By Jane Carruthers (London)
How do you define a thoroughly modern heroine? Brave, candid, funny, kind and fantastically good at her job? Well, that’s certainly part of it. It was a job that demanded Marie Colvin took more risks than most people would consider sane, and one that she made peculiarly her own. By her sheer professionalism, personal bravery and awe-inspiring energy Marie Colvin became a legend in the hard-bitten world of war reporting. The newspapers and websites are abuzz with praise for a woman who lived her life to the maximum, working in places closer to a vision of hell than many of us can imagine, and telling the stories of ordinary people so that the world could know about the horrors and the atrocities they faced on a daily basis.
Along with Kate Adie, Christiane Amanpour, and Janine di Giovanni, Colvin crashed the almost exclusively male world of war reporting. Ground-breaking in the latter part of the last century, these women have shown the way to other women who want to pursue their chosen careers without fear of discrimination. Colvin did not do so as a quasi-male. She brought her own brand of femininity to her work, and liked nothing more than having a ritzy manicure and a night out in designer clothes, partying with her large circle of friends when home from an assignment.
Her friends and colleagues speak of someone full of fun, who knew the world’s darkest corners but also how to party – hard. East Timor, Sri Lanka (where she lost an eye), Chechnya, Libya. A roll-call of the horror centres of recent years, and she was there, telling it like it is, like always. Syria was to be her downfall. Murdered in a run-down press HQ in Homs, along with her French photographer Remi Ochlik, she had ‘one more story to file’ and died doing it. Two of her colleagues are still stranded in the bombed-out press centre, injured and desperate to get out.
Yale educated Colvin started her career as a night police reporter with UPI, eventually moving to Europe where she worked in Paris as Bureau chief. She moved to The Sunday Times in 1985 and became Middle East correspondent in one of the most turbulent periods in the region. She could be relied upon to get the scoop, even winning an unheard-of interview with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Award-winning and highly respected around the world for her hard-hitting coverage, her successes came at great personal cost: she lost an eye when she came under fire from the Sri Lankan government forces in an RPG attack, and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder for a year, requiring hospitalisation. Her three marriages failed. Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club in London, where Colvin and her friends would congregate to relax between assignments, said: “She had a tough time. You cannot live a normal life with her job.”
Friend Virginia Bonham Carter, who knew Colvin for over 30 years, said that she managed to combine being brave and serious with incredible joie de vivre and energy for fun: “Marie connected with virtually every person she met.”
Colvin was not shy of using her considerable style and charm to gain entry to some of the most influential offices in the world. When working in the Middle East, she followed the more modest dress code required. A Moslem friend taught her how to tie the hijab around her neck properly, but Colvin insisted that she got better interviews if she showed a bit of cleavage. With Colvin, it was never a sacrifice of personal integrity – but she would – and did – push with every fibre of her determination to get the quote, get the story, file the scoop.
To ask the question “what does it mean to be an intrepid woman?” you need to little more than to read Marie Colvin’s resume. She embodied excellence, passion and humanity.
Much of the coverage of her death dwells on her gender, which is perhaps not surprising given her working world. Perhaps the greatest honour we could do her would be to ensure that it is not her gender for which she will be remembered, but her professionalism and her passion.
Seven Steps for Making A Difficult Conversation Easier
Ask A Career CoachYou wish your boss would give you more space to make decisions. You think your co-worker is sabotaging you behind your back. You need to talk with an employee about their bad attitude. Many of these situations call for conversations to be had, conversations that often don’t happen, because they are difficult and frankly we’d rather go get a root canal. My goal is for us to all have the personal power to have difficult conversations. So here is a step-by-step checklist for making these difficult conversations easier so that they actually happen.
Step 1 – Are You Seeing the Situation Clearly?
Conversations become difficult when our feelings and emotions are involved. If we are emotional about a given situation, our emotions cloud our judgment and ability to see the situation clearly. We often have filters or stories that impact how we see a situation. The first step in a difficult conversation is to look within.
Leadership Practice
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Global Solutions for Getting More Women into Tech
Industry Leaders, LeadershipToday the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology released its latest report on getting more women into the technology workplace. The report combines best practices from a number of top technology companies on recruiting and retaining women, as well as suggestions on how companies of any size can implement them.
