Pause

The Part You Didn't Read in the Obituary

I received a call from my grandmother--known by all blood relations as Nana--that I must have slept through on Sunday morning. In her voicemail message, she apologized for calling so early and asked for my help, me being "a writer" and all.

My grandfather--known by all blood relations as Papa--died on Friday after battling more complications than I can count. We are sad and yet relieved for him; his last few years of health struggles were threatening his track record of having lived a good, enjoyable life.

Nana wanted my help re-drafting Papa's obituary. It ran Sunday, but Nana thought it didn't capture him as well as it could have. The facts were right, but Papa encompassed more than just accomplishments. "I want to show what a good person he was," Nana said in her follow-up email. I understood, but I didn't know how I could convey that in his obit, the most formulaic form of writing, which typically read like a press release for the deceased.

Dropping the A-List Mentality

My rant on BlogHer about my inability to live la vida linka.

Authenticity Gets Some Street Cred

...WALL St. cred, that is.

Thanks to pal and Business Pundit Rob May for sending me a note with the subject line, "you should blog this." It contained a link to an Economist article about authenticity in leadership.

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, two British academics, write that the most important trait any CEO must have is authenticity.

After 25 years spent observing well-regarded chief executives and good managers further down the ladder, the authors conclude that those who are true to characteristics they already possess make the best bosses. Their message to the aspiring high-flyer is “be yourself”, have a lot of self-knowledge and be comfortable with who you are. Identikit executives hiding behind the latest management fad, ambitious role players, time-servers and office politicians may manage to creep to the top. But Messrs Jones and Goffee insist that those they seek to lead will soon find them out. Authenticity cannot be faked, they say, and a little eccentricity won’t hurt either.

I love that this story constitutes business news--truly! No snark intended. I love that I've been asked to present with Ensight's Jeremy Wright at the New Communications Forum about Authenticity for businesses contemplating entering the social mediasphere. I love that people don't look at this word anymore and go, ewwww. How granola.

The fact is, authenticity hasn't changed, but our perception and understanding of it has. For one thing authenticity isn't synonymous with being woo woo or "out there". Companies that fake a green philosophy or open management style are Inauthentic. On the flip side, there are plenty of awkward types who inspire the best in people and understand their strengths and limitations; they are authentic, and effective.

As Daniel Pink says in A Whole New Mind: Competence has become a commodity.The only way to differentiate yourself in the business world today is to insist on being yourself. Ironically, it takes some of us years to come full circle back to the place we were, before we tried to be someone else.

Thanks, Rob, for forwarding the link. Tres vrai!

authenticity leadership executive development

When Food is Love Part II: Counting Portions

This is Part II of a series on the challenges faced when food and co-habitation collide.

Summer, 2004

Thankfully I’m not the only freak—there is at least one more, one of my closest girlfriends. She just moved in with her significant other and tells me she’s had a similar challenge of coordinating food consumption in the household. She’s a vegetarian; he likes to hunt. She’s used to cooking half a box of pasta and working on it for several days; he thinks pasta is a side dish. She wasn’t expecting groceries to compete with rent as a monthly line item. Listening to her tell me her issues sheds more light on mine.

Worthwhile: The Little Magazine that Could

I posted about the "Purpose, Passion, and Profit" pub over on the BlogHer site, in case you're interested. In fact, I'll be pointing readers there if I post anything remotely Pauseian.

When Food is Love Part I: When Grocery Carts and Metabolisms Do Not Align

This is Part I of a series I started writing a year and a half ago about when food and cohabitation collide.

He always gets hung up at the meat counter. I’m a fair-weather vegetarian, eating meat only when nothing else looks good; I’m hardly excited when he plunks a pound of tri-tip into our cart. I catch a glimpse of the price—$13—and roll my eyes. At least it’s better than the $18-per-pound ahi tuna he bought on our second date. At the time I thought he was trying to impress me, but I learned he actually buys this stuff for himself, though not as readily now that he's in grad school. He sees me look askance.

“Only the good stuff,” he says, handling the grocery cart, taking over the mission of stocking our house for the week. I feel much the same as I do when we go to Home Depot, REI, or any of the stores that pertain more to his tastes than mine—like an observer. But the thing is: I love food. So why, then, do I feel so alienated?

Attention Naked Bloggers: We Need Your Feedback on How You Deal with Mixing the Personal and Professional

In preparation for what we believe will be a thought-provoking SXSW Interactive Conference panel on combining personal and business blogging, BlogHer is conducting a survey to gather as many opinions as possible on the subject. We're trying to get a sense of how bloggers--personal or professional--feel about providing personal information in a business-related blog, or business information on a personal blog.

As a media consultant, I'm always encouraging business bloggers to loosen up, but is there a point where a blogger can get too loose? And what kind of personal information could enhance a business blog?

We are looking for responses from women and men, personal and professional bloggers. We'll announce results at SXSW and will post them to the BlogHer site in March. Thanks so much in advance!

Again the survey can be found here.

Valentine's Day Post Mortem

It started sometime last week, when I noticed we were in the month of February.

"What do you want to do on Valentine's Day?" I asked B-friend, not expecting a very inspiring response. I figured he would go on a diatribe about Valentine's Day being a Hallmark holiday, and I would quip back that hey, at least it's a day of intentional focus on our relationship, versus our recent mode of catch-as-catch-can--a snuggle when we both find we are sitting on the couch, during episodes of Project Runway. It seems the Bravo channel has been more responsible for our togetherness than we've been.

Leave a Memory After the Beep

Just a few short months ago, it was unusual to hear the crackle of my parents’ old-fashioned answering machine, which went on after the fifth ring when nobody was home. My mother bought the machine when I was ten, or younger. And the recording is just as old:

“You have reached the Des Jardins. No one is here to take your call right now, but if you leave a message we will get back to you as soon as possible.”

I’ve heard it maybe 20 times over the course of 15 years—not often. It seemed like someone was always home, usually my Mom, but on the rare occasion she wasn’t, my Dad would pick up. And on the rarer occasion that they both were out, I’d hear that old machine message and hang up before the end of the recording.

I’ve been hearing the machine a lot more since Dad’s been gone. No doubt, Mom’s been wanting to get out of the house more. Just the other day I heard a new message on the old, crackly machine:

“Hi, it’s Joy. I’m not here; leave me a message.”

It's Safe Again to Go Out into the New Media Waters

Roughly five years ago I was a Dot Com gal, sitting in my Dot Com desk cluster (cubicles were verboten), with an exceedingly long list of ice-cold leads that I was to call that day to advertise on said Dot Com.

The economy had tanked, and my job had morphed from Director of Business Development to Scrappy Telemarketer. I left eight, ten, calls for some people, praying to God they would call me back and forget my name at the same time. I had faint hope that we would pull out of the slump that was dragging down most content Web sites, but things were not looking good.

It wasn't meant to be this way, we were supposed to maintain and grow our millions of monthly page views. But advertisers had lost their faith in the exorbitant cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) model and were offering to pay only cost-per-acquisition (CPA) deals. In a short year media companies went from having little responsibility for whether viewers actually saw the ads we put before them to having to virtually walk viewers to the checkout counter. Companies wanted retribution for all of these eyeballs they paid for in 1999 that didn't pan out into sales. Hence, my new job as telemarketer, dialing for her rent.

I was confident that we would come out of the slump intact, but I wasn't so stupid that I didn't start my passive search looking for work elsewhere.