We should all be feminists

 

– Are you I worried that men would be intimidated by you?

– It is exactly the man I would have no interest.

I feel you. I have been there thousands of times, and precisely asked that question. My intelligent feminist side sometimes can’t help falling for the basic cultural instinct of perceiving my purpose in life as finding a man, getting married and laboring children. And I have noticed that in the country I leave, the way my brain works and my personality (sometimes marked by «masculine» adjectives such as rational, harsh or direct) might be an obstacle for that goal.

This is why I smiled so sincerely listening to the answer Chimamanda Ngozi gave to her friend, because even though I had never phrased it like that, her answer is so right for me as well! It makes no sense to polish my girly-personality in order to pretend to be someone I am not. That would never ever last. Maybe I am the one cherry picking here. And it might take me some time to find the right guy for me. For sure he must be smart, not intimidated by the true-me at all and have a couple more aesthetic attributes on my wish-list 🙂

Growing shoes

Awesome idea, which is already working and everyone can help to fundrise here.

Just one small thing missing from my point of view: how can we make from this a social business? The idea is there, the technology too, it has already been commercialized… but it depends on the charity of many people, or from a couple of rich ones, to keep existing. And generally, that is not sustainable.

Using the famous sentence of don’t give a man a fish, show him how to fish, the solution to get a pair of shoes to every children passes from teaching them how to make their own shoes. Maybe technology can be exported to those places in Africa where shoes are needed de most? Maybe then you can employ local people and use local material instead of fancy rubber and treated leather?

Next step is to make it profitable (or at least take it to the break even point) and self-sustainable. Charity can help to set up a business, but if it can not fly alone in a couple of years people will move their interest and their wallets to something else, and it will sadly disappear. You can use for instance recycled materials to cut down costs, or set flexible prices according to the location you sell them: cheaper in the poorer villages, medium in more resourcefull cities and overprized to tourist or first-world stores.

Then the impact in the world will be not only to thousands but millions of children.

12-point plan for job hunting

This is definitely one of the most complete processes that I have found so far to prepare yourself for job-hunting. I specially like the focus on your personal aspirations and the tricks given to identify them.

Full article by Liz Ryan at Forbes.

1. Decide what you want to do next, after you leave this job. You don’t have to look for a new job that’s just like the old one. You get to decide. Maybe it’s time for a big career shift!
2. Now, brand yourself for the job you want (not the job you’ve got)! Begin your branding exercise by writing about yourself (not for publication —  just for you). In your new job, what sort of work will you do? Write your bio as though you’re writing about yourself working at your new job, six months from now. You’ve already had experience in a lot of different subject matters, whether you’ve held the job title or not. Use the bio-creation exercise to reclaim those experiences and get them into your branding!
3. Will you update your LinkedIn profile? You’re in a stealth job search now, so you don’t want to raise alarms. You can set your Notifications to “off” so that your LinkedIn contacts don’t get notified about your profile updates, or you can live with the LinkedIn profile you’ve got throughout your job search.
4. Determine your salary requirement and your other requirements for your job search. Write about your ideal job. What is your target salary level, position title, daily commute, amount of travel per month, and so on? Write your expectations out on paper and talk about them with someone close to you. Determine your floor in each category. What is the lowest salary you would accept — and what would make that low salary worthwhile to you? Know what you want so the universe can bring it to you.
5. Write your Human-Voiced Resume to bring your new branding into clear focus for the benefit of hiring managers who don’t already know you. Remember — you don’t need permission to change careers. You need to give yourself permission!
6. Create a Target Employer List. You may already have target employers in mind, or you might decide to browse LinkedIn profiles to spot employers who are struggling with the very same kind of Business Pain you solve.
7. Learn about Pain Letters and then research and compose a Pain Letter to a particular hiring manager you’d like to start a conversation with.
8. Send your hard copy Pain Letter, attached with one staple in the upper left corner to your hard copy Human-Voiced Resume, directly to the first hiring manager on your Target Employer List, by post.
9. Activate your network. Check in with old friends and new acquaintances to begin expanding your sphere of influence.
10. Get some consulting business cards and begin passing them out to people you know (instead of the business cards your employer gave you).
11. If you are planning to use a Third Party Search channel in your job search (that is, to partner with one or more recruiters whose clients may be looking for someone like you), reach out to one or two trusted recruiters or friend-of-your-friend recruiters to talk through your resume with them. Your Human-Voiced Resume will probably not be your recruiter’s favorite, so you’ll need a traditional resume for recruiters as well as your Human-Voiced Resume to send to hiring managers directly.
12. Get a journal and begin writing in it every day or every other day. Write about your job search. Write about your ideas, dreams and feelings. You are growing new muscles. Hats off to you!

