Decision Time

Oh, hasn’t it been a while? So sorry. Much has gone on.  Let me try to update you.

I’ve made an important decision.  I’m leaving at the end of the year.  No, Dumb Boss isn’t finally getting rid of me.  I’m not being fired because we lost that case.  Nothing like that.  I’m just done, that’s all.

If you don’t know, I joined the Company in 2007 to turn around the dysfunctional Legal team.  Thankfully, everyone acknowledges that I’ve achieved that.  So, what was next?  It’s fair to say that Dumb Boss isn’t helping to facilitate My Next Big Step.  Plus, the international opportunities that I joined the Company to access have shrivelled up since the GFC knee-capped the joint.   At the Company at least , I’ve meandered into my personal dead end.

For what seemed like a long time, I kept updating this blog with Dumb Boss’s considerable sins.  I tapered off as I slowly came to take his lunacy for granted in some kind of corporate Stockholm syndrome.  And to realise that he has them fooled.  Not all of them, of course.  Most of his peers know he’ll end up with his face on a wanted poster and think he’s evil.  But those above him buy his act, and I just came to realise that his staggering ability to manipulate the truth meant my concerns about him would never gain traction – he was too good at covering his tracks. 

I knew things had gone too far when one of my direct reports shut my office door, and sickly explained how Dumb Boss arranged for him to be approached to review some legal advice that I had given.  All because Dumb Boss didn’t like the answer.  Even though I told Dumb Boss that outside counsel agreed with the view I had expressed.  My direct report refused.  When others hear this story, they are horrified.  When it happened, although it registered as wrong in my head, I barely flinched.  I had finally come to accept his bad behaviour as normal: it was time to go.

But not before I took my issues to the head of  HR, unfolding 2 years of stories about the control freak.  They tried to have my reporting line changed.  Although the CEO was happy to do it, our Group requirements for GC reporting wouldn’t permit it.  Then, the choice: stay or go?  Exhausted from all of it (and possibly not in the best frame of mind to make the call) I decided to go.  I laid out the ground rules: I would stay until the end of the year, have them pay me a shitload of money for breaching my employment contract, and they couldn’t say crap about me. 

It’s been over 9 years that I’ve been a General Counsel and, as much as I’ve loved it, I’m done.   The advent of Corporate Risk Management roles means that the GC role has slowly receded in importance in many organisations – I am continually amazed at how many things legal is kept out of in place of the Chief Risk Officer.   I have no interest in becoming a CRO, so it feels like sunset time for this part of my career.

So, you’re wondering: what am I going to do?  Truth is: I don’t really know.  Not yet.  I need to breathe in deeply, over and over again, shut my eyes and actually listen to the world around me.  Then I’ll go see if there’s something left of the life I forgot about living while I was clambering up the corporate ladder.    

I am trying to develop my poverty plan: what if I never work again?  Can I afford just to sell up, move to another country, grow my own food and never let corporate life darken my doorstep again?  Of course, I’ve spent plenty of time changing my own mind on this.  Every time I think about it, I find a breath catches in my throat.  The reaction of others has reinforced the two-edged vibe of this decision.  Some have been caught, wide-eyed and fearful for me.  Those few in my team who I have told are upset but they’ll go on without me.  Most of my friends, though, have practically cheered. 

When I broke the plan to my brother, he said “Fantastic.  We have been so worried about you.  I know that, if you don’t leave that place, you’ll be dead before you’re 50″. 

So, I’ll take 9-10 months or so off (before I start begging others for work!).  Travel for half of it.  Perhaps I’ll come across me again somewhere on the Mediterranean.   I’ll walk the Camino de Frances across Spain, wile away weeks in the Greek and Croatian Islands.  Finally visit the Cinque Terre and Lake Como in Italy…straddle Europe and Asia in Istanbul.  Find me again.  Write a book. Work out a future.

Confidence

Why is it that confidence and ability seem to so rarely form a perfect match?  What is it about self-delusion that makes so many of us unable to truly understand what we are really capable of?

I, for one, often find myself knocked sideways a little when under subversive attack.  I am terrible, I think, at blowing my own trumpet.  So, when the crunch comes, I find that I get that sick feeling in my stomach that sits there, like a dead weight.  I can often lose confidence in my ability to handle the situation, and withdraw or – sometimes worse, over-talk.  I think it’s like that far more for women, as we so often assume that we cannot do things that we are more than qualified for.  Often, more qualified than the very men who turn up and give it a whirl.  Many men just seem to unfairly and (often destructively) ooze with self-confidence.

