Denise Brosseau - Building Well-Connected Leaders
Stop tearing down my hero(ine)s!
Reading the newspaper has always been one of my favorite morning rituals. Even as the SJ Mercury News gets smaller and smaller, I really enjoy catching up on local and national goings-on, especially the tech news, over breakfast. Yet, as an avid advocate for women leaders, this month’s ‘news’ has really made it next to impossible to look forward to unwrapping my paper in the morning.
First, there were the ‘news’ stories of the ostensible ”public breakdown” by Susan Boyle, the British singing sensation who knocked my socks off in the You Tube video just a few short weeks ago. OK, I confess, every time I watch that video it makes me cry. I think I forwarded the link to 100 people the first time I saw it, and I rarely do that. Can any other video better underline the amazing power of an underdog story…and the importance of having an honest person in your life, like a talent agent or executive consultant, who can help you make the right first impression?
But I digress. My point here is that after watching the video, I walked around in a glow for several days, happy that sometimes, just sometimes, the right thing can happen for people, even with all the odds against them. But then, almost immediately, the newswires started tearing her down. Rather than use the opportunity to help build another hero(ine) story, instead, I started hearing and reading stories about how Susan couldn’t hold up under the pressure and had ’snapped.’
Next, I watched with dismay the amazingly rapid fall from grace of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Here is this unbelievably qualifed nominee, with every credential possible to make her a shoo-in for the position, and within hours all the press is talking about is the conservative Republican’s rhetoric, which I will not even deign to repeat here. Once again, it seems, my paper, and many other news outlets, have spent more time ripping down a potential hero(ine) than building an inspiring story into a broader message of hope. Are we seeing a pattern here?
Then this morning, on the front page of the SJ Mercury News, there is a small picture of Carol Bartz, which gets me kind of excited. It’s rare you get to see a picture of a woman CEO of Fortune 500 company on the cover of your paper (and that’s a whole other conversation). But wait, what’s the lead story all about? Turn to page 6B and there you find one of the regular columnists, Chris O’Brien, NOT focusing on Carol’s leadership or substantial expertise or even actual company news, but instead about the fact that she used an expletive (or two) in recent meetings with staff or the press.
Now I know, if you read the story carefully, that his point is that it’s crazy that the only coverage Carol ever gets is when she drops profanity in conversation. But again, isn’t there someone in the SJ Merc newsroom that actually thinks it’s time we talk about our hero(ine)s with genuine admiration and STOP repeating all the bad stuff all the time.
One might infer from the above that I am against the basic tenet of good journalism that you have to tell both sides of the story. It’s not that. I just wish that occasionally, maybe once every few days, I could walk away from the paper with some sense that there is good left in the world. That all the news is not about people blowing people up, but instead is about great leaders trying their hardest to find peace. That while there are some (ok, many) companies running giant Ponzi schemes and creating completely unfathonable things like credit default swaps in order to fool people into investing their hard earned capital and losing it, there are others, including many women leaders, who are trying to do the right thing. Who are getting up every morning and setting out an inspiring vision, building strong relationships in their industry or their community and then building and leading a team to implement that vision and leaving the world a better place. Why can’t I read stories like that?
Here, I’ll even give you a few places to start. What about Caterina Fake of Hunch, who first survived the harrowing struggle of turning a losing game company into the now international sensation Flickr, and then took her IPO winnings and invested it in several new winning ideas, including Hunch, which is in beta. Or Dawn DeBruyn of WeMeUs who led several other successful ventures before building a great tool for professional service providers and consultants who need to keep track of many, many contacts. Or Catalina Ruiz-Healy, who first helped build the Progressive Coalition and now has a cool new application on the Google phone (and now iPhone!), Catalista, that helps you find volunteer activities and track your volunteer hours.
I could go on, and on,…but tell me, who are some of your hero(ine)s? Who would you like to see getting press in the next month so we can all read our paper with a little more hope and inspiration?
Posted by Denise Brosseau on 5th June, 2009 | Comments
Tags: women leaders, Carol Bartz, Caterina Fake, Catalina Ruiz-Healy There are no comments for this post Post a CommentHTML is not allowed in comments, http://... will be automatically linked.
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