mentoring Archives - The Grassy Road

Equality as an ingredient for peace: from Gaza to Ramallah to Tel Aviv

It’s hard to know if you can make a difference. Small actions, personal actions, can they in some small way change the path to peace? Who knows, but why not do them anyway just in case? Here’s the story of our efforts; the story of WE2, women for economic equality, and our mentoring mission in January 2018. Early this year I led a delegation of Silicon Valley executive women to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank to mentor women entrepreneurs. As I posted before we left: “I am more deeply [...]

By Penny Herscher|2019-01-04T10:05:05-08:00February 7, 2018|Equality|Comments Off

Five tough lessons on being a mentor

Coaching and mentoring is increasingly popular, everyone wants one, everyone has one. This is somewhat a result of the explosion in the number of startups over the last ten years, but also because the word is out that getting a good mentor can really help you grow faster at any stage of your career. And women want to help women! I have mentored on and off for the last 20 years but in the last 2 years since I stepped down as CEO I have focused almost entirely on women, [...]

By Penny Herscher|2019-01-04T10:07:19-08:00November 10, 2017|Leadership|0 Comments

Five practices you can learn so that “I told you so” is a gift

Does it irritate you when someone says “I told you so” to you? You’d be quite normal if it does. There is nothing quite as annoying as having a know-it-all tell you that they knew better than you all along and you did not listen. And yet, if you can check your ego, and if he did actually tell you so, then you’ve been missing a gift. Of course, this only makes sense if you are getting advice from someone who is often right, and who cares about you, otherwise [...]

By Penny Herscher|2019-01-04T10:10:47-08:00August 11, 2017|Career Advice|0 Comments

Why women need sponsors more than mentors

I was on a panel at GHC 2012 last week "Sponsors or Mentors - which will get you there?" Standing room only in a large room, it was clearly a topic of great interest to the female tech students and geeks at the conference. And the questions were priceless... The panel, lead by Anne Losby of Thomson Reuters, was prompted by a report Catalyst put out last year on Sponsoring Women to Success. In it the research clearly shows sponsorship is a powerful differentiator at the top and key to [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T16:53:15-08:00October 11, 2012|Equality|1 Comment

How to think about your career path

I was asked to speak to a mentoring group at our audit firm - Frank Rimmerman - this morning. It was an early morning group - all women - all accountants but in different roles: auditors, internal accountants and outsource accounting. All under 40, the majority under 35.Since it was an early morning session, and I only had 45 minutes, I decided to take a casual approach and discuss three basic guiding principles to help the audience structure their thinking about their career path.After a preamble about the path my [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-03T02:44:45-08:00November 5, 2009|Career Advice, Equality|1 Comment