The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.
Yesterday
In 1982, my father of blessed memory died. If he had lived until yesterday, he would have been 82. Yesterday, I spent the day, writing a paper for school, on Mediation.
In the afternoon, I took a break to look at e-mail and saw a notification that I had received a comment on my beehive profile (IBM's answer to Facebook, and internal for IBMers) from the father of a summer intern.
The intern's father works for IBM as well. I did not know him prior to this summer; he works in Sales in New York City.
The other day, I had written on the profile of the intern's father, and then when he responded, I replied, "Today would have been my dad's birthday -- may his memory be blessed. I'm glad to hear from another father on this day. You must be proud of [your daughter]; we're happy to have her on our team for the summer and I hope she chooses IBM upon her graduation."
Her father wrote, "...I am sure that your father if alive would be very proud of you. I am, too, very proud of [my daughter] and she can't say enough how much she has enjoyed IBM and the people she is associated with, thanks for making it special for her!"
I'm so envious of the intern. My dad never even got to see me graduate from high school. It was kind of him to write about my dad's likely pride in me in any case.
"Mad Men" Again
The show is nearly back, but I had missed the first four episodes, and so we're watching them now, pre-season. We just watched Episode #3. Tonight, I told Pat that 1960, the year when the show takes place, seems so familiar to me, even though I wasn't born till 1965. "Maybe I was just experiencing it as part of my parents, inside my father."
The show conjures my earliest memories. I remember my father, using the same sort of movie camera that the main character uses. Our kitchen curtains were the same concept as the main characters' kitchen's. My father dressed smartly, like the men dressed, and my mother went to Girardo's in Pound Ridge every week, where he made her hair flip at the bottom.
For what additional achievements and kindnesses would I have been proud of my dad, if he had made it to yesterday? Maybe he would have invented several more games and toys (he was a professional toy-maker/game designer); maybe he would have done hagbah on High Holidays for the synagogue we went to in my childhood; maybe we could have gone rollerskating together a few more times; maybe he would have liked Pat and welcomed her into our family; maybe he would have been pleasantly surprised by my career and by the way I grew into an adult....
Showing posts with label Mad Men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mad Men. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2008
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Sad Men
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.
Circa 1960
Pat's brother, Jim, first told us about "Mad Men" last week. And then Pat heard a positive review for it on NPR, which she has been downloading here as podcasts.
In 1960, Pat was 10 and I wasn't yet born. We watched three episodes this weekend and it reminded me of suits and ties and outfits my dad and mom wore during my earliest years; I was born in '65. And I could almost smell the lipsticks the women were wearing.
Also, I recognized the box of Carnation powdered milk and what appeared to be the Lanz nightgown on the daughter (my sisters and I wore them, too), and the girdles; I was endlessly fascinated with the snaps that hung down from them and would play with them when they came up from the laundry. By the end of the '60s, they stopped coming up from the laundry; women, including my mother, stopped wearing them.
My dad worked in the Toy industry as a toy and game designer, as I mentioned here previously, and it was as competitive as Advertising. He commuted to New York City daily from our suburban home in Stamford.
Channeling Childhood Challenges
Due to the competitive nature of the creative side of the toy business, my dad moved companies a lot, and it was less secure for us, growing up, than if he'd been in a less creative job, I think. As a child, I didn't think about supporting myself or a family when I grew up, but knew that no matter what, I didn't want to be as financially-rollercoasterish as we were during my childhood.
A month or so ago, I read a great interview in a local women's magazine about a young, Indian-American economist, who contributed to an important BRIC study recently; she spoke of being haunted by her dad's layoff from AT&T in the States during her teenage years and was happy to have more financial security in her adulthood.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember her name or the magazine's -- just that she went to Yale and recently moved to India. What I admired was how her unstable childhood inspired her to channel it for good in her career as an economist. She has been trying to help in a macro way, identifying hopeful trends, pointing to fewer people feeling what she felt in relation to money, or lack thereof.
Keeping Up Appearances
What was so poignant to me about the TV show so far, and my memories of that time, was the investment in appearances. My mom went to see Girardo to have her hair done every week, regardless of my parents' financial situation. Necessarily, my mother spent much more time with me during my childhood than my dad, and the show has been giving me a window into the pain he might have felt in the work-world of that time.
