Talk Cocktail

Why Dreamers matter!

How often does a story leap off the pages of a magazine, to become a book, a documentary and a major motion picture?  Very rarely. And when it does, it’s clear that the story it tells has touched a powerful nerve among readers and viewers.  

Such is the story that Wired  Contributing Editor Joshua Davis tells, of four underdogs from the streets of Phoenix, who, using Spare Parts would take on the best High School and College students in the country, including MIT with the resources of Exxon/Mobil.

My conversation with Joshua Davis:

The best places to work

We’ve recently seen year end lists of the best places to work.  Free food, massage, pets, and a beautiful campus are all contributing factors.  However, research, behavioral analysis and science can also tell us what make a workplace effective, productive, and more innovative.

The famed management consultant Peter Drucker said that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Affirming a long held conviction that the culture of a company, even more than its smarts or its products, drive its success or failure.

Part of that culture, built into the DNA of every company, it the work environments it provides its people.

That where my gust Social Psychologist Ron Friedman picks up the story in The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

My conversation with Ron Friedman: 

The healing power of our pets

While the origins of the quote are sketchy, Harry Truman, frustrated by the problems he faced in the White House, is reported to have said that “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

Today the same might be said of our pets in general, or in the politically correct parlance of the day, our companion animals.  Be they dogs, or cats.

With all the talk about  the amount of money spend on our pets, it’s easy to lose sight of the real power of our relationships with them.  Sometimes exalted, sometimes mocked, the fact is that in a society where alienation is common, where complexity often rules, where self absorption defines a whole generation, those human/animal connections can be transcendent.

That’s the personal story and the connection that Lissa Warren writes about in The Good Luck Cat: How a Cat Saved a Family, and a Family Saved a Cat.

My conversation with Lissa Warren:

Cheryl Strayed's WILD

Back in the 1940’s theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the serenity prayer. You all know it. It tells us to accept those things that we can’t change and the courage to change those we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Over the years, it’s been adopted by AA and various other groups. But it might also be the coda for Cheryl Strayed's fantastically successful book  Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

The story of her trek on the Pacific Crest Trail, it’s also the story of coming of age and Cheryl's journey out of her own heart of darkness. The book is out in paperback and it is now a major motion picture.

My conversation with Cheryl Strayed:

If you're afraid of Genetically Modified Food, you'll really be afraid of Genetically Modified Humans

During the recent Ebola scare, we were often reminded of the dozens of science fiction thrillers that set the stage for our fears.  From the Andromeda Strain, to World War Z, The Stand and The Hot Zone, to name just a few.

Today, the cutting edge of genetic manipulation, often provides the basis for similar fears.  The brave new world of Bioengineering, plays upon our most primal instincts of what makes us human.

Jamie Metzl a former member of the National Security Council,  has added his new thriller to this long tradition.  Set against the worlds of politics, finance and religion,     Genesis Code, takes its place in fuelling our paranoia.

My conversation with Jamie Metzl:

Only satire can save us now

We live in an ironic age.  The speed of modern communication, juxtaposed with the traditional entrenched problems we face, provides a disconnect that only humor can bridge.

Think about it this way. How often has humor engaged us to better understand tragedy?  How long after certain tragedies, do we hear the first joke?  Not out of disrespect, but out of a way to get our arms around something that our brains have trouble comprehending.

When David Letterman asked, after 9/11, if we would ever laugh again, he was going to the heart of the role humor and satire play in our society.

From Mark Twain to Will Rogers, from Mort Sahl to Stephen Colbert, satire has been a translator of the American experience. 

Sophia McClennen dishes it up in Is Satire Saving Our Nation?: Mockery and American Politics.

My conversation with Sophia McClennen:  

Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production

Even amidst the concerns about the impact of cattle on global warming, the disgrace of industrialized farming and slaughterhouses, and the increased worldwide population that has sworn off beef, it’s still very much a part of our diet.  

And perhaps it should be.  But is there a better, more sustainable, more humane way to process that beef and bring it to market? 

