Working remotely and The Year Without Pants

October 18, 2013

Earlier this week I headed uptown to CUNY Journalism School, which was hosting a lunchtime talk by author Scott Berkun. I loved his book The Myths of Innovation, which I read last year while studying on CUNY's entrepreneurial journalism program, where I launched The Broad Experience. I'm currently reading his Confessions of a Public Speaker, which I'd recommend to anyone, who, like me, has fairly limited experience of speaking in front of a crowd but intends to do more and wants to get better at it. What I like about Berkun's writing is that it's a bit like good radio - it feels like he's talking to you in a friendly, upfront, informal way. His talk was about his latest book The Year Without Pants. I'll explain in a minute, but I should say here that this post doesn't pertain particularly to women, as most of my stuff does on this site, but to the workplace in general.

Berkun, a former Microsoft employee, makes a good living these days as a writer, consultant and speaker. But after consulting for quite a while he felt like a bit of a fake. How could he advise companies on how to do things when he hadn't worked in one for so long himself? So when a consulting gig at WordPress.com came up, he turned it permanent - for a year, anyway. That year of working for one of the world's most popular blogging platforms (20% of all sites are built on WordPress) is what he describes in The Year Without Pants. After all, when you work remotely, as everyone at WordPress does, who needs pants? (My UK friends will snicker here because over there, the land of my birth, pants constitute underwear, rather than trousers, as they do in North America. I presume Berkun did not spend a year without underwear, but you never know). 

He was working in an environment where no one worked together. Everyone was scattered throughout the country and the world. Everyone at WordPress was genuinely excited to be there, he said, not part of the whopping 70% of Americans who are said to be un-engaged at work. If people love being there, who needs to be told what to do, right? No one, he said, used email (viewed as an archaic form of communication, at least for internal stuff), there were few rules, little structure, an open vacation policy, and people were treated like adults. Sounds like bliss, especially the part about being treated like a grown-up. That's the problem with so much work culture - that feeling you have of being corraled and talked down to like so many recalcitrant children.

But it wasn't perfect. He said something I've heard said by my Generation X friends about Generation Y workers - that they don't like conflict. He described WordPress as a conflict-averse culture, where ideas were all seemingly taken on board and no one dared criticize openly. Also, the fact that people are all working in different locations meant a lot of interactions were happening in chat-room-like settings. He pointed out that it takes a bit of forwardness to jump into a discussion that way. He also said at one point that given so many of us spend our days in offices, surrounded by colleagues, yet mostly communicate with them via computer, is this remote working type of situation really so different? Last month I met with an old friend and colleague in London who talked about how annoyed she gets by co-workers who sit two desks away, emailing her about something when they could have a face-to-face conversation. She thinks it's absurd, and often pops up by their desks, urging them to talk instead. But the reality is most of us are doing this now - writing rather than speaking, in part because it does make disagreement easier to avoid, or at least postpone, and we're all getting used to this rather more polite way of working. I still remember the slanging matches that used to occur in our small office at the London publishing house where I worked with the aforementioned friend (in the distant mid-'90s) - voices were raised, tempers were hot, doors were occasionally slammed. How, though, ultimately, do problems manifest themselves today, if not in email or face-to-face discussion? I suspect I'll have to read the book to find out what Berkun's final take is on WordPress and whether they way they do things might actually end up being the future of work.

He gave us this URL for those who'd like access to a free first chapter of the book: bitly.com/nopants. 

How to be a successful rainmaker

October 11, 2013

Last night I found myself sitting in a grand, high-ceilinged room at the New York City Bar Association, attending a panel for female lawyers called Women Who Ask: How Successful Women Rainmakers Ask for and Bring in Business. As I reported in my piece about female lawyers that aired on Marketplace this summer, the number of women lawyers, particularly at big firms, dwindles sharply as the years go by. Only about 15 percent of equity partners at firms are female. My interviewee Marla Perksy told me a major reason women's status tends to stall is that they rarely bring in business for their firms - they're not rainmakers. Last night's panel featured two top lawyers who have made plenty of rain on a regular basis, Sheila Birnbaum and Nina Gussack. The panel was moderated by Vivia Chen of The Careerist and The American Lawyer.

