The eating habits of women’s souls in the workplace
People with eating disorders (especially girls) have a biased perception of their body. They feel fat and unfit and no feedback (from a mirror, from parents, or from friends) seems able to shake the perception that there is something wrong with their body. Their body needs to be controlled, shaped and disciplined.
At the same time, they are extremely sensitive to feedback (from peer, media, advertising) that reinforces their biased and negative body image (Debbie Notkin and Laurie Toby Edison, who I met at Blogher, blog about this on Body Impolitic). The loving and caring act of nourishing their body becomes a harsh act of self-discipline and self-mortification.
I started to wonder if a similar mechanism operates on women’s self-image at work. Do women have a biased self-image when it comes to their skills and talents? Do they have a hypersensitive negative feedback loop and a high-threshold positive loop?
I don’t want to generalize to all women (we had many examples of strong, assertive, successful women at Blogher). I am talking about women who are clearly talented and highly skilled and yet substantially underestimate their value and their abilities. I am talking about the women who attribute their failures to themselves and their successes to chance and circumstances.
Go to work each day as it were your last day (aka Steve Job’s conspiracy)
This post is about getting happier at work, the surprising effects of physical exercise, and the spirit of Steve Jobs channeled through my iPod.
For a couple of days I’ve had this idea buzzing in my head with the obnoxious persistence of a silly tune. The thought was to write a post about going to work each day as it were your last day.
No, I don’t mean going to your boss and telling him what a @#%@ he is, or arriving to work at noon, half naked, and intoxicated (after all, chances are that even if it’s your last day at your current job, you may still want to work in the future). What I mean is learning how to focus on the important things and let go of the minor actions that clutter your work day because you “gotta do them” or are good for your career.
With this idea still stuck in my head, yesterday I went to the gym, I put my headphones on, and cranked my iPod up. After Madonna’s Ray of light, guess what the next shuffled mp3 in my queue was? Yup, Steve Job’s commencement speech at Stanford.
The chronicles of bad experience: Verizon and Symantec
Everybody knows that bloggers like to bash companies that have displeased them. We do it because we feel angry and betrayed and want to get back at them. We also do it because we want to save others from unpleasant experiences and avoidable frustrations. Today it’s my turn to rant: let’s talk about Verizon’s greed and Symantec’s pitiful and misleading customer service. Fasten your seat belts.
No fear of flying Southwest
According to Wikipedia, the 35-year old Southwest Airlines is the third larger airline in the world for passenger carried. Fortune magazine defined Southwest "the most successful airline in history." Yet, I didn’t understand what a big deal Southwest was until I flew with them for the first time.
User Research: Don’t neglect the goldmine in your own backyard
A product development process built around the user and the experience is an expensive proposition for many companies. On the surface, companies may reject user- and experience-centric approaches because they appear more expensive (more steps, more people involved, more time); deep inside, taking a user-centric approach is frightening because it requires relinquishing control and embracing a 180° cultural shift.
Putting a lot of thought in the early phases of product design clashes against the "faster, cheaper," "let’s see if it sticks" IT culture. Reaching out to people outside the company to discover solutions, ideas, and opportunities is unsettling for companies in which "the boss" makes all decisions and sets all strategic directions. True user-centered design requires a flatter, more democratic, and distributed corporate structure to work.
Because adopting a user-centered framework requires a cultural paradigm shift we often need to start small and proceed slowly to avoid a massive immune rejection response from the corporate culture. The good news is that in each company there are pockets of user knowledge that designers can easily leverage to get important user information. Read more »
Blog Feed
Cool Readings