In what too often seems to be world of black and white thinking, can we find a middle ground?  A way in which beef is healthy, sustainable, humane and actually good for us and the environment?  Nicolette Hahn Niman thinks so. Her book about what she has discovered is 

Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production

My conversation with Nicolette Hahn Niman:

Is Word of Mouth advertising driving Black Friday this year?

John Wanamaker, the famous department store magnate, once said that he knew that at least half of his advertising budget was wasted.  Problem was, he didn’t know which half. 

For anybody that’s in business today, you know how difficult it is making your product or service stand out among the competition and noise of today’s marketplace. It’s a lot tougher than it was for Don Draper.

Advertising is everywhere.  Television, radio, billboards, digital, banners, mobile, native advertising, telemarketing, and pop ups.  It’s on everything that isn’t implanted into us….and that may be not that far away.

So what works.  What is, in the buzzword of the day, authentic, effective and creates real Return on Investment?  

One of the most powerful tools of the marketer has always been word of mouth.  Social media and things like Yelp, have only amplified that power. 

But is word of mouth marketing just some random confluence of events, or can it be shaped, molded and directed in ways that are both authentic, and beneficial to both seller and buyer?

This has been the work that Ted Wright talks about in Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth

My conversation with Ted Wright:

The Marshmallow Test

I can’t even count the number of times that guests on this program have spoken about what’s become known as the Marshmallow Experiments.  In conversations ranging from business, to public policy, to personal psychology, the impact of this experiment in determining self control, executive function, the predilection for addiction and even intelligence, has been profound.

Walter Mischel started thinking about this experiment when he was in graduate school. Later, in the 60’s at Stanford, he devised what's become known as the Marshmallow Experiment, to assess the ability of children to delay gratification.

Since then, 50 years of in depth research have both enhanced and expanded the scope and knowledge that began with this simple experiment.  After all these years, Mischel has written about it in The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.

My conversation with Walter Mischel: 

Valerie Plame's BURNED

We live in an information age.  The goal of virtually every App on our phone, and most websites, is perfect information; about the world, about our neighbors, about our friends and about ourselves.

So how is it, that with all this information, the world is so much more dangerous.  That secrets are sometimes so much deeper, that bad actors, and even good ones turned bad, can often outsmart, out run and out maneuver the CIA, the very agency designed to ferret out those secrets and keep us safe.

Even as the very first tenants move into the new World Trade Center, we’ve come to appreciate the importance and value of human intelligence.  But those that engage in it are often at risk both from their enemies and their friends.

Few understand this better than former CIA operative Valerie Palme.  Her life and career was derailed, in public view, as much by friends as by her enemies. Valerie Plame’s career continues through the work and efforts of her fictional alter ego Vanessa Pierson.

Pierson made her debut in Blowback, and now she’s back in Burned.

My conversation with Valerie Plame:  

The Business Moments You Can't Ignore

It was actually Winston Churchill, not Rahm Emanuel who said that we should never let a serious crisis go to waste.

A crisis often creates a great opportunity to face, to talk about, and even sometimes to act on issues that had been previously frozen

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld once inarticulately put it, “sometimes the only solution to an unsolvable problem, is to create a bigger problem.”

But often these problems come out of the blue; in life and in business.  When they do, when those pivotal moments happen, it’s the culture, the people, the mission, in short the underpinning of the organization itself, that must become its survival mechanism, as well as the jumping off point for its future.

So just as we might prep for physical disasters, why not prepare and build an origination for the stress of those moments. That's one of the lessons from Malachi O'Connor and Barry Dornfeld in The Moment You Can't Ignore: When Big Trouble Leads to a Great Future.

My conversation with Malachi O'Connor and Barry Dornfeld:

Mark Leibovich's portraits of Citizens of the Green Room

Someone once remarked that when they saw a snake and a vulture having sex in Washington, and thought it was just business as usual.  Fitzgerald said that he rich were different, because they have more money. Politicians are different, usually because that they have more insecurities

The fact is that most politicians and other high profile inhabitants of our nation's capital are just flesh and blood human beings. And yes, they may be different than you and I, they are certainly more caught up in their unbroken series of successful gestures, but most do care about their work.

