| Sharon's profileSharon's spacePhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
January 24 Women's Conference
|
|
By Julie Evans
January 13, 2006 From around the globe, employees flocked to Redmond for the 2006 Women’s Conference. They came to learn and grow, to find answers and provide them. They laughed, they connected, they were inspired and, ultimately, many attendees said, they were empowered. The conference kicked off Jan. 9 with an evening reception, networking opportunity and awards ceremony. Three award-winners, culled from more than 100 nominees, were announced. Sandra Jacobson, senior program manager for WW PSMG Partner Segment Planning and the longest-tenured woman at Microsoft, was given a separate Resilience Award. “At times, women at Microsoft go unrecognized for the work they accomplish, the passion for the company, and the impact they have on the company,” Jacobson said. “Looking back [to] when the company had fewer than 300 employees worldwide, to now when we have nearly 5,000 women at a Microsoft Women’s Conference, I am proud to say: Women at Microsoft play an important role, we accomplished a lot, and we’re making a difference!”
Lynn Kepl, senior director, Technology Integration and Planning, received the Women’s Empowerment Award for setting an example for work-life balance and management style. “It’s exhilarating to know that the time spent in mentoring and championing areas like diversity and work-life balance make a difference to others across the company,” Kepl said. The Women’s Inspiration Award went to Margo Day, vice president, U.S. Partner Group, whose substantial volume of nominations from co-workers cited her infectious passion for technology and business, and her promotion of organization diversity. Kim Daly, general manager, OEM Operations, received the Women’s Leadership Award for leading women by example and for her passion for people’s development. The opening panel discussion generated very high interest among participants. It included Debra Chrapaty, Mich Mathews, Tanya Clemons, Tami Reller and Kathleen Hogan, and Kathy O’Driscoll was moderator. The witty, informative dialogue was peppered with humorous anecdotes about first jobs, brushes with greatness, lessons learned and how to achieve work-life balance. The panelists stressed how important it is for women at Microsoft to gain and exude confidence. It was a common theme throughout the conference. “You gotta get in the game. You can’t just sit in a meeting and be quiet,” Hogan said. They stressed the need for effective confrontation and of being very deliberate in all actions and interactions – from being prepared at meetings to standing up straight and using powerful language. “Always go above and beyond …you never know who’s watching,” Clemons said. They also discussed the value of mentors throughout their lives, many of which have come through informal relationships. To achieve work-life balance, panel members' suggestions included defining your priorities, making them known, and having the confidence to say no. Mathews said her priorities have changed since having children. She said she used to be on e-mail 24/7 and work long hours, which is often seen as a badge of honor, but then “you realize you can’t run your life that like.” She has since reset her priorities. For example, because she values taking her children to school in the morning and eating dinner together at night, she has set work hours outside of which she generally won’t take meetings. To accommodate that design, she said, she makes her office time more productive. Reller said that women are great multi-taskers, and that with three kids, she has learned to embrace that skill – often cooking dinner, returning e-mails and changing diapers almost simultaneously. Lisa Brummel, corporate vice president of Human Resources, spoke Wednesday about her nontraditional career and how, by many textbook standards, she took a lot of “wrong jobs.” But on her path, she gained valuable skills, learned from a lot of people and took on responsibility that might not have come with the “right jobs.” Being broadly networked and finding sponsorship within the company have been keys to her success, she said.
