Trends come and go. Some leave indelible marks upon a culture, and others just fade away. When a trend is couched in terms like “positive psychology” one might expect that any influence it exerts on a culture will be, well…positive. But is there such a thing as too much of a good thing? The contemporary positive psychology movement was founded in the ’80s by Martin Seligman, so you would think he […]
For ten days, we are bound by clay, water, sand and straw – in various ratios and textures. Bamboo, tapioca, and cement show up from time to time, but basically, we are women with red hands and feet. Kahlo (as in Frida) is 18 months old. Susan is 77. We are every decade in between. We are Thai, French, Hungarian; Canadian, American, Mongolian. We are Pakistani, raised in Canada, living […]
I grew up in a half white, half Mexican neighborhood in Roseville, CA. My best friend was Hally (Angelica) Rodriguez. Her parents were Mexican immigrants. Her older brother was a cholo and sold drugs from her house. He was a dick. Her older sister was tough and foul-mouthed and her bangs stuck straight up in a great wall of a tidal wave above her forehead. She was so cool, I […]
It’s been 10 years since acclaimed author and CEO Chip Conley’s best-seller PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, compelled a generation of leaders to increase employee performance and engagement by creating a culture of purpose. Yet today, when 66% of employees and 68% of executives surveyed agree that businesses don’t do enough to instill a sense of purpose, his message seems more relevant than ever. Conley first […]
Last week, I sat in huge ballroom full of entrepreneurs and cringed as a white male CEO gave a TED-style talk on how he solved diversity. Yeah, that happened. You see, he has realized his business – oh! also his industry – oh oh! also his city – were too white and too male, and so he co-launched an initiative to place a one person of color as a paid […]
What happens when a mixed race child only has a white identity and then goes out into the world? I have spent my entire life straddling many worlds culturally, socially and racially. I am a mixed race woman and I am in a family of transracial adoption. (Transracial adoption means adopting children of a different race). My biological mother was a white woman from Dallas, Texas. My birth father was […]
I never imagined I’d go to Tokyo. I always said there was so much to see in the US that the thought of traveling overseas seemed so… foreign to me. But, in the Fall of 2016 I found myself with the opportunity to travel to Japan with a group of 12 -14 year old female gymnasts, two of their coaches, a parent chaperone and my husband, the delegation leader, for […]
My parents met at the famous Max’s Kansas City bar in Manhattan, in 1966. A couple of privileged white kids. Him from an affluent family, spending his whole childhood in the town where the Great Gatsby took place. Her, on a full NYU scholarship, hailing from the Bay Area, the daughter of scientists. They actually weren’t that privileged. Dad is Jewish and, during that privileged childhood, a global war broke […]
Welcome to the most provocative issue of Pregame Magazine to date. In discussing this month’s topic of diversity and culture, our contributors opted to keep it real. No maxim-riddled fluff. We went straight for the cultural jugular, favoring much-needed call-outs over the typical overoptimistic (and oversimplistic) opinions which do little more than to serve to keep us all exactly where we are as an individual or as a culture. I […]
Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster. —Sun Tzu, The Art of War I fight fuckery and build belonging for a living. If you’d like less of the former and more of the latter, read on. It doesn’t matter if you’re pitching a product or selling a service: fuckery divides. I used to trip over phrases like “trust-eroding behaviors.” One evaluation […]