My mornings are all the same. Go down stairs, let the dog out, get breakfast for my son, prod my son to get breakfast for the dog, make coffee, read the paper. Week day or weekend, this is my routine, my habit, my ritual. When I travel or get busy or sick and can't engage... Continue Reading →
I flew business class to Lagos for a meeting on providing family planning to poor women in Nigeria. When I landed I was met by a SUV that drove me past the market ladies, the peanut hawkers, the foot-ball-playing boys, and the five-year-old girl begging in the road, traffic roaring inches from her bare toes.... Continue Reading →
My dad taught me how to build bookshelves when I was a little girl. He was forever building them because the flow of books into my parents' house was always in, and never out. I grew up thinking “library” was a home décor style, like baroque or shabby chic. So Dad built bookshelves. The fanciest... Continue Reading →
If you glance at a dozen organizations’ corporate values statements you will see a lot of the same words: integrity, honesty, passion, creativity, excellence, caring. They are fine words, all of them. Who can argue against integrity, or take a stand against passion? But they are just ink on a 3 x 5 card handed... Continue Reading →
The other day a colleague busted me shoe shopping online at work. The sad thing is that I hate shoe shopping, so I wasn’t even indulging secretly in an illicit joy – I was mindlessly looking at shoes because nothing better occurred to me. My brain was blank and empty, with nothing feeling urgent enough... Continue Reading →
It is easy to believe that we run programs from Baltimore. That is what we do, right? But it’s a fallacy, maybe a sort of optical illusion, a trick of perspective. When I sit in my office in Baltimore, looking out over a busy American street, hearing the hum of dozens of other staff in... Continue Reading →
In all my travels I had never looked out an airplane window at 20,000 feet and seen nothing but dust. But the other day, wanting to see the landscape below while flying over Northern Nigeria en route to Abuja I looked out and saw nothing but the Harmattan winds swirling dust from the Sahel. Huh,... Continue Reading →
I like to write. That can make me a piss-poor writing coach – I think the best teachers are often the ones who have battled a subject hand-to-hand and understand its devilish ways, rather than those who see a subject through a lover’s uncritical eyes. But whether seen as pleasure or pain, writing is a craft,... Continue Reading →
When I leave for vacation or a work trip I often leave a backstopping memo for the team that will cover for me while I am gone. I have a guilty secret: to that list I always add some awful task that I have been hammering away at, or avoiding, for months and that refuses... Continue Reading →
I'm used to doing my work with the office door closed. In that quiet and privacy I edit communication strategies, write endless numbers of emails, and try to make project budgets come out right. When I need to, when I should, I open my office door and actually talk to people. It's hard for me,... Continue Reading →
Open Door Policy 