Brummel also described several pillars on which she has built her career – one called “I love what we do here.” She said loving Microsoft's products and realizing how they change people’s lives is what keeps her here. Another pillar, she said, is confidence – where she sees the biggest difference between women and men at Microsoft. “Too often I see women come into the company with all of the right answers, and then they get in a meeting and only half of that comes out", Brummel said. “You have to have the confidence in what you know. …Come on, step up. Even if you’re wrong, it’s OK.” She said the most important thing that women at Microsoft can do is to be the best example of what they want others to be. She said that if women did one thing different every day – whether running a meeting differently, hiring a diverse team or giving each other positive feedback – we’d be a better company tomorrow than we are today. “Every single person can set an example of what we want,” Brummel said. Other sessions throughout the week covered a range of topics; titles included "Forget Balance: Embrace Comfortable Chaos,” “Build Trust and Improve Your Performance” and “Body for Life for Women.” While final attendance numbers weren’t available at press time, organizers say more than 4,800 employees registered, and attendance almost doubled that of last year’s conference. Early reviews: Worthwhile, inspirational
|
The Forgotten Empire Persia Exhibition, British Museum
As I mentioned in my blog in December, I intended to visit this exhibition and finally managed to make it just before it closed on 8th Jan. Whilst small, it really did cover well just how significant an empire Ancient Persia was. Founded in 550BC by Cyrus the Great at it’s height it stretched from the Indus Valley to North Africa, and from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf. What was great about the exhibition was that much of what was shown hadn’t ever come out of Iran before, and I have to say that the exhibits on the “Royal Table” – gold and silver plates and vessels, and the Jewellery was incredibly intricate, beautiful and lavish. The other really impressive item was the Cyrus Cylinder. A bit like the Rosetta Stone, the Cyrus Cylinder was found in Babylon and records on it a decree that made it possible for deported people like the Jews to return to their homes. Written in cuneiform script, finally deciphered in the mid-19th century, this cylinder shows the surprising degree of tolerance that existed at this time.
Book - Madam Secretary
Madeleine Albright
I promised to share with you all some insights from the amazing leaders we met at the Leaders in London Conference a few months ago, and I decided to start this month with Madeleine Albright. It is particularly pertinent that we start with her as January is also when we will be hosting and attending the Microsoft Women’s Conference in Redmond, and so this month, this review and insights shared with you all will be particularly pertinent to our female colleagues.
Her biography, Madam Secretary, is a pretty good read – more so the early chapters which focus greatly on her personal journey and how she arrived in America having been born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1937. In fact, one of my favourite excerpts from her book is on her personal thoughts when she had just been invited to work for Bill Clinton in the role of Secretary of State, she writes: “For all my awareness of how unexpected events can be, I had to marvel. I had arrived in New York Harbour half a century before, an eleven year old immigrant from Prague staring up at the Statue of Liberty. How astonishing that that girl was about to become the sixty-fourth secretary of state and the highest ranking woman ever in US history” – pretty impressive! Huh!
I was impressed with her throughout the book, as I was when I listened to her at the conference. She is clearly an incredibly driven person and relates this back even to her youth. As a young woman in school she tells of how her “serious streak dogged me – I went all out in class, hockey, school plays, and was popular enough to get elected to the student council but (alas) became overzealous and turned someone in for talking in the hall – I was never elected to anything again. So to compensate, I started my own international relations club and named myself president”.
What was also interesting to me was how as a young married woman she came up against some of the real challenges that existed for women in the workplace then, and today. In January 1960, 12 months after she graduated and married, she moved to Chicago and was hopeful of finding a job as a journalist. One night over dinner her husband’s managing editor enquired as to what she was going to do and when she replied that she wanted to work in the newspaper business his reply came back “Well, you can’t work on the same paper as your husband because it’s against newspaper guild policy. And of course it wouldn’t really be helpful to your husband’s career if his wife were working for a competing paper. So I’m afraid you’ll have to consider doing something else”.
About 12 months later, she was asked to speak at one of the local colleges about social factors influencing women’s careers and she wrote: “Twice in two years I have had to leave good jobs with good futures to follow my husbands’ path, and that was before I had children. Now, even to get a job, I would have to find and hire a dependable nurse and pay her perhaps more than I could make myself. Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic; perhaps I could go out tomorrow and get a job as a typist. The next question is, why bother? Do I want a job merely to have a job, or do I want to work in order to be doing something worthwhile? I must admit though, that I feel somewhat like a pioneer. I am not satisfied to sit back for the rest of my life and contemplate in which order to clean rooms. I want to find a solution and still feel that somehow it must be possible to be a responsible mother, a good wife and have an intellectually satisfying job”. I am sure many women reading this will still be able to identify with these comments over 40 years later!
