By Sally Duros
Real Estate Editor, Chicago Sun-Times
September 28, 2007
‘People would rather talk about their dysfunctional sex lives than reveal publicly their financial state.”
Ain’t that the truth.
That quote comes from Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard University and t Continue reading Elizabeth Warren: Why talking about credit card debt is taboo
Inspired by Bill Moyers piece in January 2012, I resurrect this article from 2007, during my time as Chicago Sun-Times Real Estate Editor. Six years later, what I sensed then has been proven to be true.
Lessons on Democracy from Woody Guthrie | BillMoyers.comBILL MOYERS: I’m Bill Moyers. And welcome to BillMoyers.com. Join us over the next few weeks, because on the air and on this website, we’ll be talking a lot about “winner-take-all” politics and how economic inequality – that vast gap between the top and everyone else – is not the result of market forces.
By Sally Duros, Real Estate Editor, Chicago Sun-Times
Published Chicago Sun-Times, August 2007
Woody Guthrie is the patron saint of this real estate section.
That means this land was made for you and me. All readers are
welcome here. Everyone –not just home buyers or home sellers, not
just Realtors or builders, not just public relations execs or
marketers, not just homeowners.
We ask all of you — especially renters and newcomers — to pull up
a chair and make this section home. That’s because, like Woody
Guthrie, we intend to bring tales of truth, fairness and justice to
these pages, while having some fun and elevating your spirit, too,
We like singing a pleasant tune.
Real estate is a market. It’s an investment. It’s a house, town
house, condo or rental apartment. It’s the biggest purchase and the
largest sale most of us will ever engage in.
But it is so very much more than that.
Real estate is the rich ground that roots us all to Chicago.
Whether we rent or own — we can’t make a go at life unless we have
a proper place to live.
Real estate is a deep subject that goes to the very core of what it
means to be an American and a Chicagoan. It thrives on legend, myth
and illusion as well as commerce, dealmaking and common sense. As
proud Chicagoans, we measure our quality of life not by whether we
own, but by where we live and our connection to the neighborhood
around us.
In this section, we explore all the controversial facets of Chicago
real estate — from affordability to lending to taxes to fraud —
and the context that informs those facets.
That means we won’t back down from exploring hot-button issues like
the regulatory environment surrounding our home purchases and the
laws that affect the quality of our home lives. Our modest goal is
to cover these issues in a non-politicized, applied way, and in a
manner useful to you. We will have succeeded if we make your life a
bit easier.
I interviewed Stedman Graham when he was the keynote for ChicWIT’s celebration of International Women’s Day, March 2, 2004. In this interview, Graham discusses his methods and his passions and how they helped him develop a personal brand platform. He also discussed how his famous life partner, Oprah Winfrey, inspired his own personal development.
Q: What is your nine-step process about?
Stedman Graham: Most of us don’t focus on personal development because we are so programmed to buy into labels and titles in our daily lives. Then we do the same thing every single day. We become so busy doing stuff that really has nothing to do with who we are
Real freedom is about being able to take information and make it relevant to the 24 hours you have every day.
I have developed a process to use the world’s resources to build your own life. It is a nine-step process of understanding and discovering who you are. And second, developing who you are. My process has been well received in the United States, Canada, South Africa. Corporations like it, and I have spoken at Harvard and Wharton about it.
Even at Harvard and Wharton, students wind up, when they are done, simply sitting in a room somewhere. They might get paid more but still they’ve learned little about how to leverage their own intellectual worth.
Most of us are never engaged in the world because we wind up doing the same thing every day. We can work at a job and after 30 years look back and see that we have no more than we had in the beginning. That’s Ok if that’s what you want.
This process (of building a personal brand platform) is for people who want a better life.
Q: Do you see a trend in time of life or gender related to when individuals become earnest about connecting with their authentic cores?
Stedman Graham: Women are in special need of the process because they are defined so much by the external world. They live in such a small box, and it is so programmed. They have such an expectation of what they should do. Their programming is very difficult to break out of without any help. It is very difficult for anyone to break out of if you don’t have the network, if you don’t have the information, if you don’t have the good old boys club, if you don’t have the ability to exchange information with other people who really know how to do it.
Unless there is an alignment of your talent, your skills and your passion with a process for developing them, you are not going anywhere. It doesn’t matter what you want to become, how determined you are, how smart you are. It is impossible to do it unless you come from a core competency that will allow you to grow.
It is a problem of self-empowerment and how to take responsibility for your own actions – which is really centered around personal excellence, results and performance.
You can’t possibly brand yourself unless you have a personal understanding of who you are.
I know that there is nothing that you can’t do. It doesn’t make any difference what your background is, whether your parents had money, etc, you can become equal to anybody following my process. Q: What was it like for you growing up?
This belief system that I could do it is different from how I grew up. I grew up in a small town, part black and part Native American in New Jersey. I grew up believing that it was all about white America, race and government control. I did not understand my own potential as a human being.
It took me 30-something years to understand that my potential was
predicated on my skills and talent. I did not know how to self-actualize. My parents told me to go to school and go to work, that was it.
This (blindness) is about not knowing how to process or how to think. It is not centered around other people.
This is about taking responsibility and being able to transcend bias. It is about all those things that will allow you to look at yourself and learn what you need to know about yourself to become more of a leader.
You have to align yourself with the resources of the world.
You have to create a platform that will create some opportunities in the market that you are residing in.
It is a process that blows me away every single day. It closes the achievement gap.
Q: Was there a specific aha! moment for you?
Stedman Graham: It was a combination of things.
I was in a relationship with a very powerful woman, Oprah, so I had pressure every single day to prove myself.
Most people don’t have that kind of pressure so they become comfortable where they are.
Because of the pressure I had to define myself under an umbrella that was bigger than life. That was one influence, and so was understanding business, and how business worked. Having a lot of different mentors was an influence too. I also am a person who is organized and I like that. It helped me come up with a program that I think all successful people have.
