On June 1, I began a three-month journey of self-discovery. This morning I returned to Fleishman-Hillard eager and ready to share my learnings – both professional and personal – with you, my colleagues and my clients.

Among my many educational experiences this summer were piano lessons. I’ve never been particularly musical, but I wanted my daughters to develop an appreciation for music. And, since I never had the chance to play an instrument growing up, I decided to challenge my brain and see what piano would be like.

My kids had taken piano lessons before with little success due to lack of enthusiasm, but I thought that by modeling behavior, maybe we’d all get better results.

My experiment paid off. Both my kids were really into it. My 12-year-old, Monica, became especially competitive and obsessed with practicing more than me and improving more than me. It’s proof that our kids do what we model.

This lesson translates well to a business environment where managers are charged with motivating their employees’ actions. People don’t necessarily behave as directed, but they do model the good behavior of others.

Additionally, I found that the challenge to my brain was real. I felt an actual struggle between the technical left side of my brain and the passionate right side of my brain. It was hard to play the music correctly while also demonstrating the passion I felt for it. My brain was in conflict as I held two equally demanding thoughts at the same time.

It took time to become comfortable doing both simultaneously.

I think organizations often forget that building competencies takes time. We try to skip from coming up with new ideas, all the way to selling these ideas, without really exploring, building and perfecting them. The hours of practice I needed to get from simply playing notes to playing them with feeling and intensity reminded me that sometimes we need to slow down and really think our ideas through.

Furthermore, my struggle gave me a personal lesson in polarity management. Polarities are pairs of organizational challenges (like stability and change) that are both necessary but often at odds. The tension between these two essential aspects of an organization needs to be managed rather than solved. For me, I needed to find a balance between accuracy and passion. Otherwise, I couldn’t have advanced my skills. Similarly, organizations that manage polarities outperform those that don’t, according to PolarityManagement.com.

While I may not be able to continue with my piano lessons as frequently now that I’m back at work and my kids’ school activities have begun again, I greatly value the lessons I had this summer. My lessons are proof of the link between music and brain function.

Glad to be back and looking forward to connecting with you again!

– Kathie

Have you had similar experiences with music? What did you learn from them?

September 1st, 2010 by Kathie Thomas | Comment on this. Share |
Tags: brain · left side of brain · piano lessons · Polarity management · right side of brain · sabbatical · self-discovery

Last Friday, I wrote about the budding entrepreneurial spirit taking over New Orleans. Well, it looks like the entrepreneurs aren’t the only people trying to improve the city in five years since Hurricane Katrina. In fact, it appears that administrators in New Orleans’ public education system have used this time to build better schools.

“I feel that since New Orleans kind of had to start over, we’ve improved in a lot of different things,” student Jazmine Sylve told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Now we have charter schools and a lot of schools are more on top of it. And we had to rebuild a lot of the schools so they look better.”

According to CSMonitor.com, “New Orleans has become a laboratory for education reform, largely by necessity. With virtually all its students and teachers evacuated for the better part of the 2005-06 school year, it had to dramatically downsize and regroup. In the wake of the storm, the state become the overseer of most schools through its Recovery School District (RSD), originally set up to take over academically failing schools.”

Since then, according to Newsweek, RSD has transformed many of the schools into charter schools. The outgoing superintendent of the RSD called “this new paradigm an ‘overwhelming publicly funded, predominantly privately run school system.’”

In this system, “students can apply to and, if accepted, choose to attend any of the city’s 46 charter schools or 23 ‘traditional’ schools. The vast majority of schools have open-enrollment policies that allow any student to attend, regardless of past academic success.”

The system actually allows students to try out multiple schools and choose the one that best fits their needs.

Shannon Jones, executive director of the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University in New Orleans, told CSMonitor.com, that in the new system, “schools are being held accountable for results because parents can choose any school in the district.”

“So far, the experiment appears to be working,” Newsweek said. “Before Katrina, two thirds of students were attending schools deemed failing by state standards … in the 2010-11 academic year, it will be less than one-third.”

Additionally, CSMonitor.com said nearly 90 percent of high-school seniors graduated this year, compared to only 50 percent in 2007.

This fall, the RSD will consider whether to turn any of the schools back over to the city, which, incidentally, was just awarded $1.8 billion by the federal government to rebuild damaged schools. This will allow the schools to extend days or years, invest in technology, and increase teacher salaries.