In fact, some care too much.  As the late, great journalist Richard Ben Cramer once wrote, that feeling you can make a difference is like a drug.   Also a great journalist, Mark Leibovich, has been been giving us great insights about the power players in Washington for the NY Times Magazine. Those profiles are part of his new book Citizens of the Green Room: Profiles in Courage and Self-Delusion.

My conversation with Mark Leibovich:

National Book Award Winner, Jacqueline Woodson

Recently we spoke of the 50 Anniversary of Freedom Summer and the early flowering of the civil rights movement.  Much has been written of the historical roots and narrative of those events. But now Jacqueline Woodson tells her personal story and the larger story of the journey of a movement from the Deep South, to urban core of America.  

The story of   Brown Girl Dreaming is a story made all the more powerful by recent events that bring into focus the arc of that journey. A journey that ended short of its target.

My conversation with Jacqueline Woodson:

Language and Cultural Evolution

When we do think about the state or origins of language, we often think about it as something based in the distant past.  But language is very much a living thing, with a direct nexus to our cultural evolution.   The choices we make about the words we use, reflect both our own place in the culture as well as the state of the culture itself.

This is all part of the unique work of Princeton Professor Daniel Cloud in The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal.

My conversation with Professor Daniel Cloud: 

Technology will keep us together

As we listened to election results last week, the one thing we heard over and over again is the slicing and dicing of the electorate.  Into generations, incomes, ethnicity, etc.

Certainly we hear repeatedly about the complexity and challenges of today's multi- generational workplace.

With all of this talk about division, it's perhaps worth looking at what might actually unite us.  There is an answer we might find surprising, and that is technology.  To paraphrase the old orange juice commercial;  technology, it’s not just for Millennials anymore.

In fact, the use and strategic advantage of technology may be the most unifying forces for all us. That's the conclusion reached by Thomas Koulopoulos and Dan Keldsen in The Gen Z Effect: The Six Forces Shaping the Future of Business.

My conversation with Thomas Koulopoulos:

Leading with Intention

In a business environment as data driven as ours is today, it’s not surprising that we don’t view success through the lens that Fitzgerald used to describe Gatsby, who saw his success as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.”

Still success to be sustainable and replicable, both personal and professional, has to be more than habit or behavior, or just data. 

In a world in which changes take place so quickly, in which workforce diversity both generational and ethnic, is so varied, the traditional solutions to problems are not always applicable.

As we often hear said about the military, you can’t fight the next war with the lessons learned from the last one

That’s why design and intentions are so important as tools for driving both leaders and their organizations.

That's what Mindy Hall focuses on in Leading with Intention: Every Moment Is a Choice

My conversation with Mindy Hall: 

The Uncensored History of the Food Network

If the past 30 years of television has been about anything, it’s been about specialization.  While ESPN was the leader and Granddaddy of specialty television programming, you can now watch nothing but Sci Fi, or old movies, or cartoons, and of course food.

Food programming, like sports has had a cultural impact far beyond the screen. The Food Network, like ESPN, has both shaped our perceptions and married it with our culture in ways that gives us both celebrities and food.  What better combination for 21st Century America.

Allen Salkin looks at his history in From Scratch: The Uncensored History of the Food Network

My conversation with Allen Salkin:  

Rules for Assassins

Throughout history, from Cesar thru Lincoln,  from Archduke Ferdinand and Gandhi through the Kennedys and Malcolm X, a bullet has changed the world.

But what’s different when assassination is not a random deranged act, but an instrument of policy.  First, it’s the stuff of movies.  Think about it;  The Manchurian Candidate, Day of the Jackal, Executive Action, Parallax View, to name a few.  Add to this list, Syriana, a story based on the life of former CIA operative Robert Baer.

Baer has now codified his unique line of work in The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

My conversation with Robert Baer: 

Ratchets, Hatchets & Pivots

We are in the midst of a great migration to cities.  The number of farms and people engaged in agriculture continues to decline.  Yet human ingenuity has produced abundant resources of food, through innovation and technology.  

Historically, when disaster has struck and we have been threatened as a species, we’ve always seemed to find a way out, particularly with respect to our food supply.  This has resulted in increases in population, which then takes us to the next crises.

