Women Authors From The United States

"“The magazine will provide expert opinions and interpretations that readers can continue to refer to and have access to at the palm of their hands. I see this magazine as a real patient encounter where I can be their personal expert on issues that really matter.”"

"Roughly every decade there is a change in hair," Ashton said, adding, "With age, all of us will have a change in our hair.""

"“My philosophy is to be honest. It’s not about being the best. It’s about being better than you were before, improving yourself. Even baby steps can be the difference in improving your health.”"

"be gentle."

"“There is so much stigma about mental health as well as blame. I felt that blame when my ex-husband passed.”"

"I never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write."

"Many of the essays engage with the question of written constitutionalism in the United States, meaning, in a specific legal way, that we are ruled by the dead. But a lot of the essays also engage broadly in questions about how memory and devotion and obligation to the dead inform decisions that we make. I don’t think it’s an unshakable hold. And sometimes, as in the title essay (from 2019), that hold is an embrace."

"'It's absolutely the best date that I've had. No one is going to live up to that. This wasn't on my bucket list but let's just end the list now. There's nothing that's going to beat this.'"

"The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist,”. “It is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth."

"That doesn't mean [hair] still can't be fabulous. It just means it requires a different approach."

"'I asked about his wedding and he told me that he got to the point where he was just like, 'wedding planners, leave me alone'. He did say that he was really involved in his wedding, though."

"Experiment with different types of things, whether they are fun hats or scarves or even wigs,"

"Be kind and gentle and patient with yourself as an older woman," she said. "Don't only be gentle with yourself figuratively, but literally. You can't do the same heat, the same pulling, the same processing and styling as a woman who is middle-aged."

"What I call myself is a Future of Work strategist and a keynote speaker and an author. And Chris Shipley and I wrote The Adaptation Advantage, which came out in 2020. The premise of it was, the future work is really learning and we can't have fixed occupational identities or fixed ideas, we have to essentially get adept at adapting, and that came out just prior to the pandemic. And, oh boy, we did not know how much we were going to need to adapt then!"

"Not only has it played out, it's gone from push to pull. So it used to be the employees pushing employees to learn. Now the Pew's latest survey on why people leave organisations, of course number one is compensation; people jump for more dollars, but that doesn't sustain. But with a net score that was the same, it was learning opportunities, because people realise, "If I'm not learning, I'm not going to be earning in the future". And so they know that's what makes them valuable in the future, and so that's becoming a real pull with employees."

"Yeah, so the book is really divided into three sections. We try to make it very easy for folks to both read and skip around, because I am a short-attention-span person as well, so you should be able to read it on a cross-country flight. It's about 200 pages with about 35 graphics. First part is, meet your new workforce because it's not the one you left in 2019. Second part is, you have to rethink about how you actually organise work, because the maps and the models in the past are not only not helpful, they can actually be dangerous, like driving in the city of Boston, which I'm from, using maps before the big dig, it's just not going to get you anywhere, it's going to get you lost and frustrated. And then the third part is about rethinking your leadership entirely, because here's what we think happened."

"You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube now.""

"You'll meet many Gen Zs whose attitude is essentially, 'I'm going to work with a sense of purpose or not at all,'"

"Yeah, first of all, let me just empathise with you. I know it's not comfortable. I make all my audience say with me, "Let's all say the four scary words, 'I do not know'", and we say it together. And I say, "And I know you were brought up as leaders not to say those words. But what's happening now is, if you pretend you know and you don't, you could be leading your team down a very dangerous path. You have to acknowledge what you don't know as an opportunity to learn, because the first step of learning is to say, 'I don't know', because if you know, you're not learning"."

"leaders should understand that employees want to feel like their work has a purpose and act in that way. Yet, if we look at Gallup's research over the past 20 years, we can see the highest rates of disengagement, mental illness, burnout, and loneliness, which are not exactly traits that highlight being purpose-driven."

"I'm telling you to have empathy, but I'm not having empathy for you". And I think that was a huge aha, is that if you were brought up, raised with this, give up your Saturdays, don't go to your kids' soccer game or cricket game, whatever it may be; work comes before everything, maybe get on to your second or third marriage because you've ground all your relationships to dust. That's how you become a leader, and then in order to lead, you've got to have your people be afraid of you and not like you and that that's what you were brought up with. This does seem like, "How could this possibly work?"

"It's a huge shift and I gave a couple of talks one week to commercial real estate folks and they were all, it was mostly boomers, some Gen X, they were mostly kind of alpha dog folks, more males, one of them was almost all male. It's not gendered though but that was the case in this instance and they were like, "Don't you think we're getting woke, and aren't we getting soft, and aren't we losing our edge?" And I thought, "Oh, I'm not explaining this right, if that's what you're taking away from this"."

