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A Budding Entrepreneur

Posted in Management with tags , , on April 20, 2012 by jrvitalis

I was right last week when I predicted that Puppy would become an entrepreneur, but I had no idea it would happen so soon! She has been asking regularly how old she has to be before she can start babysitting. Since she’s only seven-and-a-half, I never took these discussions too seriously. But yesterday I was going to offer to watch Otter for a half-hour while her mother took Squirrel to karate. That’s when it hit me: this was Puppy’s big chance!

I asked if she had any interest in starting a business venture, to which she eagerly responded “Yes!” I suggested she offer up her babysitting services to Otter’s mother. She was eager to make the phone call, but I pointed out she’d better come up with a business plan first.

“How much are you going to charge?” I asked.

“One dollar,” she promptly answered. Sensing a teaching moment, I pointed out that her rate would be $1 for 30 minutes and asked how much her rate would be for a full hour. “Well, normally it would be $2, but I don’t want to take advantage of anybody,” she said, “so I’ll only charge $1.50 for a full hour.”

She made the call and was thrilled when she received her first official job. But I should have known that Puppy would take my idea and run with it. After getting off the phone, she turned to me with a sly grin on her face. “So Mom,” she said. “I’m getting $1 for babysitting Otter. But since Kitten is going to be here too, and you know she’s going to play with us, don’t you think you should give me a $1 for babysitting Kitten as well?”

She knew she had me. All of the sudden, I’m not so sure Puppy going into business is such a great idea after all!

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Kitten Quips

Posted in Management with tags on March 30, 2012 by jrvitalis

Kitten (pointing at donut holes on table): Daddy, you got us pom-poms!

 

Kitten: I am a real princess, but I am disguised from the wolves because they only eat real princesses.

 

Kitten: My name is despicable, but don’t tell anybody. I’ll say “Hi, my name is despicable, nice to meet you.”

 

Kitten: Do I really have to eat these disgusting eggs?

 

Kitten recently decided to tell her friend Otter about about her great-grandmother, who lives in Las Vegas and has had two knee replacements. Kitten’s take on Grandma: “I call her the old woman who lives in the desert, but that would make her feel bad, so I’ll call her the old lady with metal in her knees.”

 

Kitten to Puppy during a fight: Well, I don’t want to contradict your business.

 

Kitten to her dad, seeing him in a suit: You look silly, Daddy.

 

Kitten: I have a book buddy at school.

Me: What do you do with your book buddy?

Kitten: We read, of course! What else would we do, play?

 

Kitten: Mom, do you want to go to the park?

Me: It’s raining!

Kitten (thoughtfully): You do make a good point.

 

Kitten: My belly is full up to here (points to chest). If I drink the water, I will over-mutate and be full up to here (points to nose).

 

Me: Kitten, do you mind if we go to the gym today so I can do a class?

Kitten: Only if we go to the playground after because you have to respect my energy.

 

Me (to Kitten, who is pretending to talk on the phone): What are they saying?

Kitten: I’m not going to tell you because it is inappropriate.

 

Kitten: Mom, do you think I look like a teenager in this outfit?

Me: Don’t you think you might be too hot wearing that today?

Kitten: Part of being a teenager is dressing appropriately for the weather.

 

 

 

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Management Styles and Earrings

Posted in Management with tags , , on March 23, 2012 by jrvitalis

In my last post we talked about management styles and the differences between Puppy and Kitten. But it wasn’t until Kitten got her ears pierced recently that I realized just how different the girls really are.

Puppy started asking to get her ears pierced when she was three or four. I had my ears pierced on my 6th birthday with my godmother. Afterward, she took me out to lunch to celebrate and I still remember how special this event made me feel.

Wanting my girls to have the same type of memory, I told Puppy she had to wait until she was 6. She was fine with that. When the day finally came, she spent an eternity agonizing over exactly which earrings she would choose. After the piercing, she burst into tears and continued to sob all the way through lunch. She was thrilled with her earrings, but apparently the pain was much greater than she’d expected.

Kitten’s experience was totally different.

From the time she could talk, Kitten was adamant that she never wanted to get her ears pierced. “Never, never, NEVER,” she said.

“It’s your decision,” I always replied.