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How to make stress your friend

Chasing meaningful things is better for yourself than trying to avoid discomfort. That is really the best way of making decisions: go after whatever create meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.

The unsurprising truth about female leaders

By Caroline Fairchild, at LinkedIn.

On Monday, I moderated a panel of female business leaders at the 10th Annual Duke MBA Women’s Leadership Conference. I started the discussion by posing a question to the audience of roughly 100 female MBA students and professors.

“Fortune recently released its list of The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and less than a third were women. Does that surprise anyone?”

Not a single woman rose her hand.

While it may not be surprising that women represent the minority of great leaders in business or beyond, I was shocked that this future cohort of business execs appeared unfazed by the stat. A majority of the women in the audience would be rejoining the workforce in a matter of months. Yet the lack of female role models ahead of them appears to be nothing but old news.

Rather than dwell on the reality of the present, I turned to my panel — leaders at CitiGroup, Procter & Gamble, SAP and Aetna — to weigh in on the future. How can women make that very unsurprising stat, surprising in the future? Here is what they said.

Brag about yourself because no one else will.

Women are much less likely than men to share their accomplishments at work with their managers, said Marissa Moss, a director in CitiGroup’s High Yield Research Group. While men are willing to brag about their big wins, women think that if they just do a good job, their work will eventually be noticed. Moss said that’s not the case, particularly in male-dominated fields like finance, and encouraged the MBA students to speak up at work when they succeed.

Get used to taking risks because it never gets any easier.

While women may be more risk-averse than men, risk-taking doesn’t suddenly become easier as you go through your career, said Jill Higman, an executive director at Aetna. In fact, as women progress in their career, it’s more likely that risk-taking becomes more challenging as they get married and begin families. Yet the reality is taking risks is necessary to having a successful career. Higman, who admitted that she is not a natural risk-taker, shared that she taught herself to become more tolerant. The key is taking opportunities and pushing for the right job when it makes sense for you in your career, she said.

Marry a man who wants to stay home.

Sharon Ruddock, global vice president and chief learning officer at SAP, didn’t succeed in finding a partner who was willing to stay home, but she still encouraged the audience to seek out a stay-at-home dad. The support at home can make taking big opportunities in your career all that much easier, she said. Ruddock also encouraged the audience to be overconfident in their abilities as she views a lack of confidence as the main reason why we see fewer female leaders in business.

Pull out bias from the hiring process.

For Charlene Patten, the global brand franchise leader of Gillette Venus and female shave care at Procter & Gamble, the numbers won’t change until the unconscious bias of the hiring process does. We all have read the studies that say a guy named Howard is more likely to get the job than a woman named Heidi with the identical resume. At Procter & Gamble, the company takes a candidate’s name and gender off of his or her resume to ensure bias doesn’t creep in.

Earth Hour 2015

For the second year in a row, I have spent the Earth Hour reflecting on the current world situation and what can we do as individuals to be closer to that future we want to leave for our children.

There is something wrong about the society we are living. All that hate, prejudices, refusal to see that we are abusing from the environment, lack of compassion and sympathy for the ones that are different from us.  I have felt disappointment because it is sometimes like humanity can’t help war, aggressiveness and destruction. I could go into a spiral of pessimism.

But then I have realized that just next to all that shit, there is something great too growing in that same society. There is people who cares, and fights untiringly to make things a little less bitter, a little more sweet. People who faces reality and its problems, being equally aware of the potential and limitations of the individuals and living along with the personal values.

We have the power to make a significant change. Starting by the man/women in the mirror. Then influencing and inspiring the ones next to us, and finally making from that willingness to live in a better world a movement.

Am I hearing a call for social capitalism?

I drool over the speech that Mr. Obama recently did.

Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?

I simply can not imagine a Spanish politician defending a tax rise for the wealthy and the strongest companies. Both in here and in the USA, companies have a strong control over politicians and fill their pockets, but apparently Obama has gone over that and sticked to his social values, while here every lame-duck is dirty with corruption. Or even worse, there is no one here with acceptable rhetoric skills that make people believe they care any more.

