Who is:

Profiles of prominent figures whose identities are a primary focus of their story.

Come Out at Work: With Breast Cancer [video]

Haig Chahinian

If you were diagnosed with breast cancer, how would you raise the issue at work? It’s a painful scenario to imagine, and yet it’s something thousands of cancer survivors have done, including two prominent television journalists.

Linda Hurtado, a health reporter for WTFS in Tampa Bay, Florida, in a recent newscast tearfully announced she had breast cancer and would undergo a bilateral mastectomy to prevent its spread. On the air she poignantly grappled with bridging her personal journey with her professional work. She said:

I was diagnosed with breast cancer about two weeks ago… I’ve struggled since then with what I should say to all of you… How much to share, if I should share anything at all… And now I’m going to be gone for a while. I’m the health reporter, it’s breast cancer awareness month, and over the last 17 years I’ve asked so many of you to share your truth with me, so I can’t just disappear for a while without sharing mine with you.

She comes out in part to align her life with what she espouses in her work as a health reporter, and in part to deal with the practicality of her subsequent temporary absence.

In 2007, Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts also came out at work with breast cancer. She shaved her hair on television so the world could witness the loss that can accompany the disease.  In the video below, she relates:

When you’re first diagnosed, one of the first thoughts is about…the side effects of chemotherapy. And the one side effect that comes to mind, just like that, is one of the most visible:  loss of hair.

There’s nothing to be ashamed about. It’s not like I’m trying to fool people by wearing the wig, because in the line of work that we are in, we don’t want to be distracting people from our story and what we’re talking about.

Roberts works openly with the public nature of her job in our lookist society. See the moving video for yourself:

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Roberts and Hurtado are brave to reveal themselves so nakedly, and in doing so they help educate millions of people about the early detection and treatment of breast cancer. Even more important, they serve themselves by coming forth with their truth, and thus from a situation that weakens some physical capacity, they derive strength.

In fact, Robin Roberts’ video diary sent droves of viewers to ABCNews.com, a boon for the network.

So coming out at work can clearly be a win-win-win prospect for the world at large, your organization, and you.

Have you come out at work with breast cancer? How did you manage the experience?

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Whole Wide Work Hall of Fame 2 [video]

Haig Chahinian

PepsiCo Chair and CEO Indra Nooyi encourages her employees to bring their whole selves to work, and she spoke on this subject once again at the BlogHer ’11 conference in San Diego. Considering her organizational ideologies in the context of her leadership role, we’re very happy to induct her into the Whole Wide Work Hall of Fame. Congratulations Ms. Nooyi!

The WWW Hall of Fame distinguishes prominent figures who promote the ideals of revealing and engaging your whole self at work. In the brief clip below with interviewer Willow Bay of the Huffington Post, she says:

But most importantly, we want to create a company where every employee can bring their whole selves to work. The reason I say that, Willow, we notice that many people who live in communities, who live in the cities we operate in, they come and park themselves at the door. They come to the company, and they’re a different person. When they leave they pick themselves up and go out again.

That’s not how it’s supposed to be. We should be seamless. We want to create an environment in PepsiCo where everybody can bring their whole selves to work, so that we can get the best out of everyone. Taken together, it’s performance with purpose. It’s just a way of saying capitalism should have a conscience.

 Take a look:

We’d like to hear Nooyi describe more precisely how her employees can bring their whole selves to work; right now she relates the concept at a pretty high level.

Perhaps she’d like us to come and speak with her employees about the specific “how-tos” of this significant skill set?

To watch the full video, click here

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Biases Not All Bad, Have Benefits

Haig Chahinian

Bias is bad, or so we’ve learned. And yet we all have prejudgments that have formed over time in complex ways. New research is indicating that employing some of our prejudices on the job sometimes can help advance the world.

Cordelia Fine (right), a senior research associate at the Melbourne Business School, recently wrote in the New York Times:

Some academics have recently suggested that a scientist’s pigheadedness and social prejudices can peacefully coexist with — and may even facilitate — the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

She introduces us to:

the philosopher of science Heather Douglas (left) [who] has argued that social values can safely play an indirect role in scientific reasoning. Consider: The greater we judge the social costs of a potential scientific error, the higher the standard of evidence we will demand. Professor A, for example, may be troubled by the thought of an incorrect discovery that current levels of a carcinogen in the water are safe, fearing the “discovery” will cost lives. But Professor B may be more anxious about the possibility of an erroneous conclusion that levels are unsafe, which would lead to public panic and expensive and unnecessary regulation.

Both professors may scrutinize a research paper with these different costs of error implicitly in mind.

First, did you note Douglas’s role? She’s a philosopher, specifically of science. There are millions of occupations out there!

And next, it seems reasonable to apply this analysis to the everyday workplace, no? Yet we caution: we’re talking only about thoughtful conclusions that have been considered with an open mind, and not knee-jerk reactions about whole groups of people.

Dr. Fine concludes the article with the statement:

Maybe progress would be even faster and smoother if scientists would admit, and even embrace, their humanity.

Hooray for bringing your whole self to work! Revealing the stuff of which we humans are made in this case can help propel progress. We considered inducting Dr. Fine into the Whole Wide Work Hall of Fame for making this declaration, yet first we’d like to see more similar work from her.

In conclusion, feel free as you engage all your many facets at work; even your biases can make your work output better.

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How to Make Great Discoveries

Haig Chahinian

We increasingly incorporate technology into our work lives; LinkedIn, iPhones, MS Outlook all help us get more done, more quickly. As computers and the Internet help us manage more of our daily living, we think about what makes us essentially different from all the silicon.