I did a comparative analysis of where I came from and where these people were going. And I saw a huge difference. I put that difference into my nine-step program.
It was like this… You’re a man in a relationship with a very powerful woman who reaches 20 million people every single day. You don’t get any respect for that. So the idea of having to find that was part of the catalyst. Being in that circumstance allowed me to look within to survive in that setting. From there I discovered that it is all internal. .
Q: What is your favorite part of your work?
Working with companies and working with business is something I do very well. I really enjoy being able to work with people who are smart. People who are a-plus folks and who are trying to maximize their potential in all spheres. That is what I enjoy most.
Q: What will you be talking about at ChicWIT’s International Women’s Day?
Stedman Graham: I will be talking about the nine steps, and internal and external branding.
I do this work with Merrill Lynch working with small businesses and high worth individuals. We change the trajectory of people’s lives.
We go into the idea of success circles. We teach them how to organize their lives based on three areas: education, career development and community development. As a core base of organizing their lives, we want them to be branded as an expert; we want them to make as much money as possible; we want them to be able to give back.
We organize their lives around their passion – what we call their life theme.
It really does change the entire financial landscape when you are able to understand what legacy they want to leave and what kind of brand they want in the marketplace.
Lots of people have financial tools. But a lot do not have alignment. That’s what I bring to the table. We give them the process for owning their world.
Q: Many people talk about this kind of personal development. One of the most interesting aspects of your work must be seeing the switch go off when people finally get it… Can you give me a good example of having seen that?
Stedman Graham: There are a number of switches and everybody’s different. Some women may have been held back by their lack of understanding that they can be anything they want. That’s the first switch. Once that switch gets turned on then there is another switch that needs to be turned on and that is “how do you do it”?
Then there are the switches of discovery, planning, being able to integrate that with financial tools, and further alignment.
The idea of being able to change the way you think about your possibilities and about yourself, that is the big switch.
That’s the key to owning your world.
For my own personal life, I wasn’t a great student in school because I never turned it on. Once I did, I realized that I could do as well as everyone. There was unlimited opportunity for me.
Q: Has your relationship with Oprah changed since your switch went off?
Stedman Graham: It doesn’t make any difference about anyone else. It just makes a difference about what you want to do in your own personal life to develop your own potential. The thing that you bring to any relationship is the fact that you are able to be your own man, to be your own person. That is the greatest gift.
You don’t ever have to rely on anyone else because you know how to make things happen, end of story. You can share, and you can talk and you can advise and you can help each other. But you stand alone. That is the greatest gift. Wherever you go you stand alone. And you can hold your own.
You never have to apologize anywhere, anytime for who you are. And you understand how to build and to grow and every day you become better than yesterday. If you get that, that’s freedom.
Regardless of how the world might define you or how other people might see you that’s not the real world you. That’s an illusion.
Q: What do you say to nay-sayers, to those who focus on circumstance?
I say it is harder at the top than at the bottom. It is harder when you have to think. It is more difficult when your life is in the limelight.
Leaders do not have it easy. People at the top know that. Success is not an easy thing to deal with. It is difficult to deal with from the family aspect of it. People change. It is much easier when you are playing softball at the lake.
The naysayers don’t understand what it’s like to be in the limelight. How the media can destroy you.
So it’s not what happens to you. It’scan you handle it. Do you have the capacity to deal with it every single day?
Q: How do you deal with questions of perceived scarcity vs. abundance? How do you counsel or help a kid in the projects recognize the resources around him when he sees pain and disappointment?
Stedman Graham: It’s a process that takes a long time.
You have to have the capacity – what it has taken me to get to this point. Serving in the US army, playing ball all over Europe. It’s taken me graduate school. It’s taken me four years in undergraduate school. It’s taken me working five years in the prison system. It’s taken me working in public relations. It’staken traveling around the world, traveling to South Africa. It’s taken me seeing Winnie Mandela’shouse being burnt down and being right there. It’s taken me almost losing my life in a couple of situations.
You are not here (at this level of awareness) because you have just arrived. You are here because you deserve to be here, not because someone gave you anything. For example, I can tell that your life as a journalist is based on countless hours of writing and developing and reading and working on your craft —- otherwise you couldn’t do it.
You are where you are because you deserve to be there. People might look at you and say, “Oh yeah, you have it easy because you work for this newspaper or that newspaper.” They don’t realize what it took to get there. And you can lose that in one second. Or in one week or two weeks, your life could change.
Q: Many women attending ChicWIT’s International Women’s Day have experienced the tiny little box you described at the beginning, and they have also been through repeated loss related to their careers. How would you counsel them to handle those ups and downs?
Stedman Graham: You have to have gone through that to be the success that you are. You had to have had failures. If you don’t know what it’s like to worry about missing payroll then you can’t appreciate when the money comes.
You are not at the top because you are given anything. You are at the top because you have processed your way through. Most people don’t see the process. They see “A to Z” and think that you have gotten there because of such and such.
What they don’t know is that it is impossible to do (get to the top by maneuvering or circumstance). You can’t maintain the posture. You won’t last. People who are experienced, and people who have gone through the process, and people who have earned the right to be where they are understand that.
Because the determination, the work and the perseverance that it takes to make it – you’ve got to have that. Otherwise you won’t make it.
It’s the never quit and never give-up syndrome. If you don’t have that, no matter what you get involved in, you will never make it.
Q: Many of us fare well at the small victories, but these days sometimes it feels as though you have to be heroic – any advice for that?
Stedman Graham: You have to keep going. You have to have the determination and keep going and not have your spirit broken or give in because it’s hard.
—Sally Duros
Consultant, Editor, Writer and Member of WorldWIT Steering Committee
An interview with
Steadman Graham
WorldWIT
International Women’s Day
June 25, 2004
BY SALLY DUROS
Originally published on www.worldwit.org — Liz Ryan’s social network
By SALLY DUROS
So we are caroling to the animals at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, and it’s quite a family affair with Santa Claus and humans disguised as reindeers and penguins, and earnest people singing holiday songs. There’s even free hot chocolate and cookies for everyone. But I am feeling disoriented because Santa Claus is being interviewed and he is talking about ‘time management.”
