I always seem to get the best insights into my children’s minds from the front seat of the car when they don’t think I’m listening. It usually comes in the form of backseat dialogue between themselves and a friend. One particular day driving to baseball practice, a friend of my son’s was with us and he out of the blue stated, “I want to be a lawyer when I grow up.” My son responded, “Why?” “So I can make a bunch of money,” he said. I guess my son saw this as an invitation to declare what he wanted to
I remember thinking, how am I going to do this? I had just started my first full-time job out of college, and I was getting married that year. I had been given two weeks of vacation for my first year that I had to earn throughout the year. If I wanted to take a honeymoon and be off a day or two before the wedding, I really had almost no time left to take off. And a couple of my good friends were getting married that summer too, and I was in their weddings out of town. Was I going
“Mommy,” my five-year-old said from the backseat of the car on the way to school one morning, “What do you do for work (pronounced more like wurk)?” I wasn’t sure where her question was coming from, but in trying to think about how to describe what I do to so her Pre-K mind would understand, I quickly thought that “consulting” wasn’t going to make sense. So, I chose instead to describe what I do in the context of what I was scheduled to do that day. “Well, today, I’m going to train some people on their first day of work.
I’m preparing to take my kids into Target, Lord help me. I just need to get some necessities. I park the car, turn and look them in the eye and tell them, “We are not going to the toy section. We are here to get milk, a card for someone, and some toilet paper. You will both walk beside me and the cart. You will not run, and you will not ask if you can go look at toys, okay?” I get “yes ma’am”. And then ask them to repeat back to me what I just said and what they
Much has been said about the open office floor plan. The concept arose out of Silicon Valley and became a popular way to supposedly create “collaborative” work environments where innovation happens. Oh, and as an added bonus, companies saved a lot of money designing office spaces as open. I’m not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg- the realization that money could be saved this way, or that “collaboration” and therefore innovation would thrive in this type of design. But in many studies, including this one: The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration, it was found