So we were heartened to read that Svante Pääbo, a prominent German evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is dedicating his life’s work to finding out what makes us essentially human. His approach? Sequencing the entire genome of the Neanderthal.

The human genome was sequenced in 2000, a significant feat in the history of biology. Still, Craig Venter and company had a lot of material to work with; humans are everywhere. Pääbo, however, is working with small fragments dating back 30,000 years. And that’s if the chip of bone or speck of skin is recent.

Amazingly, Pääbo is halfway through mapping the Neanderthal genome. Once it’s done, he’ll compare it bit by bit with the human genome, and see where the two diverge. It’s estimated that the two genomes vary by 4%; Pääbo is hot on the heels of that small, yet significant, percentage!

Yet he may have never progressed this far had he listened to some of his former colleagues. Indeed his career path is intriguing, as reported in a recent New Yorker profile by Elizabeth Kolbert:

When [Pääbo] was a teenager, his mother took him to visit the Pyramids, and he was entranced…

“I really wanted to discover mummies like Indiana Jones,” he said…

In the early nineteen-eighties, Pääbo was doing doctoral research on viruses when he once again began fantasizing about mummies. At least as far as he could tell, no one had ever tried to obtain DNA from an ancient corpse. It occurred to him that if this was possible, then a whole new way of studying history would open up.

Suspecting that his dissertation adviser would find the idea silly (or worse), Pääbo conducted his mummy research in secret, at night.

 The results of his work were a hit! Read more →

Come Out at Work: As Atheist [video]

Haig Chahinian

Religion is a touchy subject; just reading this post’s title makes us go “eek!” inside.

In many organizations, executives promote a message that people of all faiths are welcome, and that no one religion is espoused. Then they close on Christmas, which suggests that the Christian persuasion indeed is most valued.

So in a work environment where having a religious identity is expected, what can we do if we’re atheist?

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, increasingly the go-to spokesperson for atheists, has an answer: come out as such.  The author of The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976 and 2006) was recently featured in the New York Times, and he spoke about his upbringing, his beliefs about the world, and of course, his work. Michael Powell relates several facets of Dr. Dawkins, including:

His impatience with religion is palpable, almost wriggling alive inside him. Belief in the supernatural strikes him as incurious, which is perhaps the worst insult he can imagine.

On working in Britain:

It is a measure of Britain’s more resolutely secular culture that Professor Dawkins can pursue his atheism and probing, provocative views of Islam and Christianity in several prime-time television documentaries.

On perceptions of him by his peers:

Critics grow impatient with Professor Dawkins’s atheism. They accuse him of avoiding the great theological debates that enrich religion and philosophy, and so simplifying the complex.

And finally, his thoughts on the future:

He talks of the possibility that we might co-evolve with computers, a silicon destiny.

We ponder that too!

In revealing his philosophical beliefs as they connect with his research and areas of expertise, Richard Dawkins models coming out at work as an atheist. Which would seem scary, and yet he looks very comfortable.

Watch the video below, in which he talks about “coming out” as an atheist.

If you identify as atheist, are you out at work?

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The New Currency?

Haig Chahinian

Money plays a primary role at work. Whether in dram, dollars, yen or euros, cash is the unit in which profits are measured, and how employees are compensated.

It’s also significant in our career counseling practice. We persistently encourage individual clients to link their achievements to the bottom line of the organizations where they work. This way they fortify their resumes, or LinkedIn profiles, or their vocabulary when describing themselves in an interview.

This may change.

Star of the TV show Roseanne’s Nuts, Roseanne Barr is prompting us to reconsider our understanding of money as currency. Having initially endeared herself to us in this scene from Roseanne—

(Roseanne and Dan [John Goodman] are in the kitchen, with a man lying motionless on the floor. Roseanne checks his pulse.)

Roseanne:  He’s dead.

Dan:  Are you sure? Check again.

Roseanne:  I can count to zero!

–we were enamored again, in a recent interview with the Village Voice‘s Michael Musto, wherein Barr pontificated on the economics of living. She says:

It keeps you smart to remember that things don’t come from money, they come from seeds.

It’s interesting to think about, no? At an essential level, so much of what sustains our daily life comes not from money, but first from seeds:  fruit, vegetables, wood, medicine, grains, to name a few.  Seeds are so crucial to life on earth that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has been created near the North Pole. It’s a bank with 2.25 billion assets under management. Should any doomsday scenarios hit, nations may be able to make withdrawals — of seeds, not cash. Seeds may indeed be the new currency; we can’t eat cash!

So as we examine the essence of what’s within us in order to reveal and engage our whole selves at work, perhaps it’s time we start looking at what’s essential around us, too.

How connected to seeds is your work?

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Come Out at Work: As the Child Within [video]

Haig Chahinian

Don’t scoff! We all were children once, so we hold within us that young kid, or inner child, who wonders about the big world, plays readily, and is excited to figure out what makes things work.

The problem is, so many of us bury that kid deep inside, as if she has no relevance to the adult world in which we live.

Except Eric Schadt, pioneering biologist and chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Listen to how he describes his work environment, starting at about 0:45.

Did you catch that? He describes where he works as a “sandbox.” More specifically, in discussing why he made the move to Mount Sinai, he states:

The simplicity of Mount Sinai is you have a CEO who runs both the hospital and the medical center, and sort of reduce bureaucracy, embed yourself in all of that, and see if in that kind of sandbox you could revolutionize the way this kind of information could impact decision making in the clinic.

Metaphorically speaking, this superstar scientist sees himself as playing in a sandbox during the workday. It suggests he’s exploring, working with his hands, collaborating with others, and having a fun time all the while. As a bonus, playtime is leading him to make all kinds of breakthroughs.

So, do you play at work? If no, how can you find the sandbox in your workplace?

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