"You have to have empathy for folks and say, "I know you gave up all those things. I know what you went through frankly sucked. And the people who are coming along now that you're going to be leading are not going to put up with it, it's not going to work. So I need to have empathy and respect for what you went through, but I've got to tell you, if you want to be successful, you are not going to be successful with those tactics"."

"It's not like the old way was working, and now we're suddenly loafing," she joked. "Instead, I think we're now putting work in the right place in our lives and getting the right social connections and support so we can do better work.""

"I say there are four shifts that a leader needs to embrace. First is a shift in mindset. You're not managing people and processes any more, you're enabling success. And to be intentionally provocative about it, I say, "You used to think of the people as working for you. Now, you work for them. You enable their success, because you're not going to get anywhere without their success". The second is a shift in culture. We used to, when we had the same skills and knowledge of the leader and the team, and then usually across the team, you could pit people against each other. Forced rankings, all those kind of bad ideas, Hunger Games kind of stuff, that doesn't work anymore. So you've got to shift from peers as competitors to peers as collaborators."

"Absolutely and we're seeing a shift in leadership too. So, when I would go out and speak, and I usually speak to senior level group leaders, the room would be at least half boomer. And now there's a handful of boomer, a lot of Gen X leaders, more millennial leaders and now we're seeing, at least in the US, about 12% to 13% of the workforce is Gen Z. That's going to be 30% by 2030 and they're an entirely different animal. They are going to change work in really fundamental ways that I think are ultimately positive."

"Well first, I think we need to dispel the notion that empathy means less, and I didn't really even understand it until I started doing these book tour interviews where people said to me, "Okay, so we've got to be empathetic, we've got to be nice, we've got to make concessions for people, let them do less and expect less". And I thought, "Well, there may be days that's true". Your dad dies, you have to put your dog to sleep, there are days that we have to be human and that's true. But no, that's not what I'm talking about."

"Let's say I'm scanning the horizon, and I might see the need to understand Chat GPT or generative design. And so, I bring that research back into the project as well as back into my functional home."

"I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelled. Empathy ultimately drives performance. It's not about lesser performances or about greater performances, it's also about greater balance. Because what's really happened during the pandemic, and I think people get all caught up on where work takes place, you know, home, hybrid office, I really have no opinion on that. What I think has happened is, and everything's pictures, it means I have to draw, is we had a smaller circle in 2019, that was called our personal life. And we had agency over our personal life. And we had a bigger circle that cast a shadow on that smaller circle, and that was our professional life."

"'It still seems a bit surreal and now that it's over, I can try to absorb all the little bits of the day. Getting a kiss on the cheek from him was absolutely brilliant'"

"As a society, we've put work first, and it hasn't helped work. We have not done better work when we put work first,"

"'I was really worried that I would be a mess but I held it together. It was a day that I am honestly not going to forget. I'm quite lucky he was late. It let me get accustomed to the situation and compose myself a bit.'"

"I wanted also to be very clear for young people coming out what their work is. And your work is not to make your mom accept you. That's your mom's work. Your mom has to work to understand what she needs and ... the best ways that she can love you. Your work is to just live authentically and as honestly as you can."

"Despite the fame of Fossey and the other Trimates, women, and particularly African women, are still underrepresented in science. We are taking numerous initiatives to strengthen our programs for women in science, including establishing a scholarship fund, as well as aiming to have equal representation of women in our livelihoods and food security work that takes place in the communities living near the gorillas. It is wonderful to be able to extend Dian’s legacy in this special way, perhaps not one that she would have expected."

"When you lose yourself, dig deep into your ancestry, because you will find the pieces there."

"Poachers, cattle herders, park officials, Western conservationists, members of her staff, a couple dozen researchers — the parade of possible suspects extended far back into the past. In pursuit of her singular goal, the protection of the endangered mountain gorilla, Fossey had shot at her enemies, kidnapped their children, whipped them about the genitals, smeared them with ape dung, killed their cattle, burned their property, discredited their work, and sent them to jail."

"Under Dian's direction of the research center, she would not allow a Rwandan to be in sight of the gorillas - claiming it would make the gorillas more vulnerable to poaching. Given that a gunshot or a trap could be effective without being seen, this didn't make complete sense, and now that Rwandans are fully engaged in their conservation poaching is far, far reduced and the gorilla population is thriving."