Time management? Give us a break! Whatever happened to holiday spirit? You know spirit like in sacred books and all the spiritual traditions of the world. NOT spirit like the car, the movie, or the gun. Santa, please say it isn’t so!
Some would say that spirit has been lost in the supermarket for a long time, and that Santa himself is one of those common signs of its impending extinction.
But I would counter that Santa originates from many great spiritual traditions of gift giving, and that spirit is actually ubiquitous. You’ll see it everywhere if you look for it. Even in business.
Like the cover story for Business 2.0 in November. In case you missed it, the topic was, “The Art of the Brilliant Hunch. Science is starting to understand why the best decisions come from the gut. Here’s how to make tough calls under pressure. ”
Boy, did I glom onto that headline. That’s because I know and you know that following the gut is always the best, but not necessarily the easiest, policy. When we ignore those gut feelings to do something one way, and we do it the other way and everything goes wrong and away from the direction of our intentions, we know the real bellyache is sure to follow. And our pain is amplified by the fact that we knew better!
The Business 2.0 article cites some interesting research on intuition. The bottom line, according to the article, is that emotions start the decision-making process, people are superb pattern makers, and we excel at abduction (rather than induction or deduction. Thank goodness for that because I never could keep those two straight.) The informed gut rules, the article said, in complex, complicated and chaotic situations, rather than in situations where formal rules can be applied.
Readers were also treated to several worthwhile capsules of how hunches work in business including advertising, publishing and broadcasting. My favorite factoid was that Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, shook uncontrollably when he came up with the idea of Starbucks. (My hypothesis is that the shakes came not from the power of the idea but from psychically connecting with the future caffeine overload of a nation of office workers.)
It was s good piece of journalism, bearing good news and befitting a fine publication like Business 2.0. The argument was based on scientific fact and expertise, and I applaud Editorial Director Thomas A. Stewart for his persuasive case.
Seems to me, though, Stewart missed pinning the tail on the hunch by about a foot and half. That’s because so much of his argument was draped against that common worldview of business, where relations are assumed to be contentious, competitive and warlike. Yeah, business is like that sometimes, but does it have to be?
It’s in my nature to shift perspective and ask: What happens when we change the worldview from one of scarcity and conflict to one of plenty and affinity?
Then the real mystery becomes less about how we make decisions in chaos and complexity, and more about how we become attracted to and then passionate about an idea. And sometimes that idea – like Starbucks – has multi-billion dollar legs.
I say the beauty of the hunch is expressed most brilliantly in the creative act of bringing something new into the world.
It’s like that hunch I have that the Business 2.0 writer was picking up some energy from the cultural stew when he decided to research this article because, well, he had a hunch! Still, where did that genesis spark come from? How was he attracted to the story idea and how was it attracted to him? Pattern played a part, paycheck played a part and editors played a part, but none of these constitute the Velcro that sealed the deal.
I believe the answer is spirit, the spirit unique to each of us that brings specific gifts into the world. And, yes, the kind of spirit that has to do with looking at the world wide open, and asking,” I wonder ..? And yes, that holiday spirit that celebrates all that is good in life, and the way we are all, each and every one of us, connected with each other.
So, here’s a holiday invitation offered in the spirit of peace and new beginnings. It’s adapted from the writings of Sonia Choquette, a well-known spiritual counselor in Chicago.
The next time you are called into a meeting with parties holding close cards and disparate interests, ask yourself this question: “How are we alike?” And look for what is true and what is real. Most of all, trust what you discover.
Radical, I know.
And if you are feeling really brave, check your assumptions at the door. Even if you have worked with these people for 20 years, walk into the meeting with this one directive: Never assume that you know anyone. And during your meeting, listen to what your intuition is telling you. Really listen – deeply. And trust it.
And most of all, here’s an invitation to a different kind of time management.
Let’s stretch the time period for holiday spirit to 365 days of the year.
And make each day a celebration of what is unique in each of us.
Let’s start the New Year off right.
Sally’s World, November 2003
www.worldwit.org
By SALLY DUROS
I am here to announce that the business suit for women is alive and well and sitting stylishly (minus the shoulder pads, thank goodness) on the shoulders and hips of businesswomen the land over! That’s proof that I’ve been hanging round the tech world a long time with its casual dress everyday and its designer tennies and its quirky habits of eating and talking – artfully – at the same time. Don’t get me wrong – I love that quirkiness, but I have forgotten the feel of a DK jacket and a Dana Buchman silk – jeeze louise, I don’t even know if those brands exist any more and whether their equity has held up.
The fact that women in business still get dressed up and wear beautiful clothes that resemble those worn by Cokie Roberts rather than those worn by Madonna hit me like a Perry Ellis camel-hair topcoat when I attended a recent breakfast meeting of the University of Chicago Women in Business Alumnae Network her in Chicago. I breathed a sigh of relief that I had left my tattered backpack at home and brought my Tumi bag instead.
I had correctly anticipated the formal atmosphere. It was an event put on by The Executives’ Club of Chicago as part of their New Women’s Leadership Breakfast Series. The title was “Perspectives from Women Shaping the Future” and “The Challenge of Leading Change. ” It was great! We heard the scoop from Linda Bammann, Executive Vice President, and Chief Risk Management Officer of Bank One. We heard from Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Chief of Staff, Sheila O’Grady. And we got the viewpoint of Judith Sprieser, Chief Executive Officer of Transora. Then we had an excellent moderator in Elizabeth Brackett, Correspondent for WTTW and “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”
They said a lot of insightful things. But the bottom line was the usual “Managing change is difficult.” It was my turn to be incredulous – well “Yes!” I guess I thought the rock was a bit higher up the hill and the conversation might have advanced to a deeper level. But a panel discussion is limited in what it can deliver, and it’s a whole different story when you’re talking about light as a feather early stage start-ups vs. large organizations like our panel was discussing. I started recollecting a conversation I had a while back with a fellow who knows a lot about cultures and change – in both start-up businesses and Fortune 100 companies – Bob Okabe, principal of Illinois Partners and co-founder of Chicago’s Prairie Angels Capital partners LLC., the manager of the first organized angel fund in the Midwest. Bob has a grey suit pedigree in investment banking and corporate finance, holding senior leadership positions at Lehman Brothers, Kidder Peabody, and General Electric, among others.
