A wish for Abalo in Uganda

Happy new year! We understand that you are expecting a child. We hope that you have an opportunity to return to school after your baby is born. All good things can happen with education. Be open to learning throughout your lifetime, take good care of your health and your baby, and keep peace in your heart always.

A Thousand Voices...

A thousand hearts. A thousand souls. A thousand stories. A thousand impressions. A thousand hopes. A thousand dreams. A thousand wishes for peace from women around the world.

Write your story. Write about someone. Write for someone. Add it to this blog. Inspired by Los Angeles' Skirball Center's Women Hold Up Half the Sky exhibit and dedicated to empowering women to be bold and seek opportunity in their world.

Three Women Win Nobel Peace Prize

We can't begin to imagine just how hard three women have had to work in their respective African/Middle Eastern countries to achieve such an honor as the Nobel Peace Prize 2011. I personally have chills about what this could mean in the evolution of women's rights globally. It is especially timely with October being Domestic Violence Awareness Month. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/world/nobel-peace-prize-johnson-sirleaf-gbowee-karman.html?_r=1&hp

Your Personal Brand

Change confronts our identity and personal branding. It is particularly in times of change and adversity that we begin to realize that our personal brand is actually tied to our values! Recently I read William Bridges’ Managing Transitions. His book speaks to three phases of change: 1) letting go, 2) transition and realignment, and 3) new beginning and renewed energy. Even though we know that change can be good and a necessary part of living, it doesn’t mean we have to like it. We can become too comfortable in our current mode. Therefore, letting go and being in transition are challenging because these phases force us to think about who we are, what we are, who we intend to be.

I suffered an identity crisis when I down-shifted my career from a fast-paced career trajectory to a part-time internal position in a global firm. This turned out to be political suicide. The nebulous leadership position I had assumed as a part-time employee quickly became insignificant in the scheme of things as the position wasn’t valued. “The position was eliminated,” were the words I heard two years later. I was not completely surprised because when I went to a part-time status, I was written off and became of no value to executive management. So, what was really eliminated? Me. I was eliminated. I went from being a highly respected, knowledgeable and sought-after professional in my field to being cast aside. Even understanding the consequences of my decision to take the part time position, I was left with deep questions about who I was and a need to rebuild my personal brand.

Have you ever been laid off? Unless you are in the top echelon of leadership in an organization who manages to walk away with a sweet package and PR that makes you sound like you’ve ascended to saint-hood, losing a job is, (and you’ll be able to relate to this), well, very uncomfortable. It is demoralizing, even if it might later look like the best thing to have happened! And the longer you have been with a particular job, corporation or industry, the more your personal brand is tied to that very existence. This kind of transition means looking at your personal brand.
What do you do when you have to abruptly let go? Allow yourself the luxury of being in the moment and experience those wounds. Feelings are ok and a sense of being sad along with experiencing grief for your loss is normal. However, also be emotionally intelligent. Drive towards an attitude that will help you to realize your full potential in the new situation that you will design for yourself and probably love even more than the old one! Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence as having self-awareness, altruism, personal motivation, empathy, self-management, and having the ability to love and be loved. It has nothing to do with our job or our title or our particular professional skills or any label. Those are superficial identities. Change is constant, but our values are constant too, and will show up and define us in every challenge. At the core of your personal brand will be much more than your job litany, but your full capacity as a person.

Now, you might be asking about how you get through the healing part and into the space of acceptance, transition and realignment? How do you harness emotional intelligence? Let’s talk about recovery. The sign of a good actor is actually not in the perfection of a performance but actually in the ability to recover from a mistake or a slip-up without the audience knowing. For anyone who watches Dancing with the Stars this past season, Karina and Ralph were applauded by the judges for recovering from a terrible fall – getting back in sync and continuing the dance with poise and grace. In sports, athletes are told to compose themselves and hide fear, error or weakness from the opponents. Goals are scored against goalies, hits are made on pitchers, interceptions happen from a quarterback’s throw, teleprompters don’t work, people forget their line, dancers trip, or positions become scarce. In all, self-awareness and motivation, as components of emotional intelligence, are critical in recovery. In all examples above, people have been trained to “bounce back” and not crumble. It takes maturity and wisdom. It might take some help from a teammate, a colleague, a friend, family, a class, or even a therapist. Reclaiming our values and affirming our total identity deepens our roots. And, it is exactly with this values-based identity that we begin with a new sense of purpose and energy and enhance our personal brand.