Typical of this phenomenon is Dumb Boss, a text book example of someone whose confidence way, way outstrips his ability.  Almost to the point of embarassment.  He is, indeed, the corporate equivalent of one of those tubby contestants on So You Think You Can Dance, or those out of key crooners on Idol.  They turn up to their audition, and inflict their over-rated sense of their own ability on the world, and then are amazed and offended when the judges (and the world) so seemingly miss their talent.  I particularly love it when they mutter to the experts: ”Well, that’s your opinion”.

I wish corporate life were more like that.  I could hit the stage with gusto, and belt out a Karaoke tune better than most.  Bring it on – wheel out the Corporate Lunatics, one by one, and expose them!  Let us stand in front of our judges and get kicked off the stage – or the air ticket to Vegas.

I came across this hugely popular You Tube video of a snaggle-toothed mobile phone salesman who is just the opposite: lacking in confidence, he turned up anyway. 

You can tell by the looks on the judges’ faces that they were convinced that this ordinary dude would be yet another one of THOSE contestants – talentless and self deluded.  “Here we go again”, they thought, but then it got worse: The contestant said he was going to sing opera…

In case you didn’t know, this shy, humble man’s name is Paul Potts.  In 2007, he went on to win Britain’s Got Talent, sing in front of royalty and sell millions of CD’s.

Priceless.

Great Leadership Books

One of the tools for developing the Management team reporting to me is what we’ve called “The Flamingo Book Club”.  Each month, we pick a book to read, and one person’s role is to facilitate a discussion about it with the rest of the group. 

I figure we could spend a bomb on sending the individuals off to leadership training; however, generally I think that you can get a lot out of just spending time with people and challenging them, giving them feedback, and working together to set boundaries.

We’ve done about 3 of these now, and they’ve gone really well.  After we have read and discussed each book, a couple of copies are added to the library, and we do a book review for the team at the full team meeting.  This way, we get to share the learnings and include the team in what the managers are up to.

The first book we chose was Susan Scott’s “Fierce Conversations”.  This is about having conversations with people that get to the heart of issues, rather than avoiding them and letting wounds fester.  She explores why this is needed, and how to approach it.  That first month, one of the managers used the techniques in the book to give some difficult feedback to one of her team members, and she was very successful.  Another manager felt extremely challenged by it because he is incredibly passive/defensive and won’t say what’s on his mind enough.  Now, when we give each other a bit of tough love, we say “Uh oh, a Fierce Conversation.”

The second book that we read was John C Maxwell’s “The 360 Degree Leader”.  I have loved Maxwell’s writing for many years, and his take on leadership and teamwork are particularly challenging yet simple and truthful.  I find his writing to be a wonderful checklist at any time.

I picked this particular book because I wanted my people to see that leading from wherever you are in an organisation is critical.  So many people think that they deserve to be leaders and that the world has not yet recognised their stellar leadership potential by making them CEO.  Great leaders have a stillness and self-confidence, and this book really gets into so many aspects of leading.  It was a great trigger for much meaningful discussion, and challenged one of my managers who is particularly competitive with others.

John C Maxwell has a great many other books, and I heartily recommend them, and his website at http://www.maximumimpact.com/

Our third book wasn’t a book: I asked everyone to watch the movie Thirteen Days about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  First, it’s an enthralling film.  Second, it closely follows history, which is borne out by the historical commentary and the book of the same name by Robert Kennedy.  Third, it shows leadership under pressure – stripped of all its flashy glitz, naked and in many ways alone.  It was by far everyone’s favourite leadership learning so far.  I’ll be doing a separate post on Leadership and the Cuban Missile crisis soon (although I do note that the new White House Press Secretary apparently had not heard of it before a couple of months ago…what a shocker).

Our next book is Lance Armstrong’s “It’s Not About the Bike”, which I hear is a corker.  We have a few others lined up to follow: “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, Daniel Goleman’s “Working with Emotional Intelligence”, “Authentic Happiness” by positive psychology guru Martin Seligman.  We ambitously put Nelson Mandela’s autobiography “Last Walk to Freedom” on the list.  I suspect it will take us a while to read.