This cycle is replicated throughout history.  It is what MacArthur fellow and Columbia Professor, Ruth DeFries calls a cycle of Ratchets, Hatchets and Pivots.  She explains in her book The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis.

My conversation with Ruth DeFries: 

Why Motivating People Does not work

Todays workplace bears very little resemblance to that of our parents.  It’s multi generational nature, its focus on employee empowerment and its reflection of broader changes in society, education and culture, all create a perfect storm that requires whole new skill sets from today’s leaders.  

These are the skills that Susan Fowler writes about in Why Motivating People Doesn't Work . . . and What Does: The New Science of Leading, Energizing, and Engaging

My conversation with Susan Fowler:

Love, Sex and Popular Culture in 21st Century America

Back in the early 1960’s the world took note of the decadence of life in the Italian capital of Rome, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.   Inspired by two major political/sex scandals of the era, the film, which would win the 1960 Palme d'or in Cannes, depicted a Rome that was ultra sophisticated, ultra modern and ultra decadent.

Fifty plus years later, Prof. Roger Friedland would decide to move to Rome with his wife and adolescent daughters, because he saw Rome as an antidote to America being awash in sexuality, modernity, sophistication and decadence. He writes about his experience in Amore: An American Father's Roman Holiday

How have the tables switched so dramatically, and what does it say about the state of love, sex and popular culture in the 21st century.

My conversation with Roger Friedland: 

The making of Super Althletes

Almost no aspect of life has not been touched by the forward march of science and technology.  The world of sports is no exception.   When we watch a game, or even multiple games as in the Olympics, we want to see things we’ve never seen before. 

The narrative of human performance drives our love of any sport.  And today, science is glad to oblige. As we learn more about the brain, the body, genetics and biological evolution itself, scientists and engineers find news ways to enhance innate athletic ability.

It’s no accident that story abounded recently about how the newly minted World Champion SF Giants, had hired a sleep expert to advise them when it was best to travel.

So what’s going on now, and where will it all lead?  That's what Wired editor Mark Mcclusky set out to discover in his new book Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them.

My conversation with Mark McClusky: 

Just how absurd is life on the West Bank?

The Middle East is always ripe with stories.  Unfortunately, few get to the heart of the absurdity of the human condition there.  In much the way that Catch 22 or Mash did for our wartime military, The Hilltop, a new novel by esteemed Israeli writer Assaf Gavron, does for the settlements on the West Bank.

My conversation with Assaf Gavron:

By the Book

How many of you have been asked recently to name your favorite or most influential books?  It’s a process that has been all the rage on social media. And while such lists have been around for a long time, perhaps what inspired this current flare up is New York Times Book Review Editor Pamela Paul’s weekly Q & A with authors and journalists in the BY THE BOOK feature in Sunday’s New York Times.

The feature is an all access pass into the private world of authors, as they reflect on their work habits, reading preferences, inspirations, and recommendations.

Now she brings together sixty-five of these exchanges, in their uncut and original form in By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review.

My conversation with Pamela Paul: 

The Lessons of 1970's S. Africa

The world of historical fiction always plays an interesting role.  On the one hand, it's an entertaining way for us to understand, often from 30k feet, the broad historical sweeps of history. But beyond that, it’s an opportunity for us to see, up close and personal, how conflict, change, stress, fear and intimacy affects the human condition. To see how others act, and to better understand and appreciate the diversity of humanity in our current world.

That's what Mark Fine has done in looking back at apartheid in South Africa in the late 1970's. He tells this story in The Zebra Affaire.

My conversation with Mark Fine:

Literature vs. The Future

Although it doesn’t seem like it in today's world of images and 140 characters, words, stories and literature once moved people and nations and changed the world.  In fact, even in our own nation, the act of reading was once even seen as subversive. Yet it fueled the quest for freedom,  fired up our democracy, and launched a nation.

Today that same nation and its discontents, seems to eschew literature as a form of creative engagement, of social discourse and as an element of citizenship.

How we got here and what it might mean for the future is part of the backdrop of Azar Nafisi’s new work The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books.

My conversation with Azar Nafisi:

Superstorm Sandy +2 years - What have we learned?