"I may not be right, but it doesn't mean that I am wrong."

Spirituality drives the culture in India, despite the dichotomy of wealth, that breeds some materialism in those with money, to the stark and vast poverty and acceptance. Being back in America, I look around and we have our world fairly well organized, with nicely landscaped properties and cities that make sense, streets with lanes by which we abide. We in the western world have outer peace and organization, but I think we live with a lot of internal chaos, angst... stress, right? Meanwhile, I find that Indians live in an external environment that thrives on chaos, lack of organization, litter and utter mess, but they have much greater inner peace. A speaker along our journey told us that there is an openness to Indian society and an interest in listening and learning. We see this in powerful messages like, "I may not be right, but it doesn't mean that I am wrong." Certainly, learning should be a two-way street.

In reflecting on the trip, I had been told a bit of what to expect. I had heard that there was a lot of filth and pungent smells in the air. I had been told to expect poverty amidst opulence. I was warned about the water and what not to eat. Sure there are slums all over, debris, and litter. Sure there is a vast poor population and it is a chaotic place. However, I saw beautiful colors in nicely worn fabric. The people are put together, natural, and organically pretty. Most of the smells are spicy, musky, citrus-y, and cool (despite the oppressive heat). I felt safe and not once in danger. Mothers nurture and lovingly care for their children. Men and women are hard-working. Amidst the squalor, I saw a lot of splendor that comes in the form of peace and resolve. There are smiles in the eyes of the children. Richness in spirit and resolve is evident. We see acknowledgement. We have hope for education of the young generation. There is confidence and drive. Sometimes we see this drive manifest itself in ways that fit in with the norm of western culture, but more often it creates its own destiny in India. How it will be harnessed in a land of such a vast population is a story still to be told...

On Leadership

Sunset from my room from the Vivante Hotel in Mumbai, owned by Tata, overlooks a city of vast contrasts.

Indian woman cleaning her little part of the street. A national campaign to rid the streets of litter and rubble would be good.

One of few places uncluttered and "green", the Gardens in Mumbai.

India is, in fact, full of opportunity, but there is a very real dichotomy that exists, which we cannot ignore. With a strong cultural heritage that permeates social interaction, love and marriage, business conduct, we find that it also infuses many people from the various walks of life and economic strata with a sense of inner peace and loving pride that we are too often hard-pressed to find in our western culture. Virtually everyone with whom we came into contact was not only pleasant, but genuinely polite and sincerely interested in ensuring we would have good impressions of their country, culture, spirit and energy. Their smiles are warm and genuine, combined with the beautiful fabrics and tasteful smell of spices in the air, brighten up the grey around them. Their strength and potential, I believe, actually lies in their very nature towards "servant leadership" that we find around every corner. And, I am not implying that they are servants. Servant leadership is studied, well-researched and defined by scholars. A servant leader puts the needs ahead of their own and is therefore inspired to lead. They are humble in their pursuits of helping others reach their full potential (Greenleaf.org, 2011).

On the scale of Blake and Mouton's leadership grid, they would be positioned as having a high concern for social community. While the concern for production/results is proportionately lower, it is not missing. Corporations are doing quite well, even with prioritizing social enterprise. People and production concerns can, in fact, co-exist.