Spoiler alert: Don't continue reading if you don't want to know any of the episode plots. We saw episodes 5-7 and in one of them, one of the account execs. -- who's not even on the creative side of the agency -- gets a short story published by "The Atlantic Monthly." His colleagues are pathologically jealous. I think about how my dad must have felt whenever a colleague invented a new toy or game, rather than his having invented one. How painful that might have been!
Innovation: How Repeatable?
My dad's most popular invention was an alternate version of Yachtzee, Triple Yachtzee, which I never learned to play. In the Wikipedia article I linked to in the previous sentence, it was mentioned in the "Related Games" section toward the bottom of the article.
Would my dad have invented additional, popular games if he had lived beyond age 56? Or were most creative people lucky to have even one good invention? When he was dying of cancer, he was working on a hand-held, computerized version and my sister Kathy was helping him with the concept, which was ahead of its time.
I have a friend in IBM Research, whose invention has brought in nearly half a billion dollars of revenue to our company so far, and yet, I don't know the ratio of Researchers worldwide, who have that happen in their career even once, let alone more than once.
Innovation: A Gift However Often it Happens
Writing this entry, "Sad Men," I've become a sad woman. I don't like to be sad, as it saps my own creativity. And I need to have a creative day today: I'm working on my independent study paper toward my Masters in Organization & Leadership.
Instead of letting "Mad Men" make me a sad woman, I need to see it as a cautionary tale -- that a preoccupation with appearances and being self-destructively comparative and competitive is not a recipe for creativity.
Creativity, for me, comes from losing myself in the sheer fun of learning and thinking and writing. What a treat that I can spend the rest of the day, doing all of that by becoming focused on it.
Please, God, let today turn into a positively creative day for me in service to the paper I'm writing and its yielding useful findings.
Circa 1960
Pat's brother, Jim, first told us about "Mad Men" last week. And then Pat heard a positive review for it on NPR, which she has been downloading here as podcasts.
In 1960, Pat was 10 and I wasn't yet born. We watched three episodes this weekend and it reminded me of suits and ties and outfits my dad and mom wore during my earliest years; I was born in '65. And I could almost smell the lipsticks the women were wearing.
Also, I recognized the box of Carnation powdered milk and what appeared to be the Lanz nightgown on the daughter (my sisters and I wore them, too), and the girdles; I was endlessly fascinated with the snaps that hung down from them and would play with them when they came up from the laundry. By the end of the '60s, they stopped coming up from the laundry; women, including my mother, stopped wearing them.
My dad worked in the Toy industry as a toy and game designer, as I mentioned here previously, and it was as competitive as Advertising. He commuted to New York City daily from our suburban home in Stamford.
Channeling Childhood Challenges
Due to the competitive nature of the creative side of the toy business, my dad moved companies a lot, and it was less secure for us, growing up, than if he'd been in a less creative job, I think. As a child, I didn't think about supporting myself or a family when I grew up, but knew that no matter what, I didn't want to be as financially-rollercoasterish as we were during my childhood.
A month or so ago, I read a great interview in a local women's magazine about a young, Indian-American economist, who contributed to an important BRIC study recently; she spoke of being haunted by her dad's layoff from AT&T in the States during her teenage years and was happy to have more financial security in her adulthood.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember her name or the magazine's -- just that she went to Yale and recently moved to India. What I admired was how her unstable childhood inspired her to channel it for good in her career as an economist. She has been trying to help in a macro way, identifying hopeful trends, pointing to fewer people feeling what she felt in relation to money, or lack thereof.
Keeping Up Appearances
What was so poignant to me about the TV show so far, and my memories of that time, was the investment in appearances. My mom went to see Girardo to have her hair done every week, regardless of my parents' financial situation. Necessarily, my mother spent much more time with me during my childhood than my dad, and the show has been giving me a window into the pain he might have felt in the work-world of that time.
Spoiler alert: Don't continue reading if you don't want to know any of the episode plots. We saw episodes 5-7 and in one of them, one of the account execs. -- who's not even on the creative side of the agency -- gets a short story published by "The Atlantic Monthly." His colleagues are pathologically jealous. I think about how my dad must have felt whenever a colleague invented a new toy or game, rather than his having invented one. How painful that might have been!
Innovation: How Repeatable?
