Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Priority Wheel - A Tool for Career and Family Alignment

The ability to "Connect The Dots" across career, family and children is one of the most pressing problems that professional women and men are facing today.

Guess what? There is not a simple answer.

After a long race trying to find a perfect balance between career and family, people came to the conclusion that a perfect balance does not exist. Rather than trying to achieve a BALANCE we need to have a goal of achieving ALIGNMENT between our top priorities.

ALIGNMENT means that the weight across your Priority Wheel will change according to the particular needs of your life stage.

The "Priority Wheel" is a tool for aligning priorities through change. Think about a wheel - Wheels are always moving.

Remember that success is a wheel of continuous improvements. Your wheel is always in motion. We all have many dots2connect and having a "Priority Wheel" will help you to be ready to achieve success when the opportunity comes. It will empower you to create opportunities to achieve success on your own terms and have the right person near you to share success with.

Success (like a wheel) is always in motion and the meaning of success changes according to what is most important for us. As you go through different life stages your priorities and needs change. Hence, your "Priority Wheel" needs recalibration in order to reflect new dimensions. Multiple life events can affect the dimensions of your "Priority Wheel", for example the following is a list of the most common life changing events:

o First job after college graduation
o Going back to graduate school
o Engage in a serious relationship
o Job displacement
o Leadership promotion (at all levels)
o Marriage
o Having kids
o Elder parents
o Opening your own business
o Community involvement
o Family lost or serious illness
o New job or career opportunity
o Personal interest / hobby


Once when you develop your "Priority Wheel" with the important dimensions you will need to be prepare to make trade-offs between the time and energy you dedicate to your career development and success and the time and effort you put on rising your children a nurturing your family relationships. My book Connecting My Dots offers multiple examples of how successful women of different ages use their "Priority Wheel" to plan for success.

One more important lesson from Connecting My Dots is an advice that many successful women have shared with me while I was writing the book. One of the lessons from the Five Leadership Lessons for Multidimensional Success is to find the right partner.

Lesson #3 Finding the Right Partner
is quite important if you want to achieve multidimensional success with your career, family and personal life.

Only you and time can tell if you found the right partner that will work with you to put "Your Priority Wheel" in full motion.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Web 2.0 Check List

The terms Web 2.0 and Social Networking continue to hit the top of the emerging technologies list for corporate executives, small business owners, non-profit organizations and individual consumers.

In every business networking meeting I have attended over the last four months people get asked if they are using Twitter. Adding the address of your LinkedIn profile has become one of the new best pratices for professional job seekers. Others have created consulting practices to teach organizations and individuals on how to leverage the power of these tools. Since 2006, the Gartner Group identified Web 2.0 technologies in their key emerging technologies watchlist.


I compiled a list that I plan to use during my presentation about Social Collaboration at Duke University. I want to share this list to help you to connect the dots across all the different Web 2.0 tools and technologies:

1) Blogs
2) Collective Intelligence (Crowdsourcing)
3) Mash-ups (Aggregation of Content)
4) Peer-to-peer fiel sharing
5) Podcasts
6) RSS (Syndication of Content)
7) Social Networking
8) Web Services
9) Wikis