Sally:How do you get to the authentic core of what your values are, so that you can build a business that will give you what you want it to give you? Obviously, you don’t want it to just be successful. You want to also have a business that you want to go to every day.
Bob: I think a lot of entrepreneurs just say, “It’s my business and I’m doing it my way, and therefore it’s something I want to come to every day,” but they don’t realize it’s not necessarily something other people want to come to. … Too many people hire for skills, not for culture.”
Sally: Can you talk about culture a bit more? About how it’s manifested in business?
Bob: Yes, I think culture is expressed consistently in one of two ways. One is by leadership, and the other is, you institutionalize it. I think it can be institutionalized. There are companies like SAS that clearly institutionalize it, and they foster a very particular culture or an attitude, and they build systems to make sure it stays consistent as the company grows.
“Then, there are companies that do it just by leadership. I mean, at GE Jack Welch had to do it by force of will, because the organization already existed. He had to fire people at this very senior level who were probably good at their jobs but didn’t fit the culture. He had to reward people who fit the culture but weren’t successful. And he had to stick by people whose performance was mixed. I think he basically did it by force of will and leadership; so you can do it in either way. The question is, what is easiest for you.
“I think in a small company, by its nature, it is going to be done by force of will, by leadership.”
Sally: Well, yes; you would say, “This is what I want.”
Bob: “But you know what? A lot of entrepreneurs – a lot of raw startups put together their team by who’s convenient and who’s willing, not by who’s right. …I see lots of teams where it’s a bunch of guys who knew each other. ”
Sally: Do people hire from skills versus culture because it’s easier to quantify skills than culture?
Bob: I think first of all that people hire in the following order: skills, personality, and then culture last. Really, what they should hire for is culture first, skills second, and personality last. Because the boat moves as fast as the slowest rower, so if there’s somebody who’s not motivated and not interested, I don’t care how physically able he is; he’s not going to row well.”
Sally: Have you gained any insight into office politics and how that affects an organization?
Bob:Office politics are a reflection of the culture in an office. People politic within an office if they feel they have to, or if they feel it will gain them a significant advantage over others. So people who are known as brown-nosers have learned and believe that office politicking helps them. And a culture that accepts that is a culture that breeds it.
But the reality is that if you’re working together, then it doesn’t matter. A consistent culture reduces the amount of office politics. I would argue that the more consistent an organizational culture is, the less onerous the office politics are.
Sally: That would actually make sense. Because if people understand the rules of how you work together, and they have enough guidance and understanding of that, then they won’t be bringing personal – you like me, you don’t like me, I like you, I don’t like you – into the mix so much.
Sally: You have to have some kind of good radar working to understand culture so well.
Bob: I think good entrepreneurs do.
The bottom line of our conversation was that Bob and I agreed that you can tell a lot about the culture of an organization by the way it talks about itself.
From my viewpoint, that talking comes in many forms. In dress codes, and hours kept. In lunch etiquette, and coffee time and water cooler gatherings. In please’s and thank you’s or growls and purrs. In office spaces and public gathering places. In email formats, and cc’s and bc’s and subject lines. In golf outings and take your kid to work days and family leave. In how you celebrate holidays and birthdays and days of important business events. In how you hire and promote and celebrate. In the stories the business tells about itself in the hallways, the executive offices, in the mailroom and in the media.
And all of these things will contribute to whether you’re wearing high-tops or floral pattern pumps to the office. As the old saying goes, “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Any type of shoe is fine as long as it fits you.
NarTube – Watch Video
Sally’s World, August 2003
www.worldwit.org
By SALLY DUROS
Leadership. We talk about it all the time. But what is it?
I’ve worked in places where leadership is measured by office configuration and size of paycheck, by number of phone calls placed and appointments made, by the urgency, authority and volume of voice with which one gives orders, by the minutes one arrives late at a meeting, or by the number of minutes of face time one has with the boss.
You know and I know that none of this is leadership, but sometimes it passes for the real thing when there is lack of an authentic leader.
Oddly, it was a photograph of an event in a far off place that got me to thinking about how we define leadership.
It was a news photo in the Sunday New York Times. Black and white, running over three columns at the top of the page, the photo was of about two dozen women – dressed casually in slacks, skirts and blouses -tossing handfuls of soil on what looked like a mound of dirt and rocks. The caption said: “Women in Dyararnakir, Turkey, performed a task customarily done by men when they threw soil on the grave of Cemse Allak, a stoning victim.” The headline on the article read, “Honor Killings defy Turkish Efforts to End them.”
The women throwing the dirt are members of KAMER, a women’s rights association. The woman in the grave had lain semi-conscious in a hospital for seven months after her skull had been crushed. The man who had made her pregnant lies in a grave of his own. This is the way honor is upheld in a culture that believes that an unmarried pregnant woman, even if brought to that state through rape, has brought shame upon her family and merits a death sentence.
It appears Turkey has been trying to win its way into the European Union, and to do so it has passed human rights legislation that lawmakers hope will squelch the tradition of murdering in the name of “family honor.” As many as 5,000 women and girls are murdered by family members each year in so-called “honor killings” around the world, according to The United Nations Population Fund.