My dad's most popular invention was an alternate version of Yachtzee, Triple Yachtzee, which I never learned to play. In the Wikipedia article I linked to in the previous sentence, it was mentioned in the "Related Games" section toward the bottom of the article.
Would my dad have invented additional, popular games if he had lived beyond age 56? Or were most creative people lucky to have even one good invention? When he was dying of cancer, he was working on a hand-held, computerized version and my sister Kathy was helping him with the concept, which was ahead of its time.
I have a friend in IBM Research, whose invention has brought in nearly half a billion dollars of revenue to our company so far, and yet, I don't know the ratio of Researchers worldwide, who have that happen in their career even once, let alone more than once.
Innovation: A Gift However Often it Happens
Writing this entry, "Sad Men," I've become a sad woman. I don't like to be sad, as it saps my own creativity. And I need to have a creative day today: I'm working on my independent study paper toward my Masters in Organization & Leadership.
Instead of letting "Mad Men" make me a sad woman, I need to see it as a cautionary tale -- that a preoccupation with appearances and being self-destructively comparative and competitive is not a recipe for creativity.
Creativity, for me, comes from losing myself in the sheer fun of learning and thinking and writing. What a treat that I can spend the rest of the day, doing all of that by becoming focused on it.
Please, God, let today turn into a positively creative day for me in service to the paper I'm writing and its yielding useful findings.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
25 Years Ago Today
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.
Shiv'ah, Not Shiva
When I began creating this entry, it was less than hour ago, 25 years ago, that my father's coma ended, and he died, after six months of common bile-duct cancer.
Shiv'ah arrangements happened the following morning. I was 17 and in shock; not till nearly a day and a half later did I shed any tears.
I miss my father's humor, dignity, smile and imagination, and I try to honor his memory with how I lead my life. This morning, Pat told me about a new series on AMC, "Mad Men," and I wonder if it'll remind me of my dad from my very early childhood -- from the creative perspective, since he was a toy and game designer, if not an ad man, and because of how the men on the show are dressed. I'm looking forward to buying/renting the season DVD.
Meanwhile, today was an honorable day, I hope. I worked extra-hard on a presentation with several colleagues and had a lovely dinner with my local manager and one of my Delhi-based colleagues.
As we said goodbye, my colleague told me to recall my first week here, during the train-the-trainers session. "You were quiet and seemed to be looking around a lot."
I could hardly recognize the characterization, but then I remembered that I was trying not to feel culture shock, particularly when one of my colleagues took a cell-phone call in the middle of the presentation he himself was delivering.
And comparing then to today, "You fit in so beautifully now. I'm amazed, as this isn't an easy culture, even for *me* sometimes(!)"
I thanked her, and her consideration of the contrast made me feel so good. It's true that I hardly even notice cell-phone disruptions during meetings anymore -- cells don't have voicemail here, as it's considered impersonal...which it is....
Shiv'ah, Not Shiva
When I began creating this entry, it was less than hour ago, 25 years ago, that my father's coma ended, and he died, after six months of common bile-duct cancer.
Shiv'ah arrangements happened the following morning. I was 17 and in shock; not till nearly a day and a half later did I shed any tears.
I miss my father's humor, dignity, smile and imagination, and I try to honor his memory with how I lead my life. This morning, Pat told me about a new series on AMC, "Mad Men," and I wonder if it'll remind me of my dad from my very early childhood -- from the creative perspective, since he was a toy and game designer, if not an ad man, and because of how the men on the show are dressed. I'm looking forward to buying/renting the season DVD.
Meanwhile, today was an honorable day, I hope. I worked extra-hard on a presentation with several colleagues and had a lovely dinner with my local manager and one of my Delhi-based colleagues.
As we said goodbye, my colleague told me to recall my first week here, during the train-the-trainers session. "You were quiet and seemed to be looking around a lot."
I could hardly recognize the characterization, but then I remembered that I was trying not to feel culture shock, particularly when one of my colleagues took a cell-phone call in the middle of the presentation he himself was delivering.
And comparing then to today, "You fit in so beautifully now. I'm amazed, as this isn't an easy culture, even for *me* sometimes(!)"
I thanked her, and her consideration of the contrast made me feel so good. It's true that I hardly even notice cell-phone disruptions during meetings anymore -- cells don't have voicemail here, as it's considered impersonal...which it is....
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