Denise Gammal, PhD, Director of Corporate Partnerships at the Institute, explained, “Last year when we first debuted our top companies of the year award – IBM was the winner – we held a workshop to discuss best practices. And through the year, we’ve increasingly had companies ask us what they can do to hire more talented women.”
This year’s Top Company for Technical Women award, released along with the study, went to American Express. Jerri Barrett, Vice President for Marketing at ABI, said, “This is a company that has achieved over 30 percent technical women.”
Gammal continued, “And it’s at every level of the pipeline, which is an impressive accomplishment.” She added that the industry norm is around 20 percent women at the entry level , and only three to five percent at the very top.
The report, “Solutions to Recruit Technical Women” is the first in a series of papers discussing tested methods to improve the gender ratio in the technology industry. “Our goal really is to come up with an actionable set of recommendations,” Gammal said. “Any company – no matter their size or resources – will find solutions they can implement.”
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Voice of Experience: Nicole Arnaboldi, Managing Director and Vice Chairman of Alternative Investments, Credit Suisse
Voices of Experience“While I’m not normally a fan of sports analogies, there’s a great Wayne Gretzky quote,” began Nicole Arnaboldi, Managing Director and Vice Chairman of Alternative Investments in Credit Suisse’s Asset Management division. “It goes something like ‘Head for where the puck is going to be, not where it is.’ When you think about your career, think about where the world is heading, and go to where the tide is rising.”
“I think asset management is one of those areas where the puck is heading,” she pointed out, considering the rise in global wealth.
“This advice isn’t limited to young people. Even as you have become more senior, take a step back and think about where the world is heading, and about what the opportunities are for you,” she continued.
Having spent almost 30 years rising through the alternative investment business, Arnaboldi shared her advice and expertise, based on her career of “going to where the puck is heading.”
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Intrepid Woman: Marie Colvin (12 January 1956 – 22 February 2012)
Intrepid Women SeriesHow do you define a thoroughly modern heroine? Brave, candid, funny, kind and fantastically good at her job? Well, that’s certainly part of it. It was a job that demanded Marie Colvin took more risks than most people would consider sane, and one that she made peculiarly her own. By her sheer professionalism, personal bravery and awe-inspiring energy Marie Colvin became a legend in the hard-bitten world of war reporting. The newspapers and websites are abuzz with praise for a woman who lived her life to the maximum, working in places closer to a vision of hell than many of us can imagine, and telling the stories of ordinary people so that the world could know about the horrors and the atrocities they faced on a daily basis.
Along with Kate Adie, Christiane Amanpour, and Janine di Giovanni, Colvin crashed the almost exclusively male world of war reporting. Ground-breaking in the latter part of the last century, these women have shown the way to other women who want to pursue their chosen careers without fear of discrimination. Colvin did not do so as a quasi-male. She brought her own brand of femininity to her work, and liked nothing more than having a ritzy manicure and a night out in designer clothes, partying with her large circle of friends when home from an assignment.
Her friends and colleagues speak of someone full of fun, who knew the world’s darkest corners but also how to party – hard. East Timor, Sri Lanka (where she lost an eye), Chechnya, Libya. A roll-call of the horror centres of recent years, and she was there, telling it like it is, like always. Syria was to be her downfall. Murdered in a run-down press HQ in Homs, along with her French photographer Remi Ochlik, she had ‘one more story to file’ and died doing it. Two of her colleagues are still stranded in the bombed-out press centre, injured and desperate to get out.
Yale educated Colvin started her career as a night police reporter with UPI, eventually moving to Europe where she worked in Paris as Bureau chief. She moved to The Sunday Times in 1985 and became Middle East correspondent in one of the most turbulent periods in the region. She could be relied upon to get the scoop, even winning an unheard-of interview with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Award-winning and highly respected around the world for her hard-hitting coverage, her successes came at great personal cost: she lost an eye when she came under fire from the Sri Lankan government forces in an RPG attack, and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder for a year, requiring hospitalisation. Her three marriages failed. Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club in London, where Colvin and her friends would congregate to relax between assignments, said: “She had a tough time. You cannot live a normal life with her job.”
Friend Virginia Bonham Carter, who knew Colvin for over 30 years, said that she managed to combine being brave and serious with incredible joie de vivre and energy for fun: “Marie connected with virtually every person she met.”
