Answering Rabbi Daniel Cohen's Questions

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

The Questions Appear in Rabbi Cohen's New Book 

The book is *What will they say about you when you are gone: Creating a Life of Legacy - Live Your Best Life Now* and the questions are ones that -- since my parents (z"l) are gone and I'm 50+ -- I'm especially in the mood to consider these days:

From pp. 13 and 15-17:

1. Who are you? A Jewish-American lesbian writer, as well as a music, fiction and global museum lover, and a solvent home owner and healthy eater, who has enjoyed the companionship of my wife for nearly 25 years so far, who has parented up to two precious cats at a time for close to a decade, who has been grateful for the siblinghood of my two older sisters Deb and Kayla for nearly 52 years and who comes from fascinating parents (z"l), who loved me and wanted a good life for me. I'm also an aunt, a cousin, a friend and an IBMer, who manages a team of premier instructional designers and who is earnest, loyal and reliable, with occasional lapses into worry that are mostly unfounded, and with flashes of creativity and humor.
2. Who do you want to be? The same, minus the worry, and plus more discipline, practice and personal success with my writing. 
3. How do you want to be remembered? For everything in #1 and #2 plus for being kind, inclusive and for being of service.
   By your family:
   As supportive and loving.
   By your community:
   As engaged and valued.
   By the world:
   As someone whose writing helped people appreciate their lives more and whose writing and work helped people excel and advance. And as someone with a capacity for joy.
4. Pick one person, place or event in your life that brings you happiness and satisfaction, and write down in a journal the various ways it might not have happened: Easily, I could never have gotten together with my wife Pat, since she lived in DeKalb, Illinois and I lived in Chicago, and since I could have not been at Shabbat services when she first visited Or Chadash, the LGBT shul in Chicago at the time, and since we were 15 years apart in age, and since initially, I was afraid to get involved with anyone as amazing as Pat, since I felt still unmoored and still was searching in most ways throughout my twenties to that point, and if Pat hadn't been more self-possessed, patient and clever in drawing me in. :-)
5. Then imagine your life without that person/place/event and write that down, too: If Pat & I had not gotten together, I might still be living alone in an apartment, whether in Chicago or Queens/Brooklyn/Bronx and searching for without ever finding any peace. Probably, I'd never have a deeper pet relationship than with a Siamese fighting fish if not for Pat, as she showed me the wonder of cat parenthood. Also, I would not be as solvent as I am, since Pat made me save the maximum in my 401K from 27 onward. And assuredly, I would be twice the worrier that I am; Pat's self-assurance rubs off on me.
6.  Choose the final words you'll ever speak: Thank you, God, and everyone.

Writing Your Own Eulogy, pp. 17-19:
"If you had to write your own eulogy, what would it say? Use the following questions as inspiration, and then craft a eulogy for your own funeral."

1. What would you do if you had twenty-four hours to live? Why? I'd spend it with my wife, cats, sisters, nieces and nephews and cousins and friends in my home and yard if the weather were warm enough and my favorite music would be playing in the background, say, the George Michael and Sade channels of Pandora. I would serve Indian, Middle-Eastern, Mexican and French food that was catered from favorite restaurants. I would invite one of my congregation's rabbis and some congregants and friends to come over and sing favorite liturgical songs and I'd set up a Hebrew University scholarship for an LGBT student for however many years I could afford to do so without making Pat insolvent. Why: I want the people and pets I love to surround me, along with my favorite music and food, as well as to cover the spiritual element and the g'milut chassadim (acts of loving kindness) angle.
2. What is worth fighting for? Dignity, love, art, humanity, beauty, truth, freedom, creative expression, inclusion.
3.  In your life so far, what have you taken a risk for or gone out of your comfort zone for? Living my life as a lesbian; whenever I've needed to learn something new; every time I've taken a new job at work, including a six-month assignment in India with Pat accompanying me  ... homosexual activity is illegal in India and necessarily, my employer told me that it could not protect me if I were jailed; any time I need to go to a party or a meeting, where practically everyone is a stranger initially.
4. You have five words to write on your headstone. What are they? A dignity and love champion.
5. When you're feeling low, what song do you play to lift your mood and inspire you? Why? Two come to mind: "The Right Track" from Pippin and "Gesher Tsar Meod". Why: The "Pippin" song is cheerful and helps me remember that I'm doing my best to lead a meaningful life, and that I'm not alone in my worry that I want it to be as meaningful as possible. "Gesher Tsar Meod" encourages me not to be fearful and when I'm not fearful, everything goes better.
6. Is there a phrase that you find yourself saying frequently when you're under stress? When you're happy or grateful? When I'm under stress, I say to myself the first sentence of the Shema, the central prayer of Judaism. And I hear my mother (z"l) saying, "Sarah, why don't you let yourself live?" (as in, relax, everything will be Ok). And also, if it has to do with gathering courage to deliver a difficult but necessary message, I tell myself: "Sarah, pull yourself together! He/she/they need you!" When I'm grateful, I tend to say, "Thank God!" and simply, "Yay!"
7. Describe your best day or your best self: My best self is humble, of service, kind, loving, self-possessed, reliable, present, creative, experimental, funny, stylish, fit, attentive, receptive, friendly, organized, on time, lucid, persuasive, inviting, encouraging and productive.
8. What is your favorite Bible verse, poem, or motto? "Al tifrosh min hatsibur"/ "Don't isolate yourself from the community," *Pirkei Avot* / *Ethics of the Fathers*.
9. Why are you here? What is your life mission? What do you hope to achieve? I'm here to model dignity from the margins was the first thing I thought of, but why focus on my marginal status? Because if I can demonstrate dignity as someone in society whose sexual minority status if not also religion and gender can be marginalizing, then anyone can. I get that I have all sorts of privilege in my education level and solvency, and citizenship, by accident of birth, but still, I also know from being an outsider. Why is dignity so key to me? Because it's the opposite of shame to me. Shame paralyzes while dignity makes anything and everything good possible.
   