Leading the Flamingos: How South Africa helped create a vision of our future

I was busy building the picture of our vision of the future. The Objectives were great, and I could certainly put a Vision into words, which I was doing.

Then, one day, I read an amazing story. I’d seen something on it before, but now for some reason, it resonated with me and hit straight in the heart. I was on a plane and was reading a business journal, which talked about what had become known as the Mont Fleur scenarios.

The Mont Fleur scenarios were developed in South Africa in 1992. A group of political parties got together with other influential South Africans, and gathered at the Mont Fleur Conference Centre. They invited a facilitator from Royal Dutch Shell, Adam Kahane, who was asked to utilise his skills in scenario planning to help them understand how South Africa’s future might play out.

The interesting thing is that scenario planning does not involve mapping out the future that you want. Instead, participants were asked to work together to describe likely futures based on what they perceived could happen. In the commercial world, you then use these scenarios to test your own strategic options and plans, and to test your business against.

The group from Mont Fleur worked together for months, and were able to put aside political and philosophical differences to identify four scenarios that they regarded as likely:

1. Lame Duck – this is where a white government remains in power and, in attempting to appease too many interests, is unable to define a way forward for the nation;

2. Ostrich – a white government fails to recognise the need for change, and ignores the growing tensions in South Africa;

3. Icarus – a black government takes power and, by implementing reform too quickly, tanks South Africa’s economy; and

4. The Flight of the Flamingos – a unified nation rises slowly, and together, as flamingos do.

Building a Vision

When I first arrived at the Company in April 2007, the biggest issue was the leadership vacuum that had striken the legal team for the past 4 years.  There had been a cocktail of aggressive leadership, absent leadership, and passive leadership which led to large levels of turnover, and great dissatisfaction.

One of my challenges was to establish a plan for this team to emerge from mediocrity (more in reputation than in fact) and transform into a world-class legal function.

The challenge with leading lawyers is that they are natural cynics; respect has to be earned.  Lawyers are smart and agile thinkers, and no empty fluff will engage them.  This team, in particular, had seen years of empty promises about things that would be delivered, and very few of them were.

The team also had a terrible reputation externally.  Lawyers who had left years before were still telling their friends that it was a terrible place to work.  Some of them even gathered up new stories about what I was doing, and scornfully spread negative stories about us in the industry.  It got to the point where this Legal Team was the last place that anyone wanted to work; everyone knew it was a basket case.  This left the team decimated, and missing key expertise needed to service the business’s needs.

Where was I to start?

Well, first of all, Dumb Boss had given all his reports the goal of making the Corporate & Finance function “World Class” (whatever that means).  So this became our anchor.

I have a fundamental belief that people within the team have most of the answers to the hard questions.  They have existed under the poor leadership and have watched as things obvious to them have failed to be done.  So, I always start by asking them what they think we should do.

My mechanism for this was an offsite where on a blank page where I drew a spot on the bottom left hand of the page.  I wrote next to it “We are here”.  On the top right hand side, I drew another spot and wrote “World Class”.  And then I joined the dots.  The line was the journey that we were to take.

I then facilitated a session.  Starting by asking the group to close their eyes and visualise the future; a future where we were in a world class legal team, surrounded by excellence, wonderful colleagues.  I asked them to picture what it looked like, sounded like, felt like.  What did it feel like to come into work?  What sounds were in the department?  What sort of buzz was there?

I asked them to imagine that a reporter was visiting the department to see what a world class team was like.  The reporter began asking them questions: how did you get here?  What do you do that makes you world class?  I asked the team to imagine how they would answer those questions.

Open your eyes.  Now tell me what you saw.  We filled pages and pages with what a World Class legal team would be.  The team knew what it was; equally they knew we didn’t have it.

I broke them into 5 groups and asked them to come up with 2 ideas for what would make us World Class.  They had to define the “What” – ie state their idea, the “Why” – ie why it would make us World Class, and the “How” – with some ideas for what we would do to execute the plan.  Each team then came back and presented their ideas, and we began to put them into categories like “Skills Development” and “Reward & Recognition”.

I gave everyone 3 dots to put onto the ideas that they most believed would make us World Class, and 10 minutes to go around the room and consider how they wanted to vote.  We then counted up the dots, and our three top priorities emerged as “Skills & Knowledge” (by a long way – I was relieved that the team understood there was big gaps), “Reward & Recognition” (they felt underpaid and under-loved) and “Customer Service” (this one usually comes up – you can usually always improve here).