At the same time, here is a concern about whether India can keep up with the global contextual expectations. The infrastructure is a certain way off and there is a sizable political risk. The young, upper class population are moving ahead at lightning speed. Certainly this was evident in our hotel bar that transformed into a modern nightclub on a Friday evening that rivaled the best of nightclubs anywhere. Women wearing beautiful jewelry in saris as well as western, fashionable attire stood side by side with nicely clad men. And, it was interesting that many of the young Indians, with whom we spoke, did not want to subscribe to the traditional model of arranged marriage. They want freedom to choose. One of the contemporary, well-educated, young businessmen we met believes that he has the freedom of choice, but absolutely expects that, when the day comes to marry, he and his bride will move in with his family, following tradition. Ads of western fashion, beauty, atheticism, and yes, sex abound like we see west of the Bosphorus, so to speak. But below those billboards are broken up sidewalks, shacks, dirt and the very significant population that works very hard to make just a little bit of money. 50% of the population in Mumbai live in slums. Over 30% of the entire 1.2 billion people is illiterate. Again, a world of contrasts that manages to co-exist in an ebb and flowing harmony.

In meeting with a senior leader of the Tata Corporation, he brought to our attention four risks, all fairly sizable: 1) deficiency in teacher training, 2) healthcare education among the masses, 3) political corruption, and 4) lack of innovation coming out of India. I am inspired by the Tata organization because they are trying to lead with a social responsibility agenda. Their vision is founded on trust, community and responsibility. They are an organization that falls on the high side of people orientation, versus production/results orientation, on Blake and Mouton's Leadership Grid. So, they bring in over $ 70 billion in revenues, but only 3% is reflected in profits because they give back to society. However, that is over $ 2 billion. I wonder if that would be enough for some of our American companies that put process over people on the leadership grid. Yes, they are proving that social responsibility and enterprising profitability can co-exist and believe that a brand is founded on what you are, not what you say. And to do social responsibility right, I would argue that a great deal of corporate emotional intelligence is necessary too.

I believe now in an inner well-being in India. They have strong souls and perseverance for a better tomorrow, whether it is in this lifetime or the next. I am impressed with the enterprises here that truly value social responsibility and sustainability, not just pay lip service to it. It gives me hope that we all can strive to become those transformational leaders. I have often felt that I needed to leave behind my experience in corporate life because it has so many heartless elements to it. I give myself the latitude after this trip to pursue a corporate career with the right organization that values intellectual curiousity, giving back to society, creates followership, builds humility into leadership, and puts social and environmental sustainability as a priority in every leadership discussion.

There is a space for us as leaders from this program to make this happen for more organizations, but our western organizations have somethings to learn too. Our metaphorical infrastructure needs to be developed. How corporations are evaluated needs to be reformed and shareholders, stakeholders and financial organizations need to lead the effort to put social responsibility on the list of criteria for valuation. I am drawn to our Learning Design coursework, Tyler's 1949 Model for Curriculum Design, which has contemporary application and goes beyond academia. Start to identify the goals and what results will look like, because they may not necessarily have a direct monetary value, at least initially. They may be good for humankind, but we'll need to know how to measure that impact and translate it meaningfully in order to design the program.

The alternative is to do nothing and to continue to let Wall Street largesse and financial gain be the only driver of big business. I think, though, that we are at a point in the global economy where this one-dimensional, myopic strategy won't go very far. India isn't the only place in the world where there are extremes of wealth and poverty. It isn't the only place where people live on $ 1.25 per day. It isn't the only place that burns through the environment. It isn't the only place that lacks potable water. It isn't the only place that needs better healthcare and education. It isn't the only place that is desperate for innovative solutions that work within the societal structure of their way of living. It isn't the only place where you can dine outside at one of the best restaurants and hob-knob with the rich and famous, and walk out the door having stepped on a rat's tail or a cockroach. These issues are global and they are ours to share as the connectivity in our world only keeps growing. And eventually, the Tata Corporations of the world -who are also very enterprising, rich in resources, diverse and profitable - will run circles around the rest because of the social responsibility and sustainability focus that drives productivity.

The Taj Palace Hotel in Mumbai, owned by Tata, full of exquisiteness and riches, representing the full opulence available to the few in India.

A typical hotel. This one is in Delhi.

Your Gateway to India and all the contrasts that co-exist.

From Shiva to Bollywood and Everything in Between

Elephanta Caves and Hindu rock sculptures from 7th century A.D., dedicated to Shiva.

