Tag Archives: Confidence

Brick by Brick

Manhattan is a great place to be in the springtime.

Walk out of the subway on to 42nd. It’s only a block to you destination, of course; you couldn’t come to New York and not see the library. You can see the lions from down the street.

Past the arches you walk, and the place opens up. It’s beautiful. The walls are painted with murals, the ceilings painted with clouds. There’s marble everywhere. Woodwork is everywhere. In the reading rooms, up the stairs worn smooth by centuries, they’ve got pieces like Toledo enamel suspended so high above you it might as well be in the sky.

The true heart of the collection is beneath your feet. It’s dug in many stories beneath the surface. That’s where the beating heart of the collection is housed. 15 million items.

It’s as fine a temple as ever has been built, and it’s built to awe.

How does somebody build something so incredible? It’s hard to even wrap your head around that question. Where does one even begin?

Now, with that in mind, I want you to look a little more closely at something.

Look at the wall. Really look at it. What do you see? Continue reading →

Con Game

In 2007, McKinsey and Company started a research series called ‘Women Matter,’ in which they set out to understand the role that women play in the workplace and in the corporate world.

The first study conducted for it was called Gender Diversity, a Corporate Performance Driver. What they found was that companies with three or more women in senior management functions score higher on every criteria they were using to measure performance. Now, this was a survey they had conducted on a management level, but even when they studied the financials of these companies, the gender-diverse companies outperformed the competitors. This isn’t isolated to corporate boards either; even hedge funds that are run by women outperform those run by men. Continue reading →