   What is my life mission? To create something artful that uplifts someone else or many people.
   
   What do I hope to achieve? I hope to achieve peace and unconditional acceptance within myself while remaining loved and loving, and grateful, and amused, and expanded by art of all sorts and while having fun and other vivid experiences.
10. What are your dreams? How can you realize them? My dreams are to write a popular book that helps others, and me, feel less alone; to stay solvent; for Pat & me to remain healthy mentally and physically till we're at least 95 and then to die in a way that is least painful to us and our loved ones.
    
    I can realize these dreams by starting to practice writing more routinely, including enrolling in adult writing classes; by revising what I've written .... I can keep working full-time in my stimulating and relatively lucrative role at IBM .... I can keep rowing for 20 minutes daily and reading books every night pre-bed and encouraging Pat to stay active with pruning, gardening and golfing along with reading and working on crossword puzzles as she loves to do.

These questions were great to answer, though I'm not yet prepared to draft my own eulogy.

Page 43: Give thanks every day to one important person in your life. Today, I thanked my friend Mindy for inviting me to her fun birthday party and for providing an orange to me when I didn't prefer cake.

That's Why They Call It Leadership

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Reprinted from my internal, IBM blog, "Learning to Lead":

"That's why they call it leadership," were the final remarks of Oxford Professor Marc Ventresca at Oxford's session on "Beyond Disruption: Ideas with Impact". He was referring to how enterprises need a purpose and not just a mission, and specifically, provided the examples of CVS, opting no longer to sell tobacco products, since it's a healthcare company [I could argue that it shouldn't sell candy in that case either], and to Unilever, vowing to become an environmentally sustainable firm. At IBM, our purpose is to be essential. And in our [behind-the-firewall, internal-only] 1-3-9 Purpose, Values and Practices site, we can review, "What does 'being essential' look like to our clients? It’s seeing our passion for going above and beyond to meet their needs by applying our Practices to every aspect of the client experience."

What does being essential look like to our IBM Learning clients? Surprising and delighting IBMers, and increasingly IBM Business Partners, clients and prospective IBMers with learning experiences that help them build their skills. And how do we do keep doing what we already do well, that is, training leaders and sellers while in parallel venturing into training people for new roles, for example, Watsoners and Offering Managers? Or how do we keep doing what we already do well, e.g., face-to-face, classroom courses and online learning while at the same time experimenting with Virtual Reality, social technologies and Watson-powered robots for learning?

What is IBM Learning's purpose? It needs to go beyond our mission. Professor Ventresca quoted Lenovo's CMO, "The mission statement [merely] has to make sense; purpose has to resonate." Is our purpose to build skills of the new IBM? Let's try it: IBM Learning's purpose is to build skills of the new IBM. That resonates with me. How about with you?

Professor Ventresca started his remarks by using Kodak as an example of exploiting its core business while insufficiently exploring its new business opportunities. He explained that Kodak had patented 28 percent of digital technology, but didn't see the disruption of the web coming. If it had, it would have seen that the web made sharing electronic photos wildly easier and that they had viral potential. "Disruptive technology is not great initially, and then it becomes good enough, and then coupled with other things, it becomes transformational." Kodak was a relatively old example compared to his next, Uber, which is already moving from being a better taxi service to starting a driverless car venture. Why did Google buy Waze, asked Professor Ventresca, too. "To craft it's driverless strategy." And Tesla, he said, is not a car company as much as it's really trying to become the home battery company, trying to solve long-term battery storage.

On driverless technology, Professor Ventresca said, "It won't necessarily even be the best. It'll be the winning consortium." Another word for consortium, he explained, is ecosystem. "Be more of an ecosystem player and talk with groups from other organizations .... Establish disciplines for selecting, experimenting, funding and terminating new growth businesses .... Purpose," said the professor, "builds bridges across ecosystems."

Prior to the session, with beverages in our hands, participants did a bit of mingling. I was fortunate to talk with the head of Digital at Citi, along with the head of Oxford's Custom Executive Programs, and eventually the professor himself. I asked the Exec. ed. leader if she knew our own IBMer Michael Coleman, an Oxford alumnus, who does IBM recruiting at Oxford, and she said, "I've been in my role for just two months, but Marc [the professor] might."

Unfortunately, by the time the professor joined us, I missed the opportunity. In fact, as I write this, I wonder if Michael made our VP Guillermo aware of the event and if that was the genesis(!) During my pre-session conversations, I *was* able to learn that the head of Citi's Digital group had been an IBMer in Australia in the '90s, in the days of O/S2; that the head of Oxford's exec. ed. group had done her Doctorate on rocks on Mars -- and I mentioned that I had adored rocks and minerals as a child, and at 10, with my best friend Amy, had been the two youngest members of the Stamford Mineralogical Society; and that the professor and I both loved Chicago. We had lived there around the same time -- in my case, more than 20 years ago. The Citi leader exclaimed, "You're the best networker here: You found a connection between the two of us with IBM, with Elaine [the exec. ed. head] as a fellow lover of rocks and with the professor around Chicago." 

I wonder, if IBM, Oxford and Citi were introducing a disruptive technology together, what could it be, and would our ecosystem help us win over any competitors, introducing a similar disruptive technology?

For fun, here's a reminder of how easy it is to share photos over the web; I snapped this shot of the marvelous Chrysler building while approaching Oxford's offices on Fifth Avenue from 42nd Street:

Follow the professor on Twitter, like I now do, if you're also intrigued by his remarks.