So, I took all this away and typed up the verbatim feedback, and then created summaries of the top 3 priorities.  We circulated this and asked people to sign up to work in groups on delivering the change they called for in these ideas.  And so the journey commenced.

I put all of this into a simple picture of our journey each year as we would work together on defined Objectives and deliver them into Business as Usual.  As they became part of our foundation, they formed stepping stones that we would use to continue to rise higher as a team.

This year, we were proud of what we delivered in our teams; only the Customer Service initiative failed to deliver everything we had hoped for.  The lesson here was that the team that was put together was full of passive or princess-types (yes, Mark was on that team!) who couldn’t bring the Objective to delivery.  That’s OK – it’s inevitable that some will fail to live up to their promise, and you learn the lessons and move on.

I did inject one objective that I was keen on: Innovation.  This, plus Customer Service, External Relationships (ie how Legal relates outside our Company) and Knowledge (ie prcedent development, knowledge management) are our Objectives for 2008.  We have already announced team leaders and the teams, and they’ll kick off their work in January.  In future posts, I’ll tell you about our model for delivering these Objectives, and using them to raise up the next generation of leaders and to test our people.

In any event, the wisdom of our own team has proved to be accurate, and using their ideas has been the core reason for our success.  If I had imposed my ideas without fully understanding theirs, we would have had some success, but it’s likely that we would have failed to gain the sense of ownership that is necessary for becoming “World Class”.  As new people join us, we explain to them how we formed this plan, and why we are spending time delivering on non-legal projects so that they can buy into our Vision.

The year end: when pride and melancholy merge

It’s when you reach the end of each year that you really appreciate how quickly they go.  Life is full of that sad cocktail of time whizzing by, but also grateful awe with what has been achieved.

I started my year consulting to the corporate regulator on a major corporate collapse, looking after the wash-up of mum and dad investors losing all or most of their dough because of some selfish and negligent corporate management.  Corporate Lunacy at its worst.  But I did some good for real people, and am so proud.

Before I started with the Company, I spent 7 wonderful weeks travelling to places as diverse as New York, Italy, Greece and Fiji (I basically just got to list all the places I wanted to go to and shove them into the one air ticket – spending some of my pay-out was truly fab).  My favourite moment was on the Greek island of Santorini where, after 5 weeks of travel, I was waiting for the bus to the capital, Fira.  One of Greece’s crazy taxi drivers asked me if I wanted a ride for 10 euro, saying the bus wouldn’t be along for another 45 minutes.  Normally, I’d have jumped at the chance.  But instead I slowly considered it and said “No thanks, I’ll wait”.  That moment, I think I was the most relaxed of any time in my life.  It was wonderful: relaxation in my core, the depth of my being.  Why oh why can’t life be like that more often?

Then I started at The Company and set about resolving the issues that had beset the Legal team for so long.  Sure, there were some bumpy times and some desperately low moments.  But they are behind us.  In that time, I have started to turn around our recruitment reputation, and brought on board some really wonderful new team members.  Plus, we’ve motivated and focused the great people who were already there.  I laid out a 3-year vision so they can see where we are going; no-one before had done that with them and followed through.

We had a bit of turnover in the first few months, as people who had waited too long for new leadership got itchy feet and headed off.  Happily, most left with regret as they wished they could also be part of what we were doing.  Two went overseas.  One very talented young lawyer told us she wanted to try private practice for a time, so I picked up the phone to the law firm she wanted to work with, and organised for them to meet her.  And she got that job.

Of course there were the people who we were glad left: the team is lighter, more hopeful without the weight of them.  But God there were tough times.  I learned a lot of new lessons this year, I can tell you. 

As for the Dispute Resolution Team, they are in a state of flux.  The new manager is wonderful – the whole team loves her, and she was exactly the right choice.  Two of the lawyers, Lisa and Anne, are like the Bobsy Twins - they always have their heads together.  They are the biggest fans of Mark, and live their lives seeking his approval.  As it turns out, they seek approval a lot, including from me.  Lisa is more the problem child – she’s like a duckling who adopts whoever walked past last as its mother.  Anne, on the other hand, is different.  Between the two of them, she’s the leader.  She resigned earlier this year, before I arrived, because her manager was such a disaster.  When I announced her old manager was going, she rang me the next day and asked to come back, which she did on a 12 month contract.  She was grateful for a second chance and, even when I announced Mark was leaving, she said I had her support (even though she knew her friends would crucify her if they heard her say it).  Our strategy with Lise and Anne is to divide and conquer.

