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Finally! A corporate blog that shouts from the rooftops the secrets of successful career women

My latest on BlogHer: The secret? There is no secret. But there is a fat conspiracy going on that women are supposed to be able to do it all. Thankfully there's a place to discuss the scam on working women.

The Tipping Point for Companies That Fail

My latest on the Fast Company Blog...Confidence is a good thing. Overconfidence is a dangerous thing. Hubris is a lethal thing.

In Loving Memoriam: Jennifer Guy

We received some bad news yesterday. Not surprising news--Jen was sick for a while. Her friends had been scrupulous about keeping people in the loop. But still, hearing that one of the most vivacious people I've ever known had passed away seemed unreal to me. Not possible.

For both my husband and myself, this is very much a shared loss. Jesse and Jen dated for years before he and I did. They were close to each other for a long time. I met Jen on the tail end of their relationship, way before Jesse and I even went on a first date. I was told we were alike in some ways. When she was searching for new career opportunities I introduced her to a woman named Mindy who owned a consulting firm that I had been working for, and that I was leaving to pursue grad school. Ironically, I never entered the MA program, opting instead to try other things (sigh). But Jen and Mindy ended up partnering and growing the business astronomically. They both became my entrepreneurial heroes. Through them I learned that I had to stop trying to stumble upon good opportunities and to accept that anything worthwhile would come by hard work coupled with great faith.

At the time that I connected Jen with this opportunity, Jesse and I began to date. For a while this made things tense, more for me than for Jen. She had moved on and was dating someone else, but I knew that she had been hugely important to Jesse. A little more than a year into my relationship with Jesse, Jen and I connected.

"You realize, you gave me a miracle," she said, referring to her business.

"You realize, you gave ME one," I replied.

From that point, I grew to love and admire the woman who influenced the man I would marry.

I had never maintained friendships with exes or friends of exes. I learned a new way of being with Jen; I learned to appreciate, honor, and love Jesse's past--and the people who made up the past. I learned that they could be brought into the present.

I can't help but try to imagine what thoughts she had, whether she was at peace, before she died. I hear that it was a peaceful passing, but I'll never know what it was like for her. What I do know for sure is that she had devoted friends and family who cared for her for two years, that she is free of the pain, and we miss the hell out of her.

Jennifer Guy

The Servant Leader: More than a paradox or trendy corporate mandate...and not kinky

My latest on BlogHer...What if we didn't just want to be the boss? We might get something done.

Entrepreneurial Sin #5: Failing to trust others as much as you trust yourself

I spent the first decade of my career ignoring my Midwestern tendencies. From the very first day that someone laughed at my flat pronounciation of the name "Eric," I was convinced that I needed to denounce my heritage of twangy vowels, blushing modesty, and blind trust in the good intentions of others. The last bit, I learned, was called "gullibility" out East.

I came home from work one day nearly a decade ago, my first week at a new job, sharing with my roommate the odd behavior of my boss, who had sat down with me and gave me what I only later identified as a veiled threat.

She explained to me how important it was that I "get it". I nodded in agreement to appease her but didn't truly understand what she meant. I noticed that many of the other people in our department were constantly present for our boss, practically camping outside of her office in order to get face time with her. I noticed that some people got things done with minimal effort, while others had to write proposals and get eighteen approvals before taking a first step. All of this struck me as inefficient.

"People who 'get it' are the ones who do well here," my boss said.

Back then, I could only feel subtext but not identify it. I knew there was a reason why my boss had said that repeatedly. I sensed that she was asking me "Can I trust you?" but I didn't really know how to seem trustworthy, just how to do my job. Meanwhile, someone who had started the same day that I had immediately "got it" and played along with our boss's whims. She checked in with our boss constantly, visited her office several times a day, shared vacation pictures and anecdotes, and adhered to what I was later to learn was the accepted behavior of someone who was trustworthy.

I decided to mind my own business and take what my boss said at face value. I also assumed that she hired me because she had faith in my abilities and in my intentions to do good things for the company. My actions would speak for themselves, I assumed. And yet, so much at that company existed beneath the surface. My decision to not give my boss the cues she required to trust me made me very isolated and lonely.

Climbing the Career Lattice: The New Way We're Achieving at Work

My latest on Fast Company's Expert Blog: we're not less ambitious in the workplace; we're just multi-laterally ambitious.

Entrepreneurial Sin #4: Assuming the worst

In honor of my Mother's 60th birthday today, perhaps she'll get a kick out of this installment.

My mother told me once about a recurring dream of hers, where she's standing on top of a skyscraper and her four kids--all under five years old in the dream--are falling off the building. Allowing any of us to fall is not an option; my mother finds that her limbs can stretch in Plastic Man fashion to catch each child. But rather than marvel at her ability to catch us when we fall, her underlying emotion in the dream is panic. What if we all fall simultaneously, and she runs out of appendages and can't catch us? She ended up waking up from her dream, not because she dropped any of us, but because she was so worked up over the prospect that she might.

God love my mother. She will always go down in history as a dedicated friend and devotee of her kids. Looking back on my childhood, her parenting goes down in the positive column of my life ledger, with a few tiny flecks in the negative. Those flecks are single moments in time, particularly in high school--a time when most teens attempt to spread their wings--when she reminded me of the many noxious fumes that a bird may encounter on the way to adulthood.

Mom didn't worry about the usual teen traps: sex, drugs, and general disinterest in safety. She tended to freak out about other things, that were more, well, unlikely.

"You're going to go into the city with your friends?" I want you to call me the MINUTE you get there. There are weird people in the city..."

"You're going to fly to Florida for spring break! But so many people are flying now; the plane's going to be SO HEAVY!"

Later in life, not much changed:

"You're moving to New York? What if you take the wrong subway to work and get lost?..."

"You're moving to California? There are EARTHQUAKES in California!"

All of her feared outcomes were possible, I suppose, but not likely, and, in my opinion, not worth mentioning to your kid. Rather than heed my mother I just brushed off her concerns as paranoid and did what I felt I needed to in order to satisfy my curiosity and thrive.

I used to joke about my mother being so crazy, but that's the cosmic joke that you don't discover until therapy or until you become an entrepreneur: Even the parental traits that you think you never adopted stick to some extent. What you resist persists.

I've never considered myself a paranoid person, though as an entrepreneur I have to wonder if I've become my mother.