Turkey’s legislation is necessary, but it won’t mean squat without grassroots leadership like that provided by the KAMER women who visited the stoning victim in the hospital, claimed her body, and saw to it that she had a coffin and a burial. They supported her when her family wouldn’t. Research on “honor killings” has shown that females in the family – mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters and cousins are commonly complicit in the violence and support attacks and “honor killings.”
Given Turkey’s cultural context, the actions taken by the women of KAMER is clearly an act of leadership.
Given the “Western” cultural context, what I see in this news story is that time is right for each of us to take personal action to disarm the weapon that enables ancient practices like “honor killings.”
That weapon is gossip.
Women value connection to others more dearly than anything else, research over the past three decades has found. And because of that, gossip hits hard as a stone and fells even the strongest among us.
Women attack each other constantly, covertly and vigorously, indirectly through gossip, slander, shunning and bullying. Still, that isn’t as aggressive as what men do – or is it?
The ways in which women attack – dubbed indirect aggression by psychologists – are devastating to individuals. Women mostly target each other, and in some cultures the attacks are deadly.
Yes, men’s typical aggressive choices – fighting, guns, bombs, weapons of mass destruction – are designed to kill and maim. This kind of aggression is open and endemic. We discuss it and actively take sides on its presence in the world. But woman’s way of attacking indirectly allows us to trivialize, minimize, and hide the way we hurt each other.
Indirect aggression has a profound affect on the status of women in the world. It is the main expression of women’s sexist beliefs about ourselves.
I can almost see the eyes rolling here – NOT another call for political correctness! This is a bit of a mind twister so please bear with me. This is absolutely not political correctness. There is no code of behavior. No checklist of approved attitudes and behaviors. Nor should we consider taking the short cut by imitating men’s worst behaviors.
No. We have to find a new way.
There is instead only the requirement that we be real and respectful and speak our minds, that we learn to let go of our anger and envy, that we refuse to participate in mutual downgrading.
Women are sexist. We are programmed to work against and undervalue ourselves. Indirect aggression is the method we use to keep each other in line and maintain the status quo. And the status quo does not serve our goals. The status quo seeks to keep us less visible.
This is a dirty old secret that was never really a secret and that has finally been thoroughly addressed in Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chesler, a groundbreaking feminist psychologist and author. Chesler says that the book took her 21 years to write, and during most of those years other women begged her not to write it.
In the Introduction, Chesler says: “As feminist women, we knew that we were doomed without sisterhood so we proclaimed it, even in its absence. We wanted to will it into existence, verbally, without wrestling it into being.”
Those of you tempted to browse to the next page because of the word “Feminist” – please don’t! This book helps us – it helped me at least – to understand and recognize the attitudes that I have internalized and how they are hobbling my power in the world.
The book is exhaustively researched. Chesler provides evidence from primate and anthropological research, workplace studies, sociological data, original interviews, memoir and more to make the case for woman’s inhumanity to woman. She discusses indirect aggression among girls and teenagers, between mothers and daughters, sisters and best friends, women in the workplace, women in groups, as well as personal examples from the women’s movement.
And yes, Chesler offers examples from research that demonstrate how women’s gossip creates the climate in which “honor killing” of a woman can become inevitable.
Although women in the West are leading the way on many fronts our advancement is hobbled by these dynamics.
“Women in the family face life and death battles, and we transfer those into our worklife,” Chesler says in a telephone interview. “It would be better if women could learn to take things less personally. … keep our eyes on the prize.”
“Women are the chief enforcers of this (aggression),” she says. “Men do not notice it.”
There’s a lot of information in this book, and it’s tempting to make it an intellectual exercise. We shouldn’t let that happen. The bottom line is personal and in our hearts. It takes us beyond rhetoric and thought and to a place where we each, as individuals, can recognize our everyday sexist assumptions about ourselves and other women.
I encourage you to read Chesler’s book to fully experience the passion and clarity of her argument. As Chesler writes, “I no longer share as an article of faith the belief in the power of political-social programming to improve human nature. … I am suggesting that the human spirit has the power to learn from adversity in remarkable ways.”
The spirit does. To push back and expand our personal edge in the world causes discomfort. But it also forces learning. And that learning can bring change around the world.
In Turkey, the change is under way at the legislative front and at the personal front. That Turkey even cares how it looks to the European Union and the “Western” world is the result of the personal work of millions of individuals and, in turn, institutional response to that work, during the past several decades.
Those of us in WorldWIT can help write the headlines of the next decades by taking leadership and fine-tuning our ear and our actions so that we are acting openly and authentically as woman and as individuals.
Each of us can heighten our awareness and then, before you know it, we’ve jointly created a critical mass of consciousness that will take us to the next level. That’s social change.
It is in that spirit that I offer Chesler’s 9 suggestions for how women and daughters can accept, sense and be with ourselves and one another to create a fresh perspective.
1. “Humbly accept that change is a process.”
It can’t be rushed.
2. “Acknowledge, do not deny the truth.”
Women are normally aggressive, oppressed women are angry; be realistic about what to expect from other women.
3. “Become strong.”
Develop a strong sense of self and of your uniqueness.
4. “Become strong enough to take criticism.”
Hear respectfully. Opposing views are not a personal betrayal.
5. “Learn to express your anger: rules of engagement.”
Perhaps here we can learn from men, who comfortably occupy a psychological middle distance from each other.
6. “Learn to ask for what you want: Learn to move on if you don’t get what you want.”
Put it into words and ask for it directly.
7. “Do not gossip. ”
Do not initiate it and do not pass it on.
8. “No woman is perfect: apologize when you’ve made a mistake and then move on.”
If you are the saboteur, cut yourself some slack. If you are slandered or sabotaged, deal with it directly.
9. “Treat women respectfully.”
Cultivate the concept of an honorable opponent.
By the way, the opinions presented in Sally’s World are mine and do not in any way represent those of WorldWIT. I invite your rage and your praise. Email me!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnSauj2855M
Sally’s World, July 2003
www.worldwit.org
By SALLY DUROS
Lately, those who make a living as pundits have been busy clicking and clucking and clattering keyboards and uttering bellicose profundities about one, single-syllable word: Facts. The questions about fact morphing into fiction float and bob about like so many balloons buoyed by the media winds.
