact you are expected to speak for ALL women, when in fact that is quite unfair. I observed this at Polaroid when we were doing work around race diversity. We expected that african americans could speak on many issue for their entire race, which is not the case.

I have found, that in the above example, it is better to have two women or two african americans present on staff. It is easier and safer as that diverse voice to speak up about a woman's issue or a race issue when there is company aka two or more of you. The spotlight is not always on you to speak for ALL your gender or race. You can raise women and race issues easier with support.

In the conversation this morning we were talking about having one member of the group be located at another site, or having two members located there. For on boarding, working, work processes and communication, it will be easier to have two there. The probability of success for those remote workers is as least double by having two located there.

So, when you are thinking about diversity of many kinds, think about having two diverse resources instead of one, and think about the dynamics. The best way to experience this is to imagine when you have been the lone voice somewhere in your life, and then imagine when another joined you.

Diversity comes in many many ways. it is not just race or gender. In the case of the manager this morning, it was being a remote worker.

I'm just Saying - have you done these?

OK, I know that some of you have done some of these. I have done all of them:

• Tried to move stuff on my computer screen the way I do on my iPhone with my finger across the screen


• Undo my seat belt in the car and assume I also opened the door, so was surprised when the door was still shut as I pushed my shoulder into it


• Picked up my iPhone to change the channel on my TV


• Searched all over the house looking for my phone, when I was talking on it


• Put the channel clicker up to my ear to make a phone call


• Tried to use my iPhone as my mouse (I hear that you can buy an App for this)

What other do you have to add to this list, if you have any idea what I am talking about?

Grief - one year later

Just a year ago, Autumn broke his leg and we had to put him down. For about a week prior to today, I have been thinking of today and wondering how I would feel. Too bad that a happy day like St. Patrick's Day is now tainted by memories from a year ago.

As usual with the passage of time, the year has gone quickly, a lot of water over the dam AND it feels like it just happened yesterday. I will never forget how helpless and hopeless I felt that day. I had never seen my daughter or my husband so stricken with grief. There was nothing I could do but cover people with blankets and make sure there was food in front of us.

Bee is so far away this year, and I cannot look in her eyes to see how she is doing, but I have to assume that she is handling it the way she has handled tough things all her life. Not the way I do by wearing it on my sleeve but in her own private, contemplative, appropriate way.

There has been a faint dark cloud following me around most of today. Another year, and another passage of deep felt grief.

Leadership - more of my thoughts - headlines

There has been a lot of discussion lately around me, about leadership. Quickbase added a blog for team leaders with regular blogs on leadership AND my business leader at Intuit presented yesterday his current thoughts on leadership that have been percolating for him.

Both of these got me thinking about what is my view of leadership. I have blogged a few times before about this, so here is the latest installment. First some history.

I managed for the first time in 1977 when I was the manager of two restaurants, Taco Villa, in the Northampton/Amherst area. I started as employee #5 and we built it to 65 employees over 2 sites. Just out of college, this was a fabulous small business experience. I learned hiring, firing, finance, scheduling, process excellence and many more small business skills.

What did I learn about leadership from that experience? It is really hard to fire someone, and role modeling behavior that you want to see, is really important. The first person I fired, I was so upset I rehired him. It was complicated; he was stealing from us and was dating the owner's sister, and they were pregnant at the time. Yes, I said they. Of course the owner, her brother, gave me the assignment to fire him. As I said, it was complicated!

One way I role modelled behavior was washing dishes. Some people just work slowly and they get run over in a fast moving restaurant. The easiest job was washing dishes but you had to work fast. Some people just are not coordinated and don't move fast. I would often throw myself into the dish washing and show them how to organize the job and move fast to keep up in busy times. Some people observed and paid attention, and some ended up as "road kill" on the floor of the restaurant. I think this accomplished two things. It showed that as the manager I was not afraid to get my hands dirty, and wet in this case. It also showed them a system of dish washing that they might not have been aware of. I was always tweaking the system to make it faster and better quality aka clean dishes. BTW, I was also getting a whole bunch of dished washed if we were running out. This explains a lot about why at church, I jump into the dish washing job more often than not. Of course, I have to fight Murg for it, because it is a perfect introvert job.