This last week, we told Anne that, not only did we want her to lead one of our project teams next year, but that we were making her role permanent.  She was overjoyed, and said “I’ve been vindicated!”.  I think she’s referring to the frequent drinks/dinners/lunches that the DR Team (both current and former members) have to pick over the bones of old times, and bitch about old and new management in Legal.  I imagine they all told her that I was systematically trying to get rid of all of them, and I wouldn’t make her role permanent.  How wrong they were.

Meanwhile, Lisa was told that she missed out on leading a project team in 2008 – that she didn’t have the leadership skills the others had.  She is disappointed, but will be uncertain how to react to Anne’s being successful.

We’ll see how that goes the next year.

Careless Talk…

Here’s a poster from WWII that really makes me think.  Actually, it makes me gulp in just a little bit of terror.

Gossip and overtalking is so tempting sometimes.  Usually, the less you say, the better. 

I’ve been involved in a number of corporate disasters (or at least near-misses…no, they weren’t my fault; as a lawyer, I am usually hoovering up the mess).  One time, I worked closely with an exceptionally good lobbyist, whose advice related back to this poster, which she kept above her desk.  She was worried that this particular corporate disaster had blown so far out of the water that everyone was beng inspired to burst into print at the slightest provokation – all creating interesting fodder for the government, regulators or litigants to gather up when they launched their attacks on us.

The poster itself is from 1944 and was part of a larger campaign to encourage those in military service to keep their mouths shut, and watch what they said in writing.  The saying “Loose lips sink ships” is a paraphrase of other posters in the same campaign.  I love this poster particularly, because it creates such a vivid image of the impact of careless talk – you can almost feel it as it rushes past you on its way across the English Channel and into the hands of the enemy. 

I wonder today if we have lost the art of staying silent?  Of keeping our opinions to ourselves, or at least not putting them into some kind of permanent form?  Particularly with the availability of so many forms of communication, from emails to blogs, from cell phones to voicemail messages!  Every adult in the Western World must have hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of words – most of them probably harmless, but many probably careless – floating around in cyberspace or locked into back-up copies.  Ready to be brought out into the public, or used to trap them or someone else.

Words are interesting.  You control them only up to the point at which you speak – after that, they’re anyone’s.  Two weeks ago, someone at work told me that the senior manager of Risk (of all people!) had been telling others that I am “nasty” – and he cited the incident with my crazy admin team (see prior blog entries for the unfolding drama!).

First, this guy didn’t know what he was talking about.  He let himself listen to the careless talk of others, and wasn’t wise enough to recognise he didn’t have all the facts.  You would think someone as senior as him would know there are always two sides to every story – but apparently not!

Second, even if every word of what he’d heard was true, he had no wisdom to keep his mouth shut.

I have spent the last couple of weeks thinking about what to do.  Yesterday, I told his boss what he’d said.  She lamented to me that she didn’t know what to do with him: he shot his mouth off all the time, and it was like an addiction. He couldn’t stop, and he wouldn’t admit there was a problem.

We truly have become more and more careless.  Words are cheap.  They seem like they’re everywhere. 

[Credit image http://hobnobblog.com/art/]

A new beginning

Ahhhh!  Monday at last.  I can’t remember a time when I’ve looked forward to starting a week at work more.

I arrive in the office, in our new, refurbished space.  Some of the team is already there, unpacking, searching for scissors, taking in our new space.  Although the rest of the floor is still a construction zone around us, it truly feels like a fresh start.  Since my office isn’t ready yet, I’m sitting at a workstation (not a cubicle, but rather a flowy round, kidney-type job) right in the middle of my team.

The Dispute Resolution Team is finally together with the rest of the group!  Now they can see how the “non-complainers” behave.  They aren’t hidden behind high workstations, gossiping.  If they want to gossip, they have to leave or do it by email! 