Me – I’m not chasing any balloons because I take as fact very little of what I read or see broadcast in any of the media streams. I am one of those people who thought the Barry Levinson film, “Wag the Dog,” was a thinly veiled documentary.
Instead I ride the media currents to see what is bobbing on the horizon of the public mind. What’s happening today is a simple matter: The media soufflé has flattened and with the collapse of the puffery – within corporations, government, and media outlets – we are rushing to fill the void. I’m enjoying the “whooshing sound,” and looking forward to seeing what kind of omelets we’re left with.
Label me wacky or label me a cynic (perhaps both!), but for me a fact begins with that which I can personally touch, see, smell, taste, and hear. I then apply the gut test – my intuitive sense – to create an impression aligned with my value system, cultural wants and spiritual beliefs. Some of my criteria are tangible and some are intangible. And then, when I’m done I still don’t have a fact. I have my belief. One of my core beliefs is that we are all – each of us – a spinmeister of sorts.
I liked the tale that was being spun by master storyteller Judy Wicks, owner of Philadelphia-based White Dog Cafe, co-chair of the National Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and chair of the Social Venture Network (SVN). She was speaking at a kickoff meeting for a new organization here called Sustainable Chicago.
Wicks says that upon waking every day, she looks in the mirror and says: “Good Morning Beautiful Business.” You have to like a woman who has two cabins in the woods, one named “Happy House,” and the other named “Fart Freely.” What began as a home-based coffee shop in 1983 is now a restaurant that seats 200 and grosses $5 million a year, with a commitment to fun, food and social activism.
What was most persuasive about Wicks was that her tale came right from her heart. I could tell because I had heard it before – from entrepreneurs of all political stripes and others involved in building local economies. That is, that business is really about relationships, relationships with certifiable, verifiable, living, breathing real people.
“A large factor in our success is that we are a real community-based business,” Wicks said. “We share values with our customers.”
“Living and working in the same community has given me a great sense of place, which is really important for building local, living economies,” Wicks said. “When you work and you live in the same place there is a very short distance between decision makers and the person who is affected by your decisions because every day you see your customers that you serve, every day you see your employees that you work with. And you live in the community and you see your neighbors (and the impact of your decisions.)”
That’s the kind of real world fact-checking that resonates for me, and helps me spin my personal vision of a perfect world. It also occurred to me that that’s the kind of fact-checking you get, and you can create through your local WorldWIT email discussions and real world events.
WorldWIT was ahead of the game in understanding that the strength of the new email tools of the web could help women with a friendly point of view, women from the same work/life integration tribe, women in the same cities and regions, share information with each other, and then create real world networks.
When you post a question to a local discussion list, like ChicWIT, you can receive a dozen or more replies. You can pick and choose what information to follow up on based on your own criteria. Even better yet, you can attend a networking event and meet the helpful individuals who communicate with you through the lists. And if something happens and you have to change jobs and move to another city, you can use the same WorldWIT resource to check out your new hometown.
Before the rush to make the Web a commercial force, there was a web that was a community of people. Hobbyists and techies and those who were simply curious built the web by putting up special interest sites, basically as communications tools that said, ” Hi, there – look what I’ve done!” That was about it. If you were on the web around 1995, you will remember when Yahoo was just a page of favorite links, a daily record of what was new on the web, put up by a couple of guys who thought the information-sharing was really neat. It was a community, and the sites were places where like attracted like, where you could find your tribe.
During the days of the dotcom gold rush, some of us lost site of the tribal energy because some financial wizards got the idea that there was money in huge global markets and numbers of eyeballs. Perhaps there is. But in my opinion, that is not the richest or deepest well.
The under tapped frontier is the landscape occupied by WorldWIT, where the locals knock on each other’s doors to find the answers to the burning questions of the day, the answers that simplify our everyday lives.
When we send our request to the WorldWIT universe, we are inviting friendship and collegial exchange. We are building trust and creating relationships. We – friends, neighbors and colleagues – are finding and becoming trusted sources for each other. And that is a great way – and the only way – to do business with each other. And that – to me – is a fact that I count on.
Watch The Organization Man on PBS. See more from The Open Mind.
Sally’s World, June 2003
www.worldwit.org
By SALLY DUROS
There’s a book I have to read. It’s called The Organization Man. It was written in 1956 by William Whyte, and it’s about time that I learned what the book says.
When I was a girl, I held a secret deep and true, and that was that somehow even though I was female I would grow up to be an “Organization Man.” My dad was an Organization Man, and my best friend’s dad was an Organization Man, and the kids’ next door, their dad was an Organization Man.
I wasn’t sure what it meant exactly – It was just a book laying around our house – but I knew my dad was one, in my simplistic view because he wore a hat, and a suit, and he went to work downtown every day. My dad would leave the house at the same time every morning. When the weather was warm he would walk to the train. You could hear the screen door slam. I would sometimes watch him exit, impressed by how fast he walked. It was a mile-and-a-half to the commuter train that took him to downtown Chicago where the train belched him out with thousands of other people, and they all walked with great intention and urgency to the gleaming revolving-glass doors of the skyscrapers where they worked, engaged in their important missions of commerce and building things and selling stuff. I knew about that because he would bring me downtown with him a couple of times a year to show me off to the other civil engineers he worked with.
His route home led him like clockwork every day, up the side streets of our north side Chicago neighborhood, until he hit the end of the alley on an adjacent street. Which is when I would spy him coming around the corner, and I would run fast up the alley and jump into his arms, the dependable arms of an Organization Man dad, and he would carry me back to my mom, and siblings and the house, and it was nice and cozy like a TV sitcom.
My dad brought home the scent of ink, paper and concrete, and his face felt rough at the end of the day, and I liked that. He carried a briefcase, and he often had work to do in the evening.
