I still remember looking longingly at the Safeway “Help Wanted” ads offering $9/hour to bag groceries while I slogged away at yet another unpaid government internship. Like most other DC-based grad students, I regarded unpaid internships as a rite of passage. Yet the trade-off — a rich, rewarding internship experience — was not always partRead… Read more »
You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself. — Sam Levinson I’ve interviewed over 450 government and contractor managers over the last fifteen years as part of a business growth assessment process. Besides getting to know a lot of sincere dedicated individuals, I’ve beenRead… Read more »
In my last blog, I talked about how to increase everyone’s productivity by tweaking your meetings. What about making your personal time more productive? Technology helps you multitask and do more, right? Wrong. Mutitasking creates lower quality results making you less productive. Here are seven productivity tips that I have combined from inc.com, a listRead… Read more »
A fascinating paper by Winograd and Hais, and published by the Brookings Institution this morning, discusses some striking differences in what appeals to Millenials, compared to earlier birth cohorts, and it got me thinking. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/05/millenials-upend-wall-street-corporate-america-winograd-hais The authors’ focus is principally on the corporate side of things, and consumer behaviour, discussing what they believe is aRead… Read more »
It’s a long, sordid story, but the moral is simple: Beware what you ask for — you might get it! A little background: Back in 2007, I was so happy. The Presidential Management Fellowship program office “popped the cap”—they allowed universities to nominate an unlimited number of graduating students for the prestigious PMF program. Previously,Read… Read more »
Meetings compose a large amount of your work time, but are they time well spent? Efficiency can be increased or decimated by the timing and structure of meetings. Think about the impact multiplier for each participant. Starting an eight person meeting 15 minutes late wastes two hours of work for the organization. Bad meetings areRead… Read more »
A while back I had an opportunity to participate in a lunch and learn about this topic and thought these big take-aways would be great to share. Today’s workforce is a blend of Ernest Hemingway’s “Lost Generation,” Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Generation,” Timothy Leary’s Vietnam-era Generation and Generation Y (I couldn’t quite decide what literary workRead… Read more »
I was hired as the first female Chief Innovation Officer in the country in early 2013 and I have to admit I think that is pretty cool. However, I am also very much aware of the gender gap that I see around me in meetings at City Hall and with community stakeholders. Often it isRead… Read more »
Most agencies have policies to facilitate diversity and sensitivity. Showing awareness or activism in this area may even be a part of your performance review. But be honest: do these policies really ensure that we walk the walk and truly embrace diversity in the workplace? Workplace diversity is a really fashionable topic these days. ItRead… Read more »
Last Sunday was graduation day at Duke. In our Master of Public Policy program, over half of the graduating students are employed, and over half of those employed are going to work for government consulting firms. Their salaries are about 20% higher than those who are working in government jobs, and they have been impressedRead… Read more »