Colvin was not shy of using her considerable style and charm to gain entry to some of the most influential offices in the world. When working in the Middle East, she followed the more modest dress code required. A Moslem friend taught her how to tie the hijab around her neck properly, but Colvin insisted that she got better interviews if she showed a bit of cleavage. With Colvin, it was never a sacrifice of personal integrity – but she would – and did – push with every fibre of her determination to get the quote, get the story, file the scoop.
To ask the question “what does it mean to be an intrepid woman?” you need to little more than to read Marie Colvin’s resume. She embodied excellence, passion and humanity.
Much of the coverage of her death dwells on her gender, which is perhaps not surprising given her working world. Perhaps the greatest honour we could do her would be to ensure that it is not her gender for which she will be remembered, but her professionalism and her passion.
Lessons of the Financial Crisis: Why PR Can Make or Break a Career in Finance
Expert AnswersThere are many lessons to be learned from the 2008 financial crisis. With the emergence of game-changing regulations, such as Dodd-Frank in the US and EMIR in Europe, transparency has become the top priority for the financial services industry, whether operationally or financially. But what about transparency in communications? One unintentional fallout from the crisis and following recession was that we learnt an important lesson – that a good communications program provides invaluable air cover for any situation (and that a bad communications program can cause serious damage, as evident by the bank-bashing firestorm that took place over the last three years).
During the financial crisis, very few financial CEOs and executives stood up with a positive or empathetic message to share with their clients and the greater population.
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Movers and Shakers: Kathleen McQuiggan, President, Catalina Leadership
Movers and Shakers“I wish I could say I had a grand plan about forming my own company,” said Kathleen McQuiggan, Principal of Catalina Leadership, with a laugh. “But I started as an entry level sales assistant at an investment banking firm. And I had this notion of making a bet on people and always following my gut.”
McQuiggan spent six and a half years at the investment bank Alex. Brown, where she started her career, before she was recruited to Goldman Sachs. She rose to become a top quartile vice president in institutional sales at the firm, before striking out on her own.
“It was about me driving things versus letting other things drive me,” she explained. “I founded Catalina Leadership two years ago. I had had a successful career and I was ready for my next adventure. I wanted to leverage what I had learned in my 20 years in financial services sales with a passion for helping women advance their careers and helping companies realize the value of diversity.”
Catalina Leadership is focused on helping companies invest in women. She continued, “Starting my own business was never an avenue I thought I would go down. I’ve learned a lot and been challenged in ways I haven’t been challenged before.”
Currently McQuiggan is retained by PAX World Fund Management to work with them on their strategy for gender equality as an investment concept and building out their practice management Women & Wealth Initiative, which helps financial advisors work better with women clients.
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Ask-a-Career-Coach: The Truth about Executive Presence
Ask A Career Coach“It’s so easy to get distracted by what other people think, do, or say. But they don’t live your life. You need to know what you want and who you are, and you have to convey it to others quickly so that you shine at first impression.”
– Christopher Bailey, Chief Creative Officer, Burberry
At a recent women’s executive breakfast that I facilitated, I began by asking everyone to share the name of a woman they considered a model of executive presence. The answers ranged from Mother Teresa to Margaret Thatcher. Believe it or not, that combination makes perfect sense, despite the radical differences between the two women, because each one’s executive presence was rooted in the unshakeable force of her belief. I call it her “aura of authority.”
Do you possess a force of belief that immediately expresses, without words, the depth of your conviction, commitment, and competence? In other words: do you know what drives you? And how deeply do you remain connected with that drive?
The essence of executive presence is that inner force. Call it belief, call it confidence, call it charisma. It may be tough to nail down, but it’s absolutely visible, even palpable.
So how do you cultivate executive presence? And how do you cultivate executive presence as a woman in a male-defined culture? Here’s a summary of the ingredients we identified together at the breakfast.
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Three Tips For Leaving an Old Job and Beginning a New Future
Managing ChangeLeaving a job by choice in the current economy is a difficult decision to make – particularly if you’ve already got a pretty plum position. But sometimes, it’s just time to move up. “I have many 3 A.M. moments,” admits Lisa Murray, who spent over seven years at international law firm Brown Rudnick LLP before opting to launch her own marketing firm. “Many friends and colleagues have said that my move was courageous, but I sometimes feel it was pure insanity.”
Sometimes others question the judgment of women who try something different. “I stepped off the corporate racetrack, closed the door to my big job as a vice president in financial services, and walked out the door,” says Marcia Mantell. “Everyone was shocked and wondered if I was crazy.”
Yet though it may seem counterintuitive and risky, many women who have spent much of their career as captains of industry in finance, law, technology, and other businesses find themselves doing just that. Women choose to leave for a variety of reasons, from office politics and inability to execute their ideas within the corporate structure, to poor work/family balance or the desire to just try something different.
Whatever reason drives their transition, it’s a decision that few take lightly. Parting willingly with a stable job and steady paycheck is a different experience than reacting to an unwanted layoff. It requires a leap of faith to be the driver of the choice to upend your career, family, and financial life in exchange for an unknown future.
Here are three things to keep in mind about how to land on your feet when you leave under your own steam.
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Being Authentic in the Culture of Tech
Managing ChangeWomen in technology should be themselves, without apology: they should wear what they want to wear, act how they want to act, and feel no pressure to conform or act like “one of the guys.” This is according to Google’s vice president of location and local services, Marissa Mayer, and Hunch and Flickr co-founder, Caterina Fake. Both women recently spoke at the CES Women in Tech panel, saying, among other things, that the industry is different and the old pressures to conform no longer apply.
Though the advice was obviously well-intentioned, it’s important to note that these are very senior women who likely don’t feel the same pressures to conform as less-established women.
In fact, recent research suggests that the industry isn’t really that different; it’s just gotten better at hiding its biases. According to the 2011report Tilted Playing Field: Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces, hidden biases in the tech workplace produce unequal opportunities for women and people of color. The data, collected from a sample of IT engineers and managers in large companies and small startups nationwide, revealed that women and underrepresented people of color encounter negative workplace experiences at significantly higher rates than their male and white counterparts.
How can women in the technology be their authentic selves in what still remains a male-dominated industry? To start with, confidence is key – and having female colleagues and role models doesn’t hurt, either.
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Voice of Experience: Michelle Gadsden-Williams, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Credit Suisse
Voices of ExperienceAs Global head of Diversity and Inclusion at Credit Suisse, Michelle Gadsden-Williams says she is the person ultimately responsible for ensuring the Bank fulfills its commitment to building a culture of inclusion for high-performing, engaged, diverse employees. She explained, “Early in my career, I found the subject of diversity to be extremely powerful on a number of levels.”
She continued, “Diversity is strategically important for a number of reasons. It provides organizations with the opportunity to attract, develop, and retain the best talent, creates an inclusive culture for employees to thrive and, most importantly, addresses the needs and wants of a diverse customer base. There aren’t many positions that can have an impact across the critical areas of talent, culture, and customers.”
Gadsden-Williams spent more than 17 years working in the pharmaceutical industry and several years in the consumer goods industry before transitioning to her current role in financial services. She began her career working in product development and marketing then pursued a career in human resources a few years later. She transitioned to Merck & Co., assuming various positions of increased responsibility in human resources. She joined Novartis Pharmaceuticals in 2002 and became the Vice President and Global Chief Diversity Officer before joining Credit Suisse in January of 2011.
She recalled, “I spent a good portion of my career in the pharmaceutical industry and got to know the industry extremely well. I knew that if I wanted to continue to stretch, grow and develop as a Chief Diversity Officer, I would have to step outside of my comfort zone and purse the work that I love in another industry. “
“Credit Suisse is a company that I have always respected and one I was familiar with living and working in Switzerland. When the opportunity presented itself to join Credit Suisse, it was not a hard decision to make the transition,” she continued.
One of Gadsden-Williams’ proudest moments was receiving the 2010 Leadership in Diversity Award from the See Forever Foundation and Maya Angelou Public Charter Schools in the presence of two women that she idolized and held in high regard, Dr. Maya Angelou and Dr. Dorothy I. Height.
“I received the award in the presence of two of my heroines, the incomparable Dr. Maya Angelou and Dr. Dorothy Height. Unfortunately, Dr. Height, a highly regarded social activist, passed away two weeks after I received the award. Dr. Angelou is a national treasure in the United States and a global icon but a renowned and revered voice of our time. I have had the grand opportunity to meet her on several occasions through my work in diversity over the years. Every time I am in her presence, I am humbled by her wisdom, her strength, and her ability to make each individual that she encounters feels special,” she said.
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