As we watch day after day, the government response to a potential Ebola crisis, we are reminded of so many mistakes that various government agencies have made in response to other disasters. It hardly fills us with confidence.

Katrina, of course, remains in all our minds. And more recently Superstorm Sandy, exactly two years ago, where municipal response, particularly in N.Y. City, would have embarrassed even the Keystone Cops.

Kathryn Miles, in Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy, dives deep into Sandy.  What she tells us could, if we pay attention, save a lot of lives in the future.

My conversation with Kathryn Miles: 

The Birth of the Pill

There are many legacies of the 1960’s.  The Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the efforts of women to have reproductive choice. Of these, arguably the reproductive freedom of women has had the most profound, lasting and  global impact.

Before the efforts of four mismatched anti establishment characters in the 1960’s, women had, since the days of ancient Egypt, sought to control their biological destiny.  

And while today, we look at The Pill and birth control as the norm, the efforts to develop and market it were anything but normal.   In a time now when we think that an App on our phone can change the world, it’s worth looking back at something that truly did. That's what Jonathan Eig has done in The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution.

My conversation with Jonathan Eig: 

Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice

When we think about the Supreme Court, and its hushed, hallowed halls, and John Adams dictum that we are a nation of laws and not of men, words that do not often come to mind are  passion, Salsa Dancing, ambition, and people skills.  Yet all of these have been a part of the life and Supreme Court tenure of Sonia Sotomayor.  

Her story is not just a legal story, it’s the story of the rise of the Latino population in America and it’s ever larger and growing role in the politics of the nation.

My guest Joan Biskupic tells that story in Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice

My conversation with Joan Biskupic:

How the World Works

Today, as we look around the world, it sometimes seems to be spinning out of control. It feels like a time, to quote Yates, when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, when the best lack all conviction and the worst seem full of passionate intensity.

Does the fault lie in the vagaries of human nature, or in our leaders and institutions?  The answer is that both are intimately linked in ways that, when fully understood, explain the essence of how the world works.

This is the journey that Francis Fukuyama takes us on in his two volume masterwork on political order.  He has just published the second volume, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

My conversation with Francis Fukuyama:

The Robots are coming

For a while now technology has seemed to focus on only one aspect or another of  information.  Everything from Google to Facebook, to Instagram, to all aspects of the sharing economy are essentially all about trying to achieve perfect information.

Slowly the emphasis is beginning to shift.  Now voice recognition,  robots, drones and a renewed interest in artificial intelligence are all pointing to a new technological direction.

Just as we’ve had to readjust to the creative destruction and social shifting of the information economy, now the the automation or AI economy is upon us.  What will it change?  How will it reshape the social contract and perhaps most of all, how will it reshape the nature of work? 

Nicholas Carr, the best selling author of THE SHALLOWS, and THE BIG SWITCH turns his attention to this future in his new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

My conversation with Nicholas Carr:  

Understanding the Internet of Things

Although the origins of the quote are a bit murky, the idea that the only way to predict the future is to invent it, certainly seems true in the 21st century. In fact, that future is being invented right now. 

As technology moves from dedicated devices, to virtually everything, soon everything from our pens to our trash to our kitchens to our most intimate desires, will be connected to the each other and to us, in ways unimagined until now. Will that technology be more humane or more intrusive?

David Rose is on the cutting edge of inventing that future and he details it in Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things.

My conversation with David Rose:

The Week Politics Went Tabloid

For those that study and write about politics, the holy grail is to find those seminal moments in the nation's public and political life that change everything.  And while the antecedents of those events may be years in the making, they usually create a perfect storm that results in an event that is a kind of tipping point;  one that marks a permanent tectonic shift in the political landscape.  Sometimes we have to let time pass, before we appreciate or even understand those moments. 

The televised Nixon-Kennedy Debate, Watergate, the Nixon’s resignation and the Vietnam war piped into our living rooms are such event.  And, according to longtime political journalist Matt Bai, the implosion of Gary Heart's presidential campaign in 1987, was also such a moment. One that Bai captures, in all its complexity, in All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid.

It was a time when politics became a plotline, when the personal became both political and public, and when Who, What, Where and When became Gotcha.