Hearing Obama to say some of the epic statements that he did, is not only a check for US congress, but also for all the other European countries. He is pointing social equality as the path to follow after crisis recovery, and this will obviuosly have more impact that the speeches that scholars, NGOs or caring people have been pushing for years.

Movements like this one make fair the Peace Nobel Prize he got years ago. Because  he might not be as brave as Malala or Kailash, but he shows another type of bravery standing with his principles, not avoiding political confrontation and using his position – the one with highest influence in the world-  to try to get out something good, despite the political mistakes he does too.

Deal with laziness

Warning! I’m about to speak in code. We like to think of ourselves as:

• “Not interested in making big money”
• “Not overly ambitious”
• “Focused more on life than work”

Code for all these excuses is “I’m lazy.”

Being lazy is something we don’t like to admit to ourselves, much less to our own mother (who will love us no matter what, except when being lazy). We will substitute other words and rationalization for our behavior. You think we can’t tell, but we can. You’re lazy, and second to bad body odor, no one really wants to be around that, even if you’re charming. (OK, maybe if you’re charming, but only then.)

If you’re in the ranks of people of whom I’m describing, you need to pay attention to what I’m about to share. Someone needs to give it to you on the chin.

You may have reached a point in your adult life where you realized you don’t care if you get ahead, excel on the job, get a promotion, or even much of a salary. Lazy is about effort, and you discovered you simply didn’t want to put in any. You were willing to forego these things as a trade off.

As a lazy person, you have learned to do things to try to hide the blatant truth about yourself. You have tried to look like you didn’t care if others passed you by. Perhaps you even attempted to look like those things were too materialistic. The great thing about rationalization is that it seems to sound good and even logical to some extent. To you perhaps.

I’m here to expose your ugly truth. We really can tell. As much as lazy people think they’ve hidden the truth about themselves, at some level the rest of us know. We pretty much let you keep thinking that we can’t see what you’re all about. You didn’t ask “does this rationalization make me look lazy?”

Here is some of the other code this signifies. It says that while you might truly just not want to do anything, it says you haven’t checked in to life. You don’t get it. We’re at our best when we are productive and contributing.  We’re even better when we’re so passionate about our work that we can’t wait to get to it again.

It says you might be afraid to try or might not be able to stand the failure that comes with striving. What you’re missing is that it will make you feel great about yourself. Not because you kept up with other people or met some type of social standard. You would feel great because you had something you strived to achieve and did it.

As a co-worker, you aren’t our first pick to work with. You can’t be trusted. If I know you’re lazy, I’m not sure what you will or won’t do. Many times, in your attempt to look like something you aren’t, you may inflate what you know or will do.

Most of the time you don’t know what you will or won’t do. Your rationalizations are filed under “Ignore.” You’ve preordained your outcome because of your “lazy-speak.” We can all see through this and because, even if you’re charming, what good is working with someone you can’t trust? The best people I’ve had a chance to work with are generally running faster than I am.

Where does this leave us? If you’re lazy, you’re missing out on a big chunk of life. I recognize some people think there is a magical dividing line between work and life, but I’m here to say the line doesn’t exist.

This is your life or at least a big part of it. Stop trying to fool yourself. The effort you think will be so painful will be the best time of your life, if you just let it. Try some career management. Fall in love with your work.
Read more at http://www.careerealism.com/career-management-lazy/#D4Lh5UYC8TGkWrMy.99

Éxito y fracaso.

Hay dos dramas en el trabajo, en el deporte, en el amor y en la vida en general. Uno es no alcanzar el objetivo. Y el otro, a menudo, alcanzarlo. El logro de una meta puede a veces ir acompañado del sentimiento de que lo que has obtenido no era del todo lo que tú buscabas y esperabas. Hay que valorar y disfrutar el llegar y seguir andando el camino.

José Medina. Dirige tu carrera.

Madrid Handover

Una de las muchas cosas que he aprendido, es que el trabajo en asociaciones como ESTIEM no acaba el día que encuentras un relevo. Más allá del cambio formal, es importante traspasar también todos los contactos y tener una handover completa, dónde toda la información y todos los conociemientos del último año no se pierdan.

Así que como última aportación al Local Group, preparé una completa sesión de 17 horas que incluyó información detallada del LG, trainings sobre Gmail, handovers one-to-one, goalsetting, varios breaks y un gran espacio para celebrar el cambio y despedirnos.

Y sí, se me caía la baba al ver a la nueva Board 2014 trabajar, soñar y decidir el futuro de la asociación.