Although I couldn’t read the book The Organization Man, I knew my dad was one. Nearly all the dads I knew were Organization Men, except Mr. McHenry, and he owned his own business, and that seemed very strange and mysterious, and he was around during the day and even had a small disassembled airplane in his back yard, which was very exotic and alien.
I was reminded of these childhood memories when I was chatting with Penny Pickett, Business Director for the Telecommunications Development Fund, at Springboard 2003-Midwest, the women’s venture capital forum. Penny was talking about the changes she has seen in the way businesses are viewed since she had started her own business first in 1980.
She started her business in 1980. When it was initially based in her home, it might solicit a condescending comment and a pat on the head. But when men headed to their garages and their basements after businesses embedding the culture of “The Organization Man” had mass layoffs during the 1980s, the conversation rose to another level. That’s when the descriptive word “entrepreneur” emerged.
A basic tenet of The Organization Man was the idea that an employee gave the corporation loyalty and, in turn, the corporation took care of you. Some folks referred to that disparagingly as corporate welfare. The book proposed that employees would have 20-, 30-, and 40-year careers with one corporation.
When my dad started working for the organization, it had about 60 employees based in Chicago. When he left, the company had about 700 working worldwide. When the company merged with another two years ago, it had about 1200, still a small-to-medium sized business by most measures.
My dad retired from the organization nearly two decades ago, with 35 years under his belt. His company merged with another one two years ago, but still the company sticks with its tradition of inviting every one who ever worked for the company to the holiday party. My dad still sees many of his colleagues from the old organization. He can thank the organization for financial stability for his family, a lifetime of friends, and work that challenged him and he enjoyed. My dad says that it was a pretty good deal.
The downside to being an Organization Man
If there was a downside to being an Organization Man, it was the spiritual demand the organization made on the individual.
“This book is about the organization man. If the term is vague, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about. They are not the workers, nor are they the white-collar people in the usual, clerk sense of the word. These people only work for The Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions.”
– From the book The Organization Man, William Whyte
As painful as the evolution has been, today we are seeking a spiritual anchor in work, and this has been especially liberating for dads. Today it is as common to see dads who are self employed as dads who are working for organizations. Dads and men, in general, once a rarity after school at playgrounds, are becoming increasingly common. Whether there by choice or because of a lay-off -most of them look pretty happy to be refereeing the basketball games, manning the tube swings, testing the jungle gym and toting the backpacks of their kids. That’s an experience that the organization never granted my Dad and other Dads of his generation.
If the organization doesn’t seem to have room for “The Organization Man” anymore, some of us have learned a new way to be in the world that means creating our own organization – even if it is only in our heads. This way of being isn’t easier. But Pickett says, we are nonetheless learning new behaviors.
“People today are more flexible and more entrepreneurial, even if they do go to big companies,” she says. “More people are biting the bullet and learning the characteristics of entrepreneurs.”
This brought to mind a friend of mine who has adapted the mindset of a contract employee, even though she is a full-time employee. Pickett believes that given the choice people like my friend would elect for a more comfortable work lifestyle.
One also shouldn’t confuse the heart-sets of a small-business owner and that of an entrepreneur, Pickett says.
“A capable business owner is the person who’s been pink-slipped and is desperate; they need an income,” she says.” They haven’t been able to find a job, so they start a company.”
“Small-business owners, we couldn’t survive without them,” she says. “They build good companies. They provide services that we all use. They’re important to their communities. They pay their taxes. They’re good people. They’re just not driven the way entrepreneurs are.”
“The entrepreneur is somebody who tends to be pretty bright, but tends to get fairly bored,” she says. “They like to learn new situations, but once they’ve done that they will get bored fairly quickly if it becomes routine. An entrepreneur has a real need to fix things, to improve things, to really change the world. Now money may be the thing that you keep score with, but in many ways, I don’t think money is the real goal.”
“An entrepreneur is a do-gooder who has a strong conviction that there’s something that they can do that’s going to make the world better or make people’s lives better or solve something that really is hurting a lot of people,” Pickett says. “They’d like to make money. That’s great, because in many ways, making a lot of money just gives them the cushion where they can flush out other ideas. It’s a vision thing.”
I look at it this way, if the small-business owner is the eagle on the U.S. seal, and the entrepreneur is the cowboy on the frontier, then The Organization Man should be honored on the face of our dollar bills.
Today, Dads are just as likely to be one as another, and Father’s Day is the time to honor all of them. Happy Father’s Day, Dad!
Recommended reading for this Father’s Day: The Organization Man, by William Whyte; Not Just A Living by Mark Henricks; Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte; and Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson.
Sally’s World, May 2003 www.worldwit.org
By SALLY DUROS
New research in the United Kingdom has found that among women born between 1954 and 1958, college graduates were 50% more likely than non-graduates to remain childless throughout their lives. Studies conducted in the United States and Germany had similar findings.
These trends register as true for my generation of college-educated women, but I am betting that findings might be different for women younger than I am.
I have seen three circles of friends choose motherhood at different phases of their lives. When I was in my early 20s, many of my neighborhood friends from grade school were married and had their first children shortly afterward. When I was in my late 20s and early 30s another circle – these women my college friends – married and had kids a few years into their careers. And finally during my late 30s and early 40s, during the 90s, another circle – this time high-level executive women – decided that to follow their hearts, they would put corporate America behind and have families.
I made a different choice. When I was 13, I decided that I would not marry and that I would not have children. My youthful decision, arrived at so easily, emerged organically from the political, social and economic climate of the time. It was my personal hard line against what I saw as an erosive devaluing of women’s contribution to the world.
Sometimes we doubt the powers of our intentions, our ability to do what we intend to do. But this youthful commitment was something that I accomplished with little difficulty. Throughout my adult life, as time passed, with considerable reflection and equal doses of gladness and sadness, I have stayed that initial course.
