Hasta La Gadget!

I was head-down, hurrying through my morning routine. My goal was to finish getting ready in the women’s gym locker room and then go to work. Dripping wet from my shower and barely wrapped in a towel big enough to cover my torso, I made eye contact as I was approaching the lockers. While I struggled clumsily to keep my towel in place, my counterpart calmly took a moment to say hello and introduce herself.

Fast forward two years and my gym buddy’s son, Russell, now leads analytics and innovation at the enterprise I work for, The Global Good Fund. By talking with Russell’s mother in the gym locker room, I learned about her time living in Singapore and about Russell’s shared values for social entrepreneurship — the backbone of The Global Good Fund.

As bizarre a situation as it may seem, networking in the gym locker room is nothing out of the ordinary for me. In fact, I seem to be a magnet for unexpected encounters when it comes to networking. And you know what… I enjoy it!

In order to build effective networks, we need both formal and informal networks in place. My most meaningful connections, against all logic, have developed outside of professional networking opportunities. Being open to informal networking is a blessing to my career.

I met our talented Global Good Fund Photographer, Kristofer Dan-Bergman, on a train. To be honest, when I first saw Kristofer on the train, I mistook his intentionally grungy look. Looks can be deceiving! Only when he stole my attention with his incredible photographs did I come to find out that he’s a talented professional who left Wall Street for his workshop.

In another chance encounter, our enterprise’s collaboration with Capital One was initiated while chatting with a woman at a coat stand. Meanwhile, our PR strategy grew out of a friendly conversation at the Visa line in Nepal. And yet another strategic partnership resulted from helping a stranger hoist her bag into an overhead compartment on an airplane. Further still, our social media operations, if I’m completely honest, stemmed from chatting with a stranger in the bathroom of a wedding.

Moral of the story: Networking can come from anywhere! I don’t need to be in a professional setting to network and meet new people who will enrich my life and career and vice versa.

I try to explore as many venues as possible when it comes to meeting new people. When networking in casual settings, I think it’s important to be structured in following-up on the backend. Even when the networking is organic, follow-up is intentional and punctual. I do my best to follow-up immediately after meeting someone, whether in business or casual settings. I ask for their business card, send an email, follow them on social media when appropriate, and add them into personal and professional contact lists. Organic networking doesn’t mean unstructured.

I try to demonstrate and instill this message in our culture daily at The Global Good Fund. Stressing the importance of organic networking has been invaluable to the success of my team. In a recent Board Meeting, I asked each colleague to share how he or she came to connect with The Global Good Fund. It was incredible to hear all of the different stories as to why each person was sitting at the table that day — talk about organic networking!

Our summer interns getting to know each other

I’m still astounded by what doors open and friendships emerge when I put myself out there and talk with people. By engaging in casual conversation with others, I learn a lot about people for who they are. In fact, I find organic networking to be a much more efficient way of learning what is mutually beneficial to a relationship than what I learn in a professional setting.

So next time you’re walking into walls while reading your email or letting the world go by with headphones in, embrace the noise and turn to your neighbor. Keep the conversation going and see where it might take you!

It’s truly unfortunate when any woman who identifies herself as a feminist tries to validate negative stereotypes about women. Self-professed feminist (I don’t believe she understands what the word means) Clarissa (her last name is not listed on her blog) posted a scathing blog by a guest blogger who appears to be unnamed, denouncing women from any future employment at her company. The title of her post? “I Don’t Want To Hire Women.” It’s obvious that she has not read the slue of reports citing that companies with multiple women in their top leadership positions outperform companies with no women in every single criterion…. but let’s just humor her for a quick second.

In the blog post she says, “Over the years, I have hired outstanding women – educated, intelligent and highly articulate. Yet, I am exhausted. I have become profoundly tired of being a therapist and a babysitter, of being drawn into passive-aggressive mental games and into constantly questioning my own worth as a manager. I have had several women who quit to stay home to ‘figure out what to do next.’ No, not to stay home and care for children, but to mooch of a husband or a boyfriend while soul searching (aka: taking a language class or learning a new inapplicable skill that could be acquired after work). Incidentally, I have not had a single male employee quit with no plan in mind.”

Reading this paragraph, I don’t know where to begin, the blatant sexism, lack of emotional intelligence or obvious misogyny. The author makes an extremely weak and unintelligible case for suggesting that women are essentially unemployable due to the fact that they may get emotional, passive-aggressive and occasionally gossip. Hmmm…really? You mean men never get passive-aggressive? Have gossiped or gotten emotional. What planet does this woman live on? The author seems to value masculine characteristics and is judging the women in her company by those characteristics. Now, if the women were emotionally distant and unapologetically egotistical (two qualities we assign to men), she may appreciate them better. She is wrong to assume emotional distance equals professionalism.

The sexism in this article is incredible. I truly could not have summed up the problems in this article better than playwright Lauren Gunderson who said:

We excuse men for being overtly sexual with women, with being aggressive to a fault, with acting only for value and not for community, with abandoning their families for work. But we don’t excuse women for having emotions, having babies, being harmonizers instead of bullies, being pretty, being not pretty, having sexuality.

Now if you were to replace the word women in her blog with blacks, gays, men, transgendered, brown folk, I don’t know frogs? It would sound just as stupid. I implore you to try it. It makes little sense when any person uses a blanket statement to judge an entire group or assume that one characteristic in one person applies to all. I believe history has taught us not to judge others based on our prejudice and lack of understanding about how to deal with them. I’m sure I don’t even have to name people who might have persecuted others based on how they judged them; you can easily bring them to mind.

