Dear Plucky:

I recently started a new job as a manager and several of my team members are previous coworkers. One of the guys has a really bad habit of taking action without asking first or thinking through the strategy; this means that he has gone over my head to my new boss (perhaps because my boss is his former boss).

I know my new team members don’t want to be micromanaged but at the same time, I feel the strategic vision should be something I establish and convey to my team and boss. But as I am new to…

What a time! This year I recorded a State of the Union to loop you all in on what’s been happening at Plucky and where things are going.

Links to things I talk about:

• So Now You’re a Manager trainings (First few 2019 dates released!)
• Plucky’s 1:1 Starter Pack

Five years down, MANY more to go! ❤

I really want a yard but we live in the Bay Area, which makes space really expensive. For now my family shares a tiny yard with our downstairs neighbors and because I was too shy to ask, I spent our first 4 summers here without any sort of garden.

This spring I asked the ladies downstairs if we could put a few potted plants out, to which they said “duh, totally, we don’t care at all.”

Takeaway #1 from this post: ASK. Most of the time, the thing you’ve been dreaming about will not bother anyone else in the least.

…

Here’s what was bothering me all day: the pauses towards the end. I wanted the messaging in my #AltMBA inspiring video to be building, to be graceful and fluid and poetic in beat. I knew that a choppy message (as inspirational as I could make the verbiage) was not going to have the same impact.

But the truth was, my kids were not napping. And my husband (after 4 consecutive Sundays solo parenting) needed a break. So I filmed my video, shipped it and told myself that perfect is the enemy of the good.

It wasn’t bad. I was proudish…

I had a hard time during my freshman year. I was still finding my way, totally uninterested in Greek life, trying to make a long-distance relationship work, missing having my own bedroom. Somehow I knew that the only way to cement my peace with college was to help someone else through it.

So sophomore year I became a freshman RA. I was responsible for 32 young women, shepherding them through the first year away from their families. I baked box cakes for their birthdays. I made giant posters to keep track of habit-building streaks for those who wanted to quit…

I don’t usually tell people I had a brain tumor right away. If I’m teaching a 2-day manager training, I never share it on day 1. This isn’t because I’m ashamed of it or feel awkward about sharing it (I’ve written publicly about it a number of times), this is because I want to feel I’ve earned the work.

I don’t want anyone to curb their feedback out of pity. If you like my work, you like my work. You don’t like my work in spite of the fact that my brain once had a lemon-sized tumor in it.

If…

So then we had to draw a map of how our organizations make decisions in #altMBA. And since I am the primary employee at Plucky, I’m basically doing all the deciding.

I mapped it out, nonetheless, and uncovered that Plucky has major polishing to do with regard to pricing, relevancy and bandwidth. I am reinventing the wheel all the time. It is time for streamlined processes, which I made notes about and was feeling pretty empowered and Business Grown Up until a nagging thought tugged at my brain.

I. Don’t. Want. All. My. Work. To. Be. Math.

The “what if”s…

Throughout my career, I have been in many rooms where someone is building software. There’s a language that comes with it (a foreign language for those of us who didn’t study Comp Sci), vocabularies and concepts that I still apply almost every day of my life, even though my job these days is not about building software at all.

I found that some of these core concepts were hugely instrumental for my #altmba team’s project this past weekend, in which we had to invent an advertising campaign for climate change. …