3-headed Shiva: creator, protector and destroyer, opposites and all-encompassing at the same time, much like what we find here in India.

Expansive cave, big country, huge aspirations.

The group that took the hot journey, in a packed motorboat, across the murky Arabian Sea harbor of Mumbai, to hike across a bridge over marshlands littered with trash and up tight, hot, steep stairs towards enlightenment.

We have been inspired by all that India is, in all of its imperfections and chaos.

We wonder at the artifacts.

We are amazed at modern influences.

We smile at the Indian attributes in contemporary forms.

Simply, there is hope.

An interesting 24 hours led us down (and up) some interesting steps. Several us moved from the hub of pop culture, watching rehearsals for the most popular show in India - Dance India Dance, to boarding a rickety old boat that took us across the murky, brown waters of this Mumbai's Indian Ocean to an island. There we hiked up (sherpa'd up, thanks to a tour guide who was in a hurry to get home) to the Elephanta Caves. WOW !!!! The first and most visited cave features a structure, replete with columns, built inside the mountain and features amazing stone carvings of Hindu's Shiva from early A.D. times. They sat in our minds in stark contrast to the hub of Bollywood, at the same time, both have brought/continue to bring a type of hope to the masses. While one is obviously spiritual and promises potential for improved life, the other is materialistic and yet also provides comfort and aspiration that ordinary people can make it.

I love India for the ability to create this kind of respectful co-existence. It lives with extremes and everything in between, and at times it feels like someone is taping an episode of the Amazing Race, only to turn the channel to Discovery on population, culture and history. In the end, we might want to agree that it is AN amazing race.

Shades of grey with splashes of color and light

Metaphorically and phsyically, there is a lot of grey in India - from the haze in the hot and humid air to the run-down buildings, streets and rubble. But we find pockets of sunshine and sparkling gems. We visited Lijjat where women are hired from all walks of life to make money rolling, kneeding, sorting, cooking papad - a local flatbread made from lentil flour. They have an amazing business model that allows them to earn profit, and at the same time their business model provides a stable social function for women. In turn, they use this forum as a vehicle to provide education and healthcare to the women and encourage them toward education for their children.

In giving a sense of purpose to women, earned money to keep them off the streets, and encouraging them with their children, the by-product is creating better opportunity in tomorrow. Their leadership is transformational in a sense that their efforts are done in the context of equality and no caste influences as well. And, again we see a model where the noble purpose outweighs profitability and enterprise co-exists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdJLpA5Adg

My travel buddies

This is the terrific travel crew from Pepperdine's GAP cohort of our EdD in Org Leadership program. Hats off! Thank you for welcoming me into your group. I have enjoyed building friendships with each one of you. And, what a great dynamic you have. Half of the group got sick. Nobody was injured. Everyone was hot, sticky and sweaty, but no one melted down. Some of the Type A's wanted to take control. All of us were tired. However, full of appreciation for this experience and up for it all, we've persevered together through illness, sensory overload, long days, short nights, stimulating conversation, intellectual debating, knowledge sharing, wisdom transferring, insights, lowsights, and highlights. Our leadership as individuals and as a group will be evident in all the subtleties and interpretations of these memorable experiences that we forever share.

Rural, meet Urban

The juxtaposition of old tradition as a back-drop to a more contemporary and capitalistic economy continues to amaze us. Both have beauty in their simplicity and amidst the squalor that appears around every corner. And it is clear to us that things in India are not black and white. Like the different hues of the cardboard that make up the structured homes, so are there so many shades of grey areas in this developing culture. I feel that I cannot even possibly do the complexities and the dimensions of life here justice.

One the one hand, we have NGOs here who accept the depths of the situation and seek to make a small difference in raising health awareness. While, another organization's mission is to create a systematic change and cultural shift. Who is more successful? Who has more sustainability? Who is more transformational.


