Education

On Monday I spoke on Initiative at Google in Chelsea, Manhattan. (EDIT: here are video clips from a future talk there) It was my first time speaking with them (here's my speaking page, by the way, for those looking to book an amazing speaker who will get them promoted for hiring me). It reminded me that I started using Google in graduate school because they used GNU/Linux before anyone else had heard of them, probably around 1997 or 98. Many of their current employees weren't born yet. I kept telling people to use it because it returned better search results but most people preferred portals. A few years later I kept telling people to use Wikipedia, also based on Free Software and its principles, and…

I wrote an in-depth piece answering why we as a culture and as individuals tend to lack initiative, as developed in my book, and how to develop more initiative. It presents more from my book than most reviews or excerpts I've posted. The piece is called Initiative: Why We Lack It and How to Develop It and appears in a community site for coaches and people getting coached called The Coaching Connector. I recommend it if you're looking to create more initiative in yourself and teams and haven't read the book yet. Also if you're thinking of getting coaching.

Why are women's studies and gender studies departments so gender segregated---in particular, female dominated? I clicked the top few results in a search on "gender studies department." Nearly every name and image I saw on those pages seemed female. I then searched on "problems with male dominated fields" and got this post stating, "Male-dominated industries and occupations are particularly vulnerable to reinforcing masculine stereotypes that make it even more difficult for women to excel," then listing challenges women face in male-dominated fields, harassment, pay gaps, underrepresentation, and so on. Why would we not expect similar problems in female dominated fields? Are there no problems with women dominating fields? Incidentally, when I searched for "problems with female dominated fields," most results still covered problems with male…

When I was growing up in the 70s, when someone said something sexist others would say that person was living in the past. "It's not the 50s anymore. Get with the times, chauvinist pig." It took people time to catch up with how times had changed. I'll come back to chauvinism and living in the past in a moment. Privilege in academia in the past Today people talk about how privilege helps some groups advance in academia versus others. This Atlantic article, What I Learned About Life at My 30th College Reunion, prompted me thinking about it. It said: I don't love the fact—now made public through the trial but previously understood by all of us to be true—that the kids whose parents donate buildings…