There are many opportunities to admire Madeleine Albright throughout the book. One that sticks in my mind is just how committed she was to continually trying to improve herself and she embarked upon getting a Ph.D (amongst other things) starting it when she had twin baby girls and finishing it 13 years later! To get it done, she used to get up at 4:30am every morning because it was the only quiet time in the day she could have a couple of hours to herself to think and write – 13 years!! What a commitment and what staying power!
She also comes across as an incredibly warm and funny person. There are lots of examples of little things she did but the one I like the best is with regards to her pins and brooches. At one time when she was serving at the United Nations, she was criticised in her dealings with Iraq and was called a “snake”. She happened to have a meeting shortly afterwards with a senior Iraqi official and also have a brooch in the shape of a coiled snake which she wore to the meeting – when she met with TV and press afterwards the camera’s focussed on the pin, as did the journalists questions, and thereafter she often picked out a brooch or pin appropriate to the message of the meeting or event she was attending. My favourite is when she met with the Russian foreign minister on the subject of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and her pin was shaped like a missile. The Russian minister asked “Is that one of your interceptor missiles?” to which she replied “Yes, and as you can see, we know how to make them very small – so you’d better be ready to negotiate!”
She ends her book with a short eulogy on how she wants to be remembered. Amongst other things she writes “Perhaps some will say that I helped teach a generation of older women to stand tall, and younger women not to be afraid to interrupt”. She left me with a particular quote that she gave on the day of the conference, and one which I will always remember, she said “There is a special place in Hell reserved for those women who do not help other women to reach their full potential” – and I think she’s right. So this month many of us will be helping our female colleagues in just this way at our Women’s Conference. You will be able to review the intranet site here (insert link) and much of the material that is going to be presented will also be video taped if you are not able to attend in person.
I would encourage all of you reading this, male and female alike, to find out a bit about what we are doing there, the sessions that are planned, and perhaps assign yourself some focussed time this month to take a look at some of this content and to invest in yourselves. Let me know if you found this interesting, and if you read the book, share your thoughts too.
Leaders in London
Book-The World is Flat
Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat – just starting this one, will let you know what I think ….
Book- A Small Island
A Small Island – Andrea Levy – 7/10
Well, despite the plaudits that this book has received I have to say that it took me until nearly the end to actually enjoy this book! I wanted to slap Hortense as soon as her character was revealed to me in the early chapters, but I must admit that I identified a lot of similarities between her husband, and my partner Robert (also from Jamaican heritage). The Jamaican patois in the book was pretty familiar to me (I’ve heard it a lot over the last 10 years), and I could easily recognise similarities in their story and that of Robert’s parents who also came over from Jamaica to help re-create our country after the war. I am sure that their experiences of racial inequality were very similar to those expressed in the book, and unfortunately many still exist today. Using the same rating scale with which we usually rate movies, I’d give this a 7/10. A bit slow to start, the last half of the book better than the first, but the last few chapters were dynamite!
Book- The Time Travellers Wife – 8/10
The Time Travellers Wife – 8/10
Loved this book! I’ll admit to being a bit confused at times (lots of going backwards and forwards in time) and it’s not terribly plausible, but completely engrossing love story. It’s very funny, very sad and touching too. And time travel is one of those things we’d all love to be able to do. You would definitely find a way to tell yourself to bet on a particular horse, or buy the URL to Windows Live J or buy shares in Google. It’s one of those books you can’t put down and great for holidays. You’ll definitely need a hankie too – enjoy!
2006 – What’s coming up
There’s a bunch of other things I want to fit in (as usual), here’s a sneak preview. I will definitely need to go and see my Mum as soon as I get back from Goa (or life will not be worth living) so that is a priority. There are x2 other exhibitions in London that I want to go to and would recommend – they are The History of Persia Exhibition, at the British Museum: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/persia/
And the China exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts: http://www.threeemperors.org.uk/index.php?pid=43
I’ll be speaking at the Microsoft Women’s Summit in January and then thinking of going ski-ing with a few girlfriends straight after that – just up to Whistler for a long weekend (In links section). In early Feb, Robert and I are going back to Rome (where we celebrated our 10 Year Anniversary this year – see piccie) to finish the sightseeing we started. We did all outside stuff in May, now we want to do all the inside stuff – The Vatican is top of the list! We’re planning a holiday to go ski-ing in Mont Tremblant in April (In links section) and our friends Liz & Aiden are getting married in Ireland in May.