Today, we visited the fruit and vegetable market, APMC (Agriculture Produce Market Committee), a place that is lost in time, where farmers come to sell their produce to the traders, and impoverished women gut rotting fruit for the seeds. The market was teeming with men of all shapes and sizes who stopped what they were doing to come and observe us. It became clear that we were being observed more than doing the observation, ourselves, especially when the papparazzi showed up and videos and cameras surrounded us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycLGI7zix3A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrTu_xUa13E

Contrast agricultural India with technological India. We visited Hexaware. Cusped on a very modern, western edge, this company is competing with all the large multinationals and has a very contemporary leadership style with respect to employees, recruiting and development, as well as succession planning and women in leadership. In this upper eschelon of contemporary business, women do not seem to be limited in their career aspirations. Well respected, we found strong, confident, independent and capable leadership potential among the women at Hexaware.


And then we got back on the bus, past the urban slums by the swamps and water's edge, through the chaos of people, traffic, vendors and trade, and onward to our contemporary hotel, right around the corner from the Gateway to India, the Taj Palace Hotel and the Causeway shopping area and Leopold Cafe. Rural, meet Urban. In some ways you are so different, but in India, I think you'll find you have some things in common.

Incredible hospitality abounds in India

It comes as no surprise to me just how hospitable everyone in India is. I know this from my friends in America! From the service in hotels, to the kind smiles of people we pass on the street and who wave to us from their cars, we have felt safe and welcome, despite the chaos that abounds around every corner. I admire their generosity. The hotel knew from my passport of my birthday and tracked me down to give me flowers, a cake and a little embroidered journal. They sang happy birthday, and in traditional Indian fashion, fed me a piece of my cake. After learning that it is custom for everyone at the party to do so, here you see Dean Weber of my school obliging the tradition! Too fun!

A Trippy Trip

Human trafficking - for labor or the sex trade, social responsibility, sustainability, oppression through ignorance, resignation, tolerance... I cannot even do justice to the intellectual debates and, as one of my fellow Pepperdine colleagues here referred to it, the "mental gymanstics" in which we have engaged on our long bus rides through the traffic, the dirt, the incredible noise pollution, and the people. Here, modernization backs right up against a general apathy towards the value of the physical life and the impoverished conditions under which the majority of the population live.

Human trafficking is the 3rd largest global crime effort, representing a rough estimated of $ 10 billion in "inital sales" of approximately four million people each year. In India, it is estimated that 250,000-400,000 women and children are trafficked internally each year. People are trafficked for sex trade but also for bonded labor. In either case, what startled us is how much this is accepted as part of the eco-system, if you will. And, while there are NGOs seeking to help these people, they are not necessarily trying to move them out of their situations. To many of these people, it is their means to providing for their children. Without alternatives, removing them without options for them creates a far greater problem and a situation that nobody is yet prepared to handle.

So, we see a need for options and for education to give people choices. I am reminded of Paulo Friere's book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wherein he advocates for greater interaction, circles of community, and open dialogue to create awareness, foster education and empower a self-interest for an alternative vocation that is not founded in oppression. This is evident at Aastha, a non-profit organization in the center of Mumbai dedicated to raising awareness and education around health issues among women who are on the streets. Through awareness, one woman learned to read and write. She left the streets, volunteered for this NGO, and now has become the President. She just bought her first car and aspires to buy a home. Later, we will meet with another organization that gives a steady job to any woman, making papad that is distributed worldwide.

I didn't get a sense of any regret, hostility, or angst among the women of Aastha. I find myself going back to Zander and Zander's Art of Possibility (tell me it wasn't timely that we read it for a class presentation). This is a group of people who seem to start with Zanders' "what is" and don't dwell on the "should be". A presenter at Welingkar had spoken to us of the "Indian gene" - that being something resilient, loving, celebratory, comfortable in ambiguity, pluralistic, accpeting, social, community-oriented, hopeful, respectful, spiritual, and hard-working. These qualities were no more evident to me in my lifetime than when two of the women from Aastha ran across the street at the end of the meeting and used their hard-earned money to buy me roses for my birthday. There is no value to this kind of thoughtfulness and generosity. It is from the bottom of their heart and it was given to me with a sense of hope... I believe a hope that I will pay this forward to someone in the future.

