Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Members of Congress Are Elected to Represent, Not to Get Along

congress-washington

In case you've missed it, there's been a spate of op-eds recently blaming President Obama for a lack of leadership; Obama could have gotten Republican members of Congress to agree on gun control, tax increases, and many more of his legislative priorities if only he knew how to lead. What "leading" means is usually left rather vague. Ron Fournier believes it just involves "rising above circumstance," E.J. Dionne thinks it means showing how much you enjoy your job, and Maureen Dowd thinks it means writing the names of persuadable senators on a chart, just like in an Aaron Sorkin movie. The ... Read More

How Etsy Got Over Middle-School-Cafeteria Syndrome

http://youtu.be/w4LExVkv4Pw Kellan Elliot-McCrea, the CTO of Etsy, recently shared the anecdote below at a private seminar held by a leading venture capital firm for its portfolio companies. (For the un-initiated, Etsy is a wildly popular online craft marketplace with over 15 million users—80 percent female—and, until recently, a 4.5 percent-female engineering staff.) Etsy also had a substantial “boys versus girls” dynamic, where engineers (mostly male) sat on one side and the women on the other... It was a broken system that required changes on both sides of the house. Not a ... Read More

Marching to the Beat of A Different Drum Major

Sometimes talent comes from the most unlikely places. Though our future business leaders are apt to come from top MBA programs or perhaps even military branches, these should not be the only avenues to search, especially when looking for leaders with a different point of view. An often-overlooked arena for leadership development is the arts. Theater, music and the fine arts all require, undeniably, an above-average level of creativity. But they also require the type of discipline, passion and commitment that can be extremely valuable in many areas of business that are now floundering. An ... Read More

The Watchdogs of Academia

A few months ago, I helped with a project connected to one of my kids' extracurricular activities. There were about 15 parents on the project, which, to keep from embarrassing my kids and getting punched in the face, I'll call "building the communal breadbox." At first, breadbox construction seemed a potentially enjoyable activity. There were piles of wood, wood screws to drive and plenty of the cordless electric drills that make those satisfying "frrrrrip" noises. We were working outside, and it was a sunny day in beautiful Santa Barbara. But it turned into an awful day, mostly for one ... Read More

Being a Decider Takes Its Toll

Thank you for choosing to read this story. Picking it out among the vast array of available articles may or may not have been an easy decision, but if Kathleen Vohs is right, it was a surprisingly costly one. An experimental psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Vohs is lead author of a new study in the May issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which she argues that making decisions — something most of us are forced to do countless times each day — lessens our ability to control our impulses. In Vohs' view, choosing one option over another is a uniquely ... Read More