"Just like Captain America did in 1941, and who knew we'd need America Chavez to punch Nazis in 2018."

"I only knew the person I had to deal with for eight years, and this was a sad person. She was riding on some kind of dedication she had once had. Why did she hardly ever go out to the gorillas if they were her life-motivating force? She criticized others of 'me-itis,' yet she kept threatening to burn the station down and all the long-term records. She was willing to take down everything with her—Karisoke, the gorillas. When I did a census that indicated the gorilla population was growing quite nicely, she tried to cut off my funding; she wanted them to be dying. Dian could have had all the accolades in the world for what she did during the first six years. It would have been natural for others to build on her work, but she didn't have the self-confidence or the character for that to happen. So many people came over here inspired by Dian Fossey, prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. No one wanted to fight her. No one wanted to take over the place. She invented so many plots and enemies. She kept talking about how nobody could take it up there, how they all got 'bushy,' but in the end she was the only one who went bonkers. She didn't get killed because she was saving the gorillas. She got killed because she was behaving like Dian Fossey."

"She would torture them [poachers]. She would whip their balls with stinging nettles, spit on them, kick them, put on masks and curse them, stuff sleeping pills down their throats. She said she hated doing it, and respected the poachers for being able to live in the forest, but she got into it and liked to do it and felt guilty that she did. She hated them so much. She reduced them to quivering, quaking packages of fear, little guys in rags rolling on the ground and foaming at the mouth."

"I think by the end she was doing more harm than good. Dian went out to the gorillas because she loved them and she loved the bush and being on her own, but she ended up with more than she bargained for. She wasn't planning on having to organize and work with and fight with people. She was no good as a scientific mentor, but she couldn't hand over control. She couldn't take the backseat. Her alternative—to leave and die somewhere an invalid—was never something she would have considered. She always fantasized about a final confrontation. She viewed herself as a warrior fighting this enemy who was out to get her. It was a perfect ending. She got what she wanted. It was exactly how she would have ended the script."

"It's probably true that Dian chose wrongly when she decided to take the law into her own hands, to try to fight the poachers by herself. And yet she felt this way was the only way to try to put right the terrible wrongs that she saw being done. But who are we to blame her? I don't know how I would react if there were poachers threatening the chimps at Gombe."

"That myth of having to go it alone and having to be tough doesn't serve us...it's in that space where softness and vulnerability meet strength that we transcend our everyday selves..."

"I warned her. Everybody who was fond of her did. But she didn't want to listen to things like that. She was a law unto herself."

"She had a perfectly colonial attitude toward the Africans. On Christmas she'd give the most extravagant presents to them; other times she'd humiliate them, spit on the ground in front of them—once I even saw her spit on one of the workers—break into their cabin and accuse them of stealing and dock their pay. Two researchers left Karisoke because of the way she treated the Africans. ... They were loyal to her, but they had to stay because there are few paid jobs in the area and there is a certain cachet to being a tracker. The men never knew when she was going to start yelling at them. When she left camp it was like a cloud had risen, and it got worse over the years."

"It’s as if Mother Teresa had just died. But the Mother Teresas of the world don’t get bludgeoned to death in their bedrooms. Dian had some real enemies, and at least one mortal enemy. But you won’t hear this from the [Rwandan] government now."

"Dian Fossey was to gorillas what Greenpeace is to whales. She was prepared to ignore the niceties of diplomatic approaches and just get in there and do the job. She did what she considered right. But she was in many ways like the gorillas. If you’re easily put off by bluff charges, screaming and shouting, you’ll probably think gorillas are monsters, and you won’t go near them. If you’re prepared to sidestep the temper and get to know the person, you’d find that Dian, like the gorillas, was a gentle, loving person."

"When I got to Rwanda, Dian was extremely warm, welcoming and encouraging. She was also a bit scary, exuding a determined, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners attitude towards poachers, cattle in the Park illegally (of which there were many at that time), and any ‘students’ who didn’t dedicate themselves 100% to the good of Karisoke. Basically, she appeared to fear nothing and was not going to take any nonsense from anyone. At the same time, she seemed like a very emotional person, almost too emotional."

"She was caught up in circumstances beyond her control, disasters that upset her mind in the early stages and soured her later years. Others would have quit. She was never physically strong, but she had guts and willpower and an urgent desire to study the gorillas, and that was what kept her up there."

"It was their individuality combined with the shyness of their behavior that remained the most captivating impression of this first encounter with the greatest of the great apes. I left Kabara with reluctance, but with never a doubt that I would, somehow, return to learn more about the gorillas of the misted mountains."