My second experience with managing was in the early 1990s when I managed a team of 18 people at Polaroid. I had IT, planning, finance, work redesign and training working for me. Here I learned to pay attention to what motivates someone and to use that information for coaching and developing. I learned that everyone is an individual and you need to tailor your development to them. The conversations are all different. I also learned here to not play favorites among my direct reporta and that admitting a mistake is one of the best things you can do as a leader. It buys you a lot.

I have managed a few people since that time but not a huge team. Some day I want to manage a large team again to apply all of the leadership training skills that I have been imparting on 100s of managers in the last 20 years.

So what does this say about my leadership philosophy. Here are the headlines:

• Don't play favorites
• Listen to people to figure out strengths and individual motivations
• Be courageous enough to move or fire someone if they are in the wrong position. They almost always end up in a better spot than the one they are currently in
• As a Myers Briggs "F" and "P", managing these preferences in the workplace is critical
• I am really good as sensing what is going on with people even when they are totally unaware. Use this a a tool and realize it is a gift

So for today 3-17-10, those are my headlines. Unlike my business leader, my thoughts are more scattered, maybe not as clear, but they are mine.

Technology Fails Multiple times

I have written a couple of posts from my iPhone but this time it is because of the title of this post.

I got to the Hilton on sunday night expecting to get a little bit of work done. In retrospect I should have connected to VA's wireless on the flight.

I spent 90 minutes trying to connect to their wireless and by then it was 2am EST. This was after spending 30 minutes with tier 1 and 2 tech support. That did not work so I called the front desk and they sent an engineer to my room with a network cable. They advertise wireless and I wanted wireless. The night ended with me refusing to switch rooms and being rather cranky to the hotel person I called at the front desk. Both technical people said that connectivity was a problem and wireless was dodgy. I believed them over the front desk person who said I was the only room having problems.

When I got to the office, this Intuit office does not have wireless like the other Intuit offices so I moved to an office with a network cable and that office did not have a working phone. That help desk ticket is still open 36 hours later. I could not print since unlike other places at Intuit you cannot install a printer by yourself. IT has to do that. I am near the capacity of rollover minutes on my iPhone so don't want to solely use that.

The kicker is that I could not get to my blog to write this at work since this is not a business site, and gets blocked by big brother at this work site . . . and the hotel wireless is still not working.

iPhone saves the day! And now I will finish this is the business center in the lobby of the hotel not in my PJs in my room, but wish I were.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I will not be thrown off my game by "stealing"/losing

Last weekend, was really strange for identity. Bee's wallet was stolen so we had to cancel our joint credit card, AND I lost my work badge, office key and VPN token (unfortunately they are all on one lanyard, silly me).

I realized at the end of this week that some of my cycles have been spent this week recapturing my identity. Physically my badge, key and token and then the credit card stuff. Technology is supposed to simplify things for us and at the same time it has complicated things for us. It allows another avenue for thieves for instance.

This is the third time in a year that we have had to get a new credit card. There are a lot of people out there "stealing". Bee's wallet and our identity.

Wouldn't it be easier to just have our fingerprint be our "credit card", office access, ignition, anywhere we need to ENTER. Some day but in the mean time we depend on those 2X3 pieces of plastic, that identify us and allow us to buy.

Time Management - Leadership series

When I teach time management I always say that you need to find the system that works for you. Franklin planners will never work for me, they are too structured and too much organization.

As a true ENFP, I am constantly refining how I organize my time in order to stay sane. I now carry a small notebook every where with me and take notes. SOMETIMES, I put a check box besides a TODO item so I can glance quickly back through my notebook and find TODOs.

This week I am trying something different. I bought myself some new colored pens, and each day I am switching the color of pen I use, in order to track which day was which.

Just now I was cleaning up my hard drive, and found a file named "Talent Plans" that would have been really helpful to find earlier this week, so I put it back where I naturally was looking for it. It will easier to work on my deliverable if it is there, but when I made that folder on my desktop, I thought it would simplify things. It DID NOT.

Another thing I tried this week with mild success is to write on my whiteboard, in RED, the strategic tasks and in BLUE the tactical tasks. My role requires me to work on more strategic things YEAH, so this helps me determine if I am working a majority of the time on the right things. It is helping with that measurement.