Read the rest of this article at Lipstick & Politics

In the early 1990’s I was hired as the principal of a school that was slated for closure in one year, and so my job was to prepare the students to transition to other schools. That’s not a job many people would want. But I saw it as important work; to create a wonderful last year for these students, students whose future would be shaped by what happened in that one year.

So we added one program, Education Through Music, which brought music education to all students in the school, as a core subject. I saw first-hand how introducing music education into the curriculum immediately brought excitement to the school. Students were more engaged, dedicated to their studies, with higher self-confidence and academic achievement improved overall. All of these changes happened with just the introduction of music education into the school.

What happened next no one, including myself, saw coming. It was decided to keep the school open, and the school won a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence Award from the U.S. Department of Education. This award was won, in part, due to the data that demonstrated the improved academic achievement of students.

Research empowers teachers and supports leadership. Research helps to set clear expectations, measure student understanding, and provide support for strategic planning and improvement. I’ve known in my heart for years that providing music education in schools serves as a catalyst to improve academic achievement, motivation for school, and increase self-confidence. Being able to say that what I know is backed by research makes all the difference in the world.

Over the past 20 years, we worked to bring the Education Through Music program to other schools, and today, we serve 15,000 students in 28 schools. As the program has grown, there has been much anecdotal evidence that the program is improving academic achievement.

Several years ago, we hired a full-time research manager to evaluate the effectiveness of the programs in these schools. For a small non-profit, this is a position that is not typical. But more and more, policymakers, funders, educators, board members, and supporters want data that shows a program works.

We have used our research results to strengthen the program and make it more effective, finding areas for improvement. The data we collect plays a central role in our professional development, and continues to improve our curriculum. Research results can provide an opportunity to make a good program great, and we have used our findings to continually improve individual schools and the overall program.

This month we are releasing our latest research report. The study found three key findings.

1) ETM students show greater academic achievement than their peers in non-ETM schools. The ETM program supports learning in the academic areas of Math and English Language Arts (ELA). Comparative data from the New York State (NYS) Assessment suggests that students within ETM schools have greater academic achievement than those in NYC public schools that have similar demographic populations. Furthermore, ETM students’ academic achievement is positively correlated to their musical achievement, based on performance measures from the NYS Assessments and the ETM Music Assessment.

2) ETM has a positive impact on students’ general development. The ETM program is important to students’ development in a variety of social and emotional measures, as indicated by survey responses from students, classroom teachers and parents. Most notably, respondents reported that the program helped students within the areas of self-esteem, creativity, and positive attitude.

3) ETM’s partnership school communities highly regard the music program. The overall program is perceived as a necessary and positive school presence, as indicated by survey responses from classroom teachers, principals, and parents. In particular, classroom teachers regard the program’s music instruction as beneficial to their students’ learning in all areas.

We have been striving to create a program that supports education reform, and is proven to work. It is popular in education to bring programs to scale and then determine their effectiveness or tweak problematic areas. With Education Through Music, I can say we’ve done the opposite. Our research shows that we have a high-performing, comprehensive program and we now hope to grow the program on a national scale.

To see the full study, visit http://etmonline.org/evaluation

Here we go again.

Just months after Barneys and Macy’s were slapped with lawsuits stemming from racial profiling accusations, Tiffany & Company has found itself in the middle of its own racial discrimination firestorm.

The New York Times reports that Michael McClure, a group director for two Tiffany stores in Texas, filed a suit in federal court on Thursday accusing the fine jewelry company of a “systemic, nationwide pattern and practice of racial discrimination.”

The lawsuit alleges that McClure is the only African-American to hold one of the more than 200 management positions at Tiffany, and that despite having received consistently glowing reviews since joining the company in 1993 and increasing sales 15 percent at one of his store locations this past year, McClure says he was given a “warning for termination” this spring. He claims the trouble began last fall, after Anthony Ledru was appointed Tiffany’s new senior vice president for North America.

Shortly after his arrival, Ledru requested that store and group directors send him photographs of themselves so he could become familiar with the company leaders, since, he said, he travels so much and meets so many people. McClure says he was issued the warning shortly after that exercise, and claims in the lawsuit that the move was evidence of an “apparent agenda to get rid of him from the start and racial bias at Tiffany.”

The luxury retailer has denied the allegations. Tiffany spokeswoman Linda Buckley said in a statement that McClure’s claims are “without merit” and that the company will address McClure’s “mischaracterizations” during the legal process.

“We welcome and value diversity in all forms and emphasize personal accountability and professionalism in a respectful and fair work environment,” Buckley said.

Tiffany launched two internal investigations after McClure decided to hire a lawyer in May. However, according to the suit, while the investigations were taking place McClure received an anonymous interoffice envelope that read: “Shortly after Anthony Ledru visited your market he made a comment to a small group of male market vice presidents that I think you should be made aware of. In reference to you, he expressed a surprise that ‘a black man is representing the Tiffany brand.'”

Robert D. Kraus, McClure’s lawyer, told the Times that the suit illustrates “racial bias in the belief, conscious or otherwise, that African-Americans are not appropriate ambassadors for the iconic, luxurious and sophisticated Tiffany brand.”

McClure’s allegations against Tiffany hardly exist in a vacuum: Much has been written about the obstacles and prejudices that black people in the workforce must contend with. The unemployment rate among black people is almost double that of whites, a disparity that has existed for decades and that a college education doesn’t seem to help with. Research has shown that job applicants with black-sounding names are contacted at a much lower rate than applicants whose names sound white. And once black employees are hired, they tend to earn significantly less than their white counterparts.

(h/t NYT)

Brian Lamb started Swivl with a vision: he wanted to make it easier for videographers and presenters to film themselves live. Using a clever little dock that panned around to follow a Bluetooth remote control, the Swivl raised $157,000 on Kickstarter and was released in 2012. Read More