Movie- A History of Violence 8/10
Went to see this at the weekend, and it is excellent. Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, without long hair – unfortunatelyL) is brilliant in it, as is his wife (what movie was she in before? Driving us nuts to try and remember). Basic plot is around mistaken identity but if I give you much more detail it will ruin it for you, so you have to go see it (soon if you are in the UK as Harry Potter is coming and it won’t get a look in) or on DVD. A bit slow to start, but worth the wait, it is an 18 rating so some violence and nudity but not gratuitously so.
Next up Harry Potter – out in the UK on the 18th November. Walked past Leicester Square where they had the Premier on Sunday – here’s a link to reviews so far. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/films/articles/20732721?source=Daily%20Mail
Between now and Christmas
It’s a really busy time for me from now until Xmas. In case you wanted to know where I am when, here’s a short itinerary. Week of November 7th I’m at Microsoft in Redmond, Seattle and will be updating my blog with some thoughts and piccies from my trip that weekend up to Victoria Island with my girlfriend Marcia – so, look out for these. Marcia’s the one at the back in the photo attached. (http://victoria-canada.ca). The week after I’m going to be in Mexico for work, then going to Mallorca for a long weekend with Robert. Then home for a few days and playing Santa that weekend to our two Godchildren in Oxford (see piccie of Alex & Abi). Week of November 28th the ICAN leadership team will be in Paris for some training and our CPE meeting, then that weekend we are doing our “Xmas Family visits” because this is the last weekend I’m at home until the New Year! We’re also planning on taking our other x3 Godchildren up to Hamleys (we must be mad) (http://www.hamleys.co.uk/) so that they can choose their Xmas pressies, then taking them Ice Skating at the Natural History Museum. This is always MASSIVE FUN and again, if you are in London around this time of year, it is a MUST to go do this. Here are the links to this Ice Rink, plus the one at Somerset House http://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/artist/932294?camefrom=CFC_UK_K005_SPOTL&tm_link=tm_home_f11
in case you want to go. A word of warning though – don’t ask Donna as she used to be a Canadian champion skater!!! Is there anything this girl can’t do? Then, week of 5th December I’ve got our MSN GSM offsite in London, and then I leave on the Friday to go to Seattle for a couple of days, and then onto Sydney for the last ninemsn Board Meeting of this calendar year. Immediately that’s over I’m off to Eva Balan’s wedding in Adelaide (loads of photo’s to come from this) and then onto my hols in Goa – and after this little lot I’ll be ready for them by then!!!!!
Rubens Exhibition, The National
Had a great day out on Sunday at The National Gallery in London. There was an amazing write up of the Rubens Exhibition in the Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago, which really inspired us to go visit. All of his most well-known paintings are there along with much about his inspiration for these, a great booklet (written or spoken) of his artistic development and great insight into the development of his talent through displays of his notebooks and sketches. I’ve attached a link so you can get a sneak peak but if you’re in town and get a couple of hours – go visit, it is definitely worth it the way oil looks on wood when up close is amazing! My favourite is Samson and Delilah closely followed by The Judgement of Paris – what’s yours?
Greenwich Meridian
Had a great day out a couple of weeks ago with Alex and Donna – thanks you guys for suggesting this. Having lived in London for nearly 8 years I had never been to visit, although I had seen the fantastic view when running the London Marathon a few years ago that goes right by it. Alex was keen to see the Harrison Clocks – of which I was completely ignorant. Take a look at the link for more info on this. It was a really lovely afternoon and I felt like a real tourist, as demonstrated by the pic actually taken on the Meridian Line. Another great place to go visit when you are in London. Alex and Donna took the boat from just by Westminster and although it takes a while, it’s definitely a great way to see London by water. You definitely need a while to do this justice though – I’d say a whole day really including time for a nice lunch in Greenwich. The museum is amazing and needs time to really see everything.
|
|