Welingkar Institute

This school is a premier center for a MBA education in Mumbai and we were welcomed with this amazing graphic made from different colorful sand. Here, we have had many intellectual discussions around the heritage and traditions of India.

We've discussed the importance of sustainability and social responsibility. My curiousity has been heightened around the idea of the private, for-profit sector creating social sustainability programs that benefit either people or the planet. Our presenter challenged us to think about a future where corporations around the world are measured by one single bottom line with no distinction between people, planet and profits, and where demand for a scrutiny in the supply chain drives integration and eradication of societal ills, like child labor. Of course, this is a noble, idealistic viewpoint, but so was the idea to recycle paper and plastic at one point in our past. I think that this is an opportunity for real leadership, a transformational kind, to emerge in the global arena. A massive shift in behavior will be necessary and I think we as shareholders in our organizations and in our world need to drive it. I would like to study the possibilities and be a part of the development and potential.

We see pockets of sustainability today, but (as our presenter summed up), "sustainability is like teenage sex. Everyone claims to be doing it, but half of those actually doing it... are doing it wrong."

Nine Lives (and many more...)

Vrindavan is one of the coolest places we visited. Not only because it is believed to be the birthplace of Krishna or because it features about 150 temples dedicated to various worshippers, but because it is the coming together of individual spirituality, as one practitioner described to us being the "tick" that lives in each one's heart. The same practitioner talked to us that there is also the "tock", that element of each individual spirit that forms a universal spirituality, regardless of cultural, religious, socio-economic, geographical nuances. And, so we see different walks of life in this festival at one of the temples we visited. Everyone seems to be doing their own thing, visiting the temple for their own personal interests. Yet there is some kind of harmony in the totality of the images that I tried to capture in video, but I find it incredibly difficult to capture something so complex and multi-dimensional in a one-dimensional view-finder. Lots of 60s/70s hari krishna throw-backs hanging out in this absolutely nutty, chaotic festival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wwBLXpOoRM

I am reminded of the multi-layered complexity that is India, further evident in William Dalrymple's book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. The juxtaposition of a modern India -a country that the western world holds on a pedestal as the next frontier for economic boom - against thousands of years of tradition and spirituality that grounds itself into the very earth that is occupied by a predominent rural India is staggering to us visiting here. This book actually highlights nine individual stories featuring different parts of India and various styles of tradition, all founded in some kind of spiritual valuation of god. It strikes many of us that there is also a great acceptance of people's lot in life, a justification for it through this spiritual connection to higher beings and a belief in reincarnation into a better physicality on the path to enlightenment.

Taj Mahal Oasis

We made it to the Taj Mahal - - after about a four hour bus ride through the chaos of Delhi and through Agra around northern India. Once close to the Taj, everyone is required to walk quite a distance or take an electric cart to the entrance as a result of noticeable wear and tear of the marble from pollution. The Shah - who had this built at the request of his wife, while she was dying in child labor delivering their fourteen baby - would not be happy!

Meanwhile, it is ironic that, right up to the very entrance gate, the streets teem with people, rubble, carts, cows, noise, litter, more litter, dirt, more rubble, more people, more carts, more litter. On the road to Agra and on the road to Vrindavan, there is more garbage, more rubble, more cows. There are monkeys. There is an occasional camel and more dirt, litter and rubble.

It occurs to me that we might take for granted just how far we have come in the last fifty years in the USA. The litter all over the streets of India are images of what could have become of America if we had not had the behavioral shift and cultural change towards our environment, earth and global warming. I am reminded of a Mad Men episode depicting the family picnic and leaving by shaking out the blanket with all the trash onto the grassy knoll. And there was no recycling then either. Kudos America for making such a movement. I asked one of the women with whom we've met if it is possible to undertake such a change in India to clean it up. For a population of this magnitude, with so many living in poverty, I'm afraid we concluded that it would take a broad-scale effort of private sector and public sector coming together and making substantial investment in the necessary infrastructure.