I know it seems dumb, but the change in the physical environment, particularly in contrast to the turmoil of the last week, has brought with it calm.  On the first day, everyone is quiet – feeling more exposed.  The seats are closer together than they appeared on the plan.  Even I feel like I need to be more productive.  I’m naturally loud (my team insisted I have an office) but I’m quieter. 

By Friday, we were getting used to the whole thing.  In a space where we could now see each other, we were calling out.  I’m sure this is annoying for some people, but it’s creating a sense of fun; we are sharing jokes and laughs, ribbing each other.

Sarah confesses to me that, even though she has been hit by the avalanche of unpaid invoices from Amanda’s inept hoarding, she is feeling more relaxed.  She no longer has to worry about where The Manipulator is; about who she is poisoning, and how little work is getting done.

Perhaps it’s a testimony to how little work our admin team was doing, but the three girls who are left of the original five seem to be coping perfectly well with the workload.  They, too, see lighter, happier.  One of them was bullied for three years by The Manipulator.  Is it my imagination, or does she seem to skip now when she walks? The other was under Amanda’s thumb, and forced to get caught up in the gossip and bitching that Amanda and The Manipulator generated.  Now she is standing on her own two feet, and getting through her work.  Even the DR Team has commented on how well she has stepped up to the plate.

On Friday, we give the Admin team an award; our inaugural “Flamingo Award” for living the Legal team’s vision.  They wear their smiles all afternoon.  I am so proud of them; we’ve been through hell, but just two weeks on, we are coming out the other side.

Mark, who will leave us in just 7 weeks, has barely been in the office.  I hear he’s been going to job interviews.  Fingers crossed that he gets a good one and can move on, as will the DR Team.

Over the coming weeks, the floor gets built around us.  First, it’s our workstations.  Other workstations for neighbouring teams go up over successive weekends.  In late November, I will get my office.  Our joinery will be built, and we can move our files out of their boxes, and into cabinets.  Our new kitchen, meeting rooms and – wait for it – library then go up.  By Christmas, everything will be shiny and new.

As well as that, three new people join us this month.  In this transformation, as with the last one I did, I am blessed by the benefit of a physical change happening in our environment.  Even a symbolic one, creating a fresh start for us.  Amazing to watch it being built, week after week.  Until…viola!  It’s so much like building a team that I can’t help but assume the team sees the same thing in it as I do.

Hello world!

Hi there.

This blog is a crazy experiment to see if anyone is keen to follow a transformation of a team of professionals in a corporate lunacy environment.

Four months ago, I became the General Counsel (ie head of Legal) for a local operation of a major international company.  I’m just gonna refer to it as “the Company” and be done with.

Until last year, I was working somewhere else, and had taken an underperforming legal team to an award-winning one.  We had the most wonderful team I’ve ever had the pleasure to be a part of and, let me tell you, I made some mistakes along the way with leadership issues.  But, despite my blunders, we got there in the end.  Along the way, I learned a lot, and found there was nothing more exhilarating than creating, and being inspired by, a wonderful team of people.

I took the job with the Company because, for the last 4 years, I have heard about how hopelessly their Legal team has been led.  My heart went out to the lawyers in it; wonderful people who had been beaten to a pulp while part of the team, and then again on their way out the door.  A team who was given no direction or future, and who, again and again, had terrible leaders appointed who just took them to new lows.

There are all sorts of parts to my story: what we’ve done so far, what lunacy I’m encountering along the way, why I left my old job and what’s happened to them since (a lunacy story in itself).  I’ll try and get to all of that along the way, and maybe share my thoughts and seek your feedback on how to handle some of the more lunatic moments and people. 

The one thing I was keen to do is to have a way of recording what happens.  Maybe I can help others create similar transformations, or we can all just work out how to build and lead wonderful teams together.

The one thing that I’m really passionate about is great leadership: the sort of leadership and humanity that makes your eyes fill with tears, and that makes you want to be a better person.  Those Mr Smith Goes to Washington/ West Wing/ To Kill a Mockingbird/ Band of Brothers type moments.

I don’t know about you, but I want to be that type of leader: the type who puts their people first and creates a platform for greatness in others.  Who doesn’t seek accolades, but quietly goes about the business of making theirs the no 1 team in whatever space they are in.

I’ll try and post an entry at least every week, and I’d love to hear from you (esp your great CL/ Corporate Lunacy tales).  They make us feel like you’re not alone!