At times, I have felt as though my head intended one thing, but my heart expected another. There is a way, I think, that women of my generation, no matter how well-developed our desires, still believe at some gut level that a knight on a white horse will ride in to save us from ourselves.
When I told a client of mine recently that the main reason I didn’t have children was because I had chosen a career over home-making, he said he didn’t believe it. I suspect many people just a squeak younger than me don’t believe it. But it’s true.
The way I perceived things as a teenager, the role of wife and mother was limited, especially financially. I really didn’t like the idea of not having my own source of income. My mother worked hard creating a loving home environment, raising four children and being wife to my energetic, responsible and loving father. Still some inner voice urged her out into the world, and in 1971, like so many women in their 40s at the time, she headed off to do office work. It was a point of, well, umm, discussion in our family’s household, and it met with a little resistance (I love you, Dad!)
But in the end my mother won. She took deep pride in the work she did, the money she earned, and the substantial contribution her income made to the well-being of our family. My mother loved working outside the home. As a result, she was always very supportive of my life choices – no matter how hare-brained they seemed to others – and she always urged me to aim for personal happiness.
At the time I made my youthful decision, there were few visible and positive examples of the myriad ways to be a woman, raise a family and have a career. After watching my mother’s happiness with her work, I took the road most natural to me. It seemed that to have two full-time jobs, and to try to do them both well – was not an option for me.
Since that time, many women have taken creative plunges into unknown seas of work and motherhood. Their powerful excursions – into business, politics, family and community – have opened doors for women and men alike. The most fortunate of us now have full freedom to choose our roles in accordance with our unique desires as individuals rather than by rules of gender and conformity.
For Mother’s Day, I offer them deep gratitude for their courage in finding their own way, clearing the path and making transparent and accessible for all of us what was once invisible: our unique hearts and our unique paths.
Recommended reading for this Mother’s Day: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh; The Price of Motherhood: Why the most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least valued by Anne Crittenden; Bold Women, Big Ideas by Kay Koplovitz; and Toward a New Psychology of Women by Jean baker Miller.
By the way, the opinions presented in Sally’s World are mine and do not in any way represent those of WorldWIT. I invite your rage, your praise and your suggested readings. Email me!
First Published in Sally’s World, April 2003 www.worldwit.org
By SALLY DUROS
In the 80s, we worked hard. In the early 90s, we worked smart. In the late 90s, we worked fast. But now, firmly established in the first decade of the new millennium, we are working all three, but most of all we are working passion.
Today many of us have switched careers or spun out of traditional organizations into smaller more intimate ones – maybe even our own. It’s a realignment of values – we are giving up what doesn’t matter for what does matter. In seeking to live from our hearts in our work and personal lives, we are responding to the irresistible tug of passion.
When passion is present, we don’t stop simply because something goes wrong. We feel the pain, yet we keep going. Having passion doesn’t mean that we will succeed. It simply means that our endurance and resilience are boosted by the power of our authentic presence. Working from passion might improve the likelihood of our success, while most certainly changing our definition of success.
But don’t mistake drive for passion. Drive is a push, not a pull. It takes us away from, not into our hearts.
Sometimes I can’t believe what a wonderful life I have because as a writer and a journalist, I often get to experience mind meld with fascinating and insightful people. Because of a book project that I am working on, I had one of those conversations the other day with Randy Komisar, author of The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living.
Komisar, who is a long-time practitioner of Buddhism, integrates his life and his work with a powerful core belief: Time is short. Don’t squander any of it. Invest your time in only those things that are important.
We were talking about passion and its role in start-up business. Komisar believes that women are better at recognizing and following passion than men are.
I agree.
To live from passion, you have to listen to your intuition and be open to hearing the beat of your personal drummer. Komisar says that women are more open-minded than men in this way, in part because men are slotted into the breadwinner role that women have traditionally been excluded from.
“Women – it’s the other side of the curse, the curse being that they’ve not had the opportunities,” Komisar says.” Women because of that are open-minded about finding what matters. They are empowered because they are disempowered in the traditional sense. Women are much more creative, I think, and much more courageous in terms of looking for those things that really matter.”
“If you think about it, (passion is at the core) of the traditional dilemma of being the super mom,” Komisar says. “You have your family and you have your career. What you see (in the struggle) is balancing two passions.”
“Most of the women involved in the dialogue about balance of life and career are involved because they care about both, because they have passion.”
Men are suffering more than women in this equation, Komisar says.
“Talk to a 50-year old man about what he wants to do next, and he looks at you (lost) … I”ll play golf. There’s no dimensionality. Their whole identity is in one thing.
Komisar, who teaches classes in entrepreneurship at Stanford, says he has learned much from students pushing against his ideas. He now more fully understands the multiplicity of passion. You may have many passions, and you will follow different passions at different times in your life.
Personally, I have been giving passion free rein in my work for a while now. I can attest that it’s difficult, financial lunacy, and often lonely. But I can also attest to the breathless creative flow that occurs when I and my passion are working side by side. There’ s nothing like it.
Except maybe this.
When I was a 10-year-old kid, I and my best friend of the week would do shoulder stands on my living room couch and imagine that we were walking from room to room on the ceiling. We would step over the tops of door frames, whose structures formed little barriers between the rooms, creating an archipelago of ceiling space, and walk from island to island, checking the treasure that laid in the bowls of the glass light fixtures.
Maybe it was the blood rushing to my head, but I used to wonder if my friend were seeing the same thing I was seeing as we explored the upside down world. I would fantasize that I was inside her brain, looking out from behind her eyes, walking on the ceiling from room to room, until it was time to go and I walked down the walls and out the door and across the street to eat dinner with her family. I would be me, but inside her head for just an hour or two, just long enough to understand what it was like to be her.
I haven’t learned yet how to get inside the mind of another, but I have found the next best thing – the wisdom I am exposed to in a great interview and the fact that I can pass it on to you. What could be better? That’s passion!