Vivia Chen, Sheila Birnbaum and Nina Gussack at the NY Bar Association

Here are a few takeaways I think are just as relevant to everyone else as they are to lawyers.

• Landing business is not easy or straightforward, and it doesn't generally come from a single interaction. "The first bit of significant business is like getting the first pickle out of the jar," said Nina Gussack. "A wide swath of people" needs to find you impressive and admire your work in order to want to trust you with their business. "The entire fabric of [your] effort leads to opportunities," said Gussack. Each woman emphasised that the business of landing business comes from building relationships, listening hard to clients and being incredibly responsive to their needs.

• On the subject of listening, they said some stereotypes are true: women are better at listening to clients, in general, than men are. Gussack said men tend to respond to a client's problem with a valedictory tale of some case they won last month or last week, whereas women are better at actually paying heed to what the client is saying, taking in what their needs are, and responding appropriately.

• Gussack made the point that "fear of rejection is women's biggest impediment...it's the biggest reason they don't put themselves out there" and don't attempt to bring in business in the first place. But when you do get rejected, only allow yourself a brief wallow - no more than a week. Both Birnbaum and Gussack said it was important to try to find out why you didn't land the business (also true for writers/journalists sending pitches and getting rejected) so you can plug any gaps and be closer to getting it next time. They talked about 'needling' the firm that hadn't awarded you the business every three months or so, just to check in and find out how well (or not) the firm that did win is handling the case.

• Sheila Birnbaum made an important point I don't think we hear enough: being friendly and decent to people further down the ladder than you is good business. "People want to give business to people they like. Be nice to people lower down in the company – they’ll remember that." You never know who's going to be a decision-maker in five years when you may be somewhere else. 

• Neither woman pretended it had been easy to get where they both are. Birnbaum said she'd never had kids because she knew she couldn't have had the career she'd had if she'd opted to become a mother. But she was very happy with the choices she'd made. Gussack does have kids, a professor husband with a more flexible schedule, and has had the same nanny/housekeeper for 22 years. She emphasised the collosal importance of having a good support network. Both loved their careers and found what they did incredibly worthwile. "There is nothing more energizing and motivating than doing hard work for someone," said Gussack. "It's really important to be powerful in your space," particularly, she said, when you have teenagers at home who are unlikely to thank you for anything you do. There is something highly rewarding and empowering, both women emphasized, about doing complicated, problem-solving work and getting paid for it.

• As for how not to become one of the many women who drop out of the profession during the childbearing and rearing years, Birnbaum and Gussack said women should try to stay focused on the long haul. "It's not a short race," to success, "it's a marathon, and you need to pace yourself," Gussack said. She was sorry so many women quit before they'd "had a chance to taste the success Sheila and I have". Her advice was to "get in the game and stay in the game as long as you find it satisfying." If you genuinely love what you do, they advised that you keep focused on the bigger picture and "power through the hard times" knowing they will not last forever.

My next show will focus on women lawyers and will be out on October 21st.

When women work for free

October 4, 2013

This piece by Tess Vigeland, 'Me, Work for Free at This Point in My Career?' really hit home when I read it the other day. Career changers or those experimenting with an additional line of work are usually expected to do a lot of work for nothing, either to prove themselves or to 'build their brand', as Tess discusses in her piece. As she says part-way through:

"I haven’t even addressed the gender behavior issues that are most certainly at play here. Without placing all blame on my womanhood, dozens of studies have shown that females are, generally speaking, terrible at asking for what they want in the working world — in my case, to get paid fairly for my services."

She is spot on. Many women have real trouble valuing themselves (genuinely thinking of themselves as having any value in the world, for one, and then putting a monetary value on their services), and a few days before reading Tess's piece I was much struck by this one on Forbes, written by Adrienne Graham, 'No, You Can't Pick my Brain. It Costs Too Much.' Graham points out that women tend to have trouble saying no and turning people down, thus they end up having a lot of coffees and phone calls with acquaintances and strangers who want to tap some of their expertise - expertise they might otherwise be charging for. This is something Financial Times columnist Mrs. Moneypenny addresses in the latest episode of my show - she has come up with a way of turning down these requests in a firm but graceful way. Women - to generalize - enjoying helping other people. It's one of the things I remember really liking about the job when I was an executive assistant. But our desire to help others can often lead us to sacrifice something we need for ourselves - like money.