“It’s very exciting to be part of this movement,” Jay Altman, co-founder and CEO of FirstLine Schools, a charter-management organization, told Newsweek. “New Orleans could be the first city in the country where every kid goes to a good school.”

There’s still work to be done in New Orleans’ schools, but the city has made impressive strides since Katrina. It ought to be applauded for finding the opportunity in a difficult situation. I look forward to watching its progress over the next five years!

 – Stephanie

August 30th, 2010 by Stephanie Susman | Comment on this. Share |
Tags: charter schools · education innovation · education reform · New Orleans · Recovery School District

On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Five years later, many residents are still living in trailers, while some, who evacuated, still haven’t returned home. VOANews.com reports that in New Orleans “a total of about 50,00 residential properties are still either uninhabitable or empty lots.”

Still, it appears, there’s hope in the region.

Gulf Coast resident Ed Wikoff, who decided to stay and rebuild with his wife, told “Good Morning America,” that “this is a great opportunity, I think, for our community to make some significant improvements. You can see some of that happening.”

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper echoed Wikoff’s sentiments in an interview with the Huffington Post. “A lot of the money that’s been promised has been delivered on,” he said. “The convention business is back, restaurants are back. There’s a kind of new life … and a grassroots movement here as well, which is exciting.”

In fact, according to a recent Brookings Institute report, “in the last five years, greater New Orleans is rebounding and, in some ways, doing so better than before.” This progress is due to:

• Rebuilding activities that allowed for relatively mild job loss during the recession.
• Emerging growth in knowledge-based industries caused by a decrease in the region’s traditional tourism, oil and gas, shipping, ship building, and food manufacturing jobs.
• Improved wages brought on by more knowledge-based jobs.
• Increased entrepreneurship.

Indeed, according to CNN, New Orleans became “a start-up city” after Katrina. Organizations like The Idea Village are working to “foster entrepreneurial talent by providing business strategies and access to development grants, talent and innovative work spaces.”

The “Intellectual Property,” an 85,000 square-foot building, is home to “a collection of vibrant, entrepreneurial companies,” including The Idea Village. And 504ward is dedicated to connecting these entrepreneurs from outside New Orleans with the local culture.

Meanwhile, New Orleans has also taken this time as an opportunity to improve its public education system. But more on that Monday.

What do you think of New Orleans’ entrepreneurial spirit? How might it help the city improve? Could this environment work in other cities?

– Stephanie

August 27th, 2010 by Stephanie Susman | Comment on this. Share |
Tags: 5 years after Katrina · Economic recovery · Entrepreneurialism · Hurricane Katrina · New Orleans · New Orleans and entrepreneurialism · New Orlenas and innovation · The Idea Village

Having followed America’s competitiveness for some time now, I was particularly excited to receive last week’s Newsweek featuring its first-ever Best Countries issue.

Like other studies before it, the Newsweek study found that the United States is slipping. The United States ranked 11^th. But, unlike the other studies, Newsweek found a glimmer of hope for our nation.

Among the chief arguments for America’s decline that these other studies have made include fewer college graduates (particularly in science, technology, engineering and math), less R&D and patent creation, and decreased manufacturing and exports. Newsweek did not ignore these indicators. Rather, Newsweek agreed that “America has clearly suffered some decline, relative to other nations, and a loss of prestige.”

But Newsweek argued, the future is not as bleak as the “declinists” suggest. “But even battered and beaten down, American power is more resilient than the naysayers give it credit for. And so is the international system that depends on American power as its central stabilizer.”

Simply put, Newsweek said the United States just doesn’t have a rival. Not even China. Its “model of autocratic capitalism, successful as it has been at home, is hardly something most others want to emulate, and it may well be close to peaking. …

“Looking again at the Newsweek list, the ‘best’ countries tend to be small, homogenous and fairly harmless: Finland (No. 1), Switzerland, Sweden. All wonderful places – but they are nations that have almost no geopolitical role to speak of and never will. They’re just too tiny. Yet in the category of ‘large’ – read significant – countries, the United States still finishes handily ahead of China in every major index, including economic dynamism, education, health and ‘political environment.’”

Indeed, Newsweek said the United States will retain its status because of its position as “the enforcer of the international system.” As long as other countries continue to look to it for military support, globalization will proceed.

But what do you think? Is Newsweek right to be hopeful? Or is the decline as serious as previously suggested?

– Stephanie

Some previous studies:

August 26th, 2010 by Stephanie Susman | Comment on this. Share |
Tags: American decline · competitiveness · globalization · Newsweek · Newsweek Best Countries Issue