Time management is a constantly iterating process for me which matching my MBTI type. What I have put in place helps me order my life and somewhat fits into my preferences, but sometimes like with the Talent Plans folder, it trips me up.

Advice, find your system that fits your personality and stick with it, or in my case keep iterating and improving the one you have. Back to the RED items on my board.

Health insurance reform, oh and BTW solving world hunger

Twice in 24 hours I noticed part of our health care system that are abolutely riduclously broken. The first one is the filling of prescriptions. My doctor gives me the prescriptions for an entire year, but I still have to go back every 30 or 90 days and get them filled. As I sat and waited at Walgreen's, I just fumed. So many little plastic bottles, only 10% full, leaving that register every 30 days. The paper to print the prescription, the paper bag it goes in, the time for the pharmacist. What a waste! It was not like this before the litiguous nature of health care.

The second one was getting my blood taken. I just had my blood taken in December for a series of tests. With technology, did they not know that I had not had blood taken for 18 months for my thryoid medication. Why did they not run that test at the same time? They have my electronic health records. The receptionist lectured me that I have not had my blood taken for 2 years. LIAR, I had it taken at YOUR office in December. You could have seen, if you looked into my records at that time.

OK, there are much bigger parts of our health care that are broken, so these ones are little and remote, but they bugged me this week!

Fox and Geese

Did you play this game in the snow as a kid? We did, but apparently I failed as a mother because my oldest had never played until Sunday when we played at Coniston. Yes, imagine mostly 50+ adults on a very mishappen diagram running around on their creaky joints.

It was part of our impromptu winter olympics which included cross country skiing, bocce, kickers(sp?) (aka horse shoes) and snow shoeing.

Needless to say it was fun and brought back childhood memories. We did not follow the same rules as when we were kids but the Internet is wonderful for finding rules to all kinds of games.

We added snow balls to the mix since some of us don't run so fast so you could tag someone with a snow ball.


Fun was had by all and C has played fox and geese now.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Isn't a Silver Medal still very very good?

We watched that hockey game in the loft of Coniston. M brought a projection system, and we got a rabbit ears signal from Plattsburgh NY. It was a very exciting game to watch with many family members. A variety of Adirondack chairs, camp chairs, and dining room chairs gathered around the TV.

I was obviously disappointed that our boys did not win, but my overwhelming feeling was, "They still did pretty good, silver is a good medal to get." Brother M disagreed. Second place is just not good, nothing to brag about. Really? Only gold medals have bragging rights, second place does not rate at all?

I am not sure whether this is an indication of competitiveness, or cooperation or gender or what. I do know that I have come in second place before and been slightly disappointed but still proud to have second place.

None of the US hockey players were smiling or looked even happy to have second place and a silver medal. OMG, they scored on the Canadians with 24 seconds to go. Wasn't that a feat and something to be proud of? They held them off from scoring a third goal for most of 2 periods. Isn't that something to be proud of?

I guess only gold medals and first place positions have bragging rights. Sad face, and disappointment from Sally.

Sally is a nickname for Sarah - alert the media

Wow, I really did not think I would have to fight this battle, aka educate the entire world that Sally is a nickname for Sarah. In my observation, only Sallys and Sarahs know this little piece of trivia.

At our annual February Star Island Corporation retreat, the opening exercise was to make a name tag with your nickname on it. Being the rebel that I am I put my actual name on it SARAH. Sally is my nickname, but only for one summer, and the 30 hours of the retreat have people actually called me Sarah.

I am a seventh generation Sarah, my Mom is a sixth generation one, and is Sarah Virginia, always called Ginny. I think at birth I was nicknamed Sally.

The battle with officials and authorities continues. I once almost could not board a plane after 9/11 because my passport says Sarah and the ticket said Sally. Yesterday my doctor's office receptionist said "You almost did not get this message because your answering machine says Sally." I get this probably twice a week.

OK, why can Roberts be Bob, even with a different starting letter? Why is William ok to be Bill, also different starting letter? Margaret and Peg? You see where I am going. Sally and Sarah even start with the same letter!

So I am thinking of reclaiming my name of Sarah. It was pretty easy for the 30 hours of the retreat. It would solve all of those "I thought your name was Sally!" from the receptionists and officials.