I'm curious to know the extent to which men say yes to these kinds of 'pick your brain' coffee meetings, and how much work career-changing men consent to do for nothing. I'd be willing to bet they're a lot more protective of their time and earnings than women are. But say you are in the kind of situation Tess is in, or I'm in as I try to get the word out about The Broad Experience - when does it make sense to work for nothing and when doesn't it? This topic arose on a conference call I was on this morning with three other entrepreneurial women. The concensus seemed to be that you had to weigh up not just the money side of things, but how much personal pleasure/fulfillment you get out of whatever it is you're doing for nothing, and how that feeds into everything else. But where does a pleasant, sharing-your-knowledge type of interaction end and exploitation begin? At what point do you become cynical about the karma and goodwill you're assured will result from your actions? (In my case, frankly, probably far too early. I am British after all. ) I'd love to get comments below from anyone who's been in this situation and has views on where to draw the line. What has worked, and what hasn't? Has pulling back from a 'free' situation ultimately led to actual paid work? The Broad Experience wants to know.

How working women have created a less equal world

September 26, 2013

My well-thumbed copy of The XX Factor

Alison Wolf is just arriving in the US to discuss her book, with its provocative (sub) title - The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World. I met her in London recently, and she'll feature in the next episode of The Broad Experience. I tore through the book, though I didn't really expect to. Perhaps I've become too used to reading self-helpish books like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (which I enjoyed), but knowing Wolf was a longtime professor and expert on labor markets, I feared I might have to plow through a pretty dry tome. But, career academic though she is, Wolf thankfully doesn't write like one. 

The book talks about the extent to which modern working women's lives would be impossible without the poorly paid labor of millions of other women. People like me, and probably you, Wolf says, can have the lives we do because some other female is looking after our children, cleaning our house, doing our dry cleaning or looking after our elderly parents - all work that would have been done by women - for free - just a few decades ago. She's not saying this is a terrible thing, but she takes readers on a fascinating tour of just how much educated women's lives have changed in the past half century or so, and how, by comparison, less educated women's have not. She reminds us that, until the pill came along, sex really was the key to women's livelihoods, whether you look at that from the perspective of women 'saving themselves' for marriage - which was their livelihood in many cases - or women actually earning their living through prostitution. She also has interesting data on how many sexual partners women with degrees have compared to other women, and how much this has changed over the years - this is all part of her contention that 'elite women' live quite different lives from everyone else on the planet. In short, highly educated women, on the whole, have sex later than others (all the better to concentrate on our grades and careers). But education seems to make women more adventurous - or encourages them to take their time in finding 'the one', because these days women with degrees have a slightly higher number of sexual partners than those without.

And you know how we all think of the Scandinavian countries as beacons of equality? 

"The thing no one believes till I tell them is that Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries have the most segregated labor markets in the world in terms of men and women working separately...if you walk into the Swedish or Danish parliament you see lots of women…but the Scandinavians very early on outsourced domestic life, daycare centers, care for elderly...all the sorts of things mothers used to do in the home they turned into paid labor. So what happened was vast numbers of women who used to do female type things at home [now do] female type things in the labor market.

...So you’ve got this enormous female workforce that’s staffing the welfare state, and a professional life that is not more integrated than anywhere else." 

The book is packed with interesting data (of note: it wasn't the advent of the vacuum cleaner or dishwasher, but the invention of frozen meals that really saw women entering the workforce in numbers), and information on working women in different parts of the world. Wolf also takes her hat off to the educated women of the past who spent many hours a week volunteering. That world has pretty much gone, Wolf says, and we're worse off for it. 

That said, she has no desire to go back to the kitchen. 

The new show will be out on October 7th.