My conversation with Matt Bai:

Capitalism vs. The Climate

It was actually Winston Churchill, not Rahm Emanuel, who said that we should never let a serious crisis go to waste.

A crisis often creates a great opportunity to face, to talk about, and even sometimes to act upon issues that had been previously frozen

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld once inarticulately put it, sometimes the only solution to an unsolvable problem, is to create a bigger problem.

It could be said that climate change provides such an opportunity.  That in seeking to address the issues of man made climate change, we will have to drill down into the very issues that caused it in the first place. That’s what Naomi Klein does in her new work This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.

My conversation with Naomi Klein: 

How the Obesity Crisis Is Complicating America's Love Life

Some of you may have seen the story recently that marriage is at an all time low in America.  We also know that two out of three Americans are overweight, or obese.  Is there a link between these two issues?

Has our national physical decline and the rise of obesity changed the way we view love and sex, and if so, what are the broad social and economic impacts of that?

That’s what Sarah Varney, senior health policy correspondent with Kaiser Health News, sets out to find out in XL Love: How the Obesity Crisis Is Complicating America's Love Life.

My conversation with Sarah Varney

Terrorism and the Search for Justice

For decades, it seems, we've read and watched stories about suicide bombers in the Middle East. We process the information without emotion, as we do most news stories.  Then 9/11 happened and suddenly suicide bombers took on a new meaning for most Americans.  

With that new understanding, award winning journalist Mike Kelly looks back at a story of a suicide bombing in Israel, that took place in 1996, years before 9/11.  The story, fraught with the humanity and frustration of loss, would have, if we knew better than, presaged so much of what’s happened since….in Israel, in Palestine, and in America.  

Mike Kelly's story is Bus on Jaffa Road: A Story of Middle East Terrorism and the Search for Justice.

My conversation with Mike Kelly:

Superintelligence

Whether we are thinking about our smart phones, or HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, we are usually deeply conflicted about artificial intelligence.  Will it be a panacea to enhance the already unique power of human intelligence or, like HAL, will its survival depend on usurping human control

That balance informs both our fear and appreciation of machines and technology and what they both can do. This is the balance that Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom seeks to find in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

My conversation with Nick Bostrom: 

The no problem, problem

Revolutions are often exciting.  The stir change, mobilize ideas, and are often at the cutting edge of excitement.  Yet what happens after revolutions is often the work that matters.  The problem is that it’s hard work.  The cameras are off, the story has grown cold, but this is where the work gets done that can truly change the world.

Arguably the women's movement is such an example.  While dramatic changes once took place, arguably the hard work since has not been quite enough

While the opportunities for elite women to “lean in,” have never been stronger, American women overall today, fare worse than men on virtually every major dimension of social status, financial well-being, and physical safety.

Sexual violence is still condoned, and reproductive rights are by no means secure. Women assume disproportionate burdens in the home and pay a heavy price in the workplace. 

Yet these issues are not political priorities. Nor is there a consensus that it’s even a problem. This is the story that Stanford Law Professor Deborah Rhode tells in What Women Want: An Agenda for the Women's Movement.

My conversation with Deborah L. Rhode:

I'm not the boss of me

The common portrayal of Millennials is as generation that is narcissistic, self absorbed, entitled and demanding.  Yet they are almost 90 million strong and will soon be taking their place in leadership in business, in politics and in almost every other aspect of society.

What will they be like in this new role?  How will they be when they are the boss?  That’s the situation that Lindsey Pollak looks at in Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders.

My conversation with Lindsey Pollak: 

Daring: My Passages

Kierkegaard said that “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.”  Such is the powerful value of memoir and reflection

Sometimes, though, that reflection takes in more than just the individual life, it becomes a way to reflect on a time, a place, and movement.  Gail Sheehy’s life encompasses all of that.  The mainstreaming of hippie culture, feminism, new journalism, publishing all exist side by side with the touchstones of love, loss and family.  Her story is, in short, the story of the past fifty years. The proverbial grain of sand that captures the history of the time.

Gail Sheehy shares her story in her new memoir Daring: My Passages: A Memoir

My conversation with Gail Sheehy: