Noticed a trend in the spam on my website of late. Instead of pharameceutical ads, or sex life enhancement ads, I’m getting more and more poker site ads. Texas Hold’em seems to be particularly popular.

Then I got the latest copy of my campus newspaper in my mailbox. At my Jesuit university, just a couple of entries below the one talking about students parking at the cathedral, is an announcement of a Texas Hold’em tournament on campus.

I’m particularly attuned to this poker thing of late due to something I’ve noticed at work. Used to be, the guy talk around the office centered around the football pool and the latest XBox or Nintendo games. Football’s still big (and, unfortunately for my conversational options, still not high on my personal interest list), but electronic games have been dropped as a topic in favor of poker. Seems there’s a regular game, rotating amongst various folks’ homes, that lots of the guys here are in on.

Note that I say “lots of the guys here”. I’ve yet to run across a woman here who’s been in any of those conversations reminiscing about who’s stash got taken at the last game, or who’s set to lose their shirt (so to speak) at the next one.

Curious. Used to be the golf greens were the place to socialize with the guys while the women weren’t around. At least the guys could claim to get some exercise that way, little though it may be for the majority of golf-cart renting golfers. Building business relationships out in the open air, learning how the other guy approaches the shot – is he overconfident? Risk averse? Does he cheat on his score card? There’s a lot to be learned from observing a golfer, I hear. I assume the same’s to be said of how a person plays poker – how high does he bet? Does he bluff often? Can he keep a poker face? How big a pot does he come to the table with? When’s he tend to fold?

Again, just curious. Interesting dynamics in the study of work.

When you’re an interviewee, interviewing for a position that will involve programming, interviewing with a guy who does programming for a living… don’t tell him that programming is easy, and that there’s no point in asking you about that stuff because you’ve done all of these other “harder” managerial things. Probably a poor move, if you actually want the job.

“Tina – If you can write this up, that would be great.” – from email from someone up the management chain from me, in an email sent over the weekend, referring to work that needs to be done by Monday. “Heard” as the boss from the movie Office Space. “yeaaaaah… that would be great.”

Spent several hours this weekend working on my self appraisal. These are tricky things. You want to honestly evaluate yourself against your goals so that you know what to do better next year. The trick, though, is to figure out just how honestly to write your failings. Failings jump out in an appraisal. Successes, poorly expressed, end up buried. Business is a game – almost like a card game where you bet the number of hands to win. Aim too low, and even if your estimate is spot on, you still lose. Bet too high, and even if you win more than the next guy, you still don’t end up ahead. I think I bet too high this year. My goals outstripped my ability to deliver. (My project also outstripped any reasonable estimate of how much time and energy work should consume, directly contributing to my delivery problem.) What I did do was great work. What I didn’t do was check off the list of skills enhancing, career development goals – the goal of quickly assimilating new technologies to build a dependable solution that met my clients needs within a very tight timeline overtook all other career development goals. It also overtook a great deal of other time I hadn’t exactly earmarked for career stuff. Luckily, my husband and family don’t keep a file on me, and my pay rate of baby kisses and hugs isn’t tied to a requirements checklist or a timesheet.

Crystal ball in hand, I attempt to set new goals for the next review cycle. Will I bid too high? Settle too low? Bleah – settle, period? Not in my nature. I’ll probably be in the same spot next year. The consolation is knowing how much I achieved. The pain is in knowing how much higher I set the bar.

Martha Barletta’s interview with Tom Peters, discussing What do Women Want?:

Key insight: women want what men want, just more of it. Martha makes the point that research has shown that women are more detail-oriented than men. Details bother us or delight us. To give a concrete example lots of folks can identify with, who’s bothered first by the dirty dishes in the sink at your house, or the layer of dust on the shelves? Women make the details work, and that benefits everyone (men like houses that aren’t dusty too, right?)

So, women want the details right. That’s true for the products marketed to us, the services given us (I won’t work with a company that does a horrible job at service, no matter how good the product is), and our work environments. OK, but so what? The ‘so what’ is that we, directly or indirectly, control the vast majority of the money in our economy. We either directly make the decision, or offer the input to the decision, for most purchasing decisions. We make more than our husbands 30% of the time, and as much as our husbands 20-30% of the time. We control the checkbook 83% of the time. [Think of your own finances – most of the money goes out the door for the basic category items that never hit the big decision making processes that the guys have been typically attributed with.] We talk (you knew that, right?) and give references lots more than guys do. If you’re looking to sell to us or to someone we know, that reference can make or break you. If you’re looking to hire us, or someone we know, similarly, that reference can be the difference between an enthusiastic hire of a super-qualified person, or the continuation of a long and expensive hiring process.

So, listen to us when we offer opinions about the details. Actively solicit our advice, encourage us to offer it, rather than burying us in low-level areas. Seek to find and develop women into positions of influence – who better to lead your business than someone who’s wired to make the details better for both your women customers (note that whether or not you see them, their influence is mighty!) AND for your male customers.

In my hunts for formats for lessons learned documents, I ran across the following conference listing on the Project Management Institute’s website:

Five Lessons Learned From the Memoirs of Wile E. Coyote, by Kelly R. Slone.

Looks like a looney kind of session, if you ask me… One I’d have happily attended.

(A little bit of follow-up search found an article of the same title, written by Kelly R. Slone, in the newsletter for the Western Michigan Chapter of the PMI.)

I was intrigued to see a new book by the guy who wrote The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley. His new book is ‘Millionaire Women Next Door’. Apparently in his research for his first set of books, he discovered that some 92% of the folks he ended up speaking with were men, and he decided that it was time to look for the millionaire women and find out what their secrets were. I haven’t read the book yet – want to check it out of the library – but according to the book review on Amazon, “While many characteristics such as frugality and simplicity of lifestyle are similar to those of their male counterparts, Stanley demonstrates that most millionaire women work harder and do better at school, in business, and in investment practices”.

So it highly amused me to see the book that Amazon is offering to pair it with in one of its ‘Buy Together’ promotions – ‘Lottery Master Guide’. So the secret of millionaire women has nothing to do with financial or business acumen or personal achievement; it’s that they know how to pick those numbers??

I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person. Did a little bit better than OK in school, worked hard (_really_ hard) at a couple of classes in college, but other than that, the main work there was time management to get things done. So, have been looking forward to returning to school in the fall to finally (!) get started on that MBA I’ve been thinking about since my junior or senior year in college. The timing was never right. First I wanted job experience to make the MBA that much more worthwhile (and hey, maybe easier if I already knew the stuff). Then we got married. Then we had a kid. And then we had another one. School takes time, time that’s always spread a bit thinner than one would like. But still, the MBA beckoned. I’d peruse the course catalog and wish I could take the class, just for the material covered. I’d plot out how many years it’d take to complete the degree part-time (too many!). I even went so far, last fall, as to write out my application essay for a local school. Never actually sent it in… Jason and I were looking at baby #2 coming and then some minor upheaval in the Coleman household as I returned to work and he took over primary care for the kids. Didn’t seem fair to load a night out to class on top of that.

In the meantime, my interest in the courses haven’t waned. And each time they come around at work to check where we individually fit on the GSA schedule, I’m reminded yet again that I never got that advanced degree. So, today went and took the GMAT exam. It’s required for the local biz school where I hope to earn my degree, one class at a time over the next several years. I’m quite certain evenings spent watching Law & Order will now be spent poring over economic and accounting tomes. Jon Stewart’s monologue may be the refrain behind research for papers. Signup’s coming up for the fall semester – need to get my application in order, including that application essay and a copy of my resume. Good excuse to get it up-to-date, anyway. Lots of things to add, of late, including (tada!) a paper I’m listed as a co-author on that’s going to be presented at a conference at NIH in a couple of weeks. (If it’s posted anywhere, I’ll post a link here… paper describes some cool work we’ve done at the National Library of Medicine).

It’ll take me long enough to get through the MBA program that Cora may be doing her homework while Mommy works on hers. One class at a time, baby, one class at a time.

Fast Company magazine’s cover asks “Where are the Women?” The starting point of the article is to ask why there aren’t more women in corner offices / executive positions, given the number of women in the workforce and the number of years we’ve now had to make it into the cushy chair. The article basically examines a study done by a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business that determined that men are almost exclusively the ones in executive positions because men compete harder and sacrifice more of their personal lives than women. Women are just as competent, just as skilled, etc, as men, generally, but men are m ore willing to work longer, relocate, and just generally give more of their lives to work than women are. This is actually the second article I’ve seen that’s based on this study. The first was in Fortune magazine, entitled “Power: Do Women Really Want It?”.

Particularly in article in Fortune, the spin seemed to be that women just aren’t willing to go that extra mile for the executive spot, and that, hey, that extra mile is required for those who want to reach the pinnacle. Two thoughts come to mind: one, is that extra mile really required for the job itself, or is it just more of a barrier to entry, a way to winnow the competition? Couldn’t companies figure out better ways to use their top job resources, so that above and beyond all call of duty _isn’t_ the required duty? Seems like then the company would be less about the man (nearly always) at the top, and more about its mission of producing something that produces value (to shareholders or some other ownership).

Second thought, and more interesting to me to explore… If the reason that more women aren’t at the top is because they value other things in life over the rewards gained via sacrifices for work, why is it that men don’t value those same things? The articles pointed out that women aren’t stepping aside merely for the “mommy track”, that they’re often stepping aside for other jobs that provide a better balance of work and life. Lots of folks seem to look at that as “settling”, as somehow demeaning what you could have been. But that supposes that the best you could be was the person wholly focused on beating the competition out to win the top spot in this one arena of business, and thus necessarily losing focus on other areas in life. Those other areas – family, personal time, other interests – why are they of so relatively less value to the men examined in this study?