It was quite a shock when she came bounding into our bedroom one morning shrieking, “I want to get my ears pierced!”

After prying my eyes open, I managed to point out that she’d never wanted them pierced before.

“Now I do. Today!”

I was tempted to say she had to wait until she was 6, but I knew if Puppy said she was ready to have her ears pierced, then she was ready.

I showed her the earring choices online, and she immediately pointed to a pair of pink flowers. When we arrived at the store, she marched up to the desk and announced she wanted her ears pierced. She didn’t even hesitate when she climbed into the chair for the actual piercing. After the first one was done, I asked if she was okay.

She blinked twice. “I’m fine, Mom.”

After the second ear was done, she hopped down grinning ear to ear.  No tears, no fuss, just pure joy.

I know she’s never regretted her decision because after she tested for her orange belt in karate recently, she came rushing off the floor and I gave her a big hug.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said.

She pulled back. Instead of responding, she tucked her hair behind her ear and asked, “Do you think anyone noticed my earrings?”

I’ve got to give the girl credit: at least she’s focused!

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Gift Cards and Stomach Aches

Posted in Management with tags , , on March 4, 2012 by jrvitalis

During a CBS class on leadership, we read and analyzed case after case regarding effective management styles. It would have been nice if one style had emerged as more or less effective than another, but with so many variables involved, this is a complicated and fascinating topic.

I’ve often wondered how much of any given leadership style is innate, and how much is learned. In our house, for example, my husband and I have very different styles. I tend to be more structured, while he tends to be more go-with-the flow. Both of our styles are effective, and we generally end up at the same place, we just take different paths to get there.

I can see these types of differences in the girls as well. For example, Puppy received several gift cards on her last birthday. We went to some of the stores right away. Puppy browsed, but she couldn’t find anything she really, really wanted. Last week during a Mommy/daughter day, we spent the morning browsing books at Barnes & Noble. Since she’d been saving her B&N gift card all winter, she was determined to pick a book out to take home. After browsing for more than an hour, she started complaining that she had a stomach ache.

“Are you sick?” I asked.

“No, I think the pressure from having to pick one is making my stomach hurt. What if I get it home and read it and then never read it again?”

Needless to say, we left the store empty-handed.

Kitten is the exact opposite. When she had a few dollars of her own to spend recently, she marched into the store, scanned the toy aisle briefly, and then pointed to the toy she wanted. Sure that she would regret her choice, I tried to talk her out of it and coached her to take her time making her selection. She remained adamant. Much to my surprise, she brought the toy home and has played with it continually ever since.

This scenario plays itself out over and over in our home. Puppy likes to analyze things and think about every possible scenario before committing to a decision. Kitten tends to make snap decisions, but not out of haste or carelessness; she simply knows exactly what she wants and doesn’t hesitate to act on her opinions.

It will be interesting to watch these two grow up and see to what extent these early indications of management style influence their lives down the road. In the meantime, let’s hope Puppy’s gift cards don’t expire anytime soon!

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My Core Competency

Posted in Management with tags , , on February 10, 2012 by jrvitalis

Puppy lost a tooth recently. Yes, another one. That fact in and of itself isn’t surprising, but the fact that I managed to botch the whole Tooth Fairy thing yet again is. I mean how hard can it be? Kid loses tooth, kid puts tooth under pillow, Mom or Dad takes tooth and leaves a reward in return. Simple, right?

Not in my house. Here, complications always arise. Once, Puppy’s tooth fell out during the night and she swallowed it. Another time, Mom forgot to play Tooth Fairy. With Puppy’s last tooth, Mom remembered, but didn’t have any cash or change to put under the pillow. And now this.

Putting her tooth in a bowl to keep it safe while we ate breakfast seemed like a great idea. Except after breakfast I rushed to clear the table so we could get out the door.

It wasn’t until we got home later that day and Puppy asked to see her tooth that I realized what I’d done. I spent the next thirty minutes with my hand down the garbage disposal, hoping against hope that I could find and salvage the tooth. No such luck.

Fortunately, Puppy is fairly pragmatic. While I searched for the tooth, she drafted the following letter to the tooth fairy (In the interests of full disclosure I should note that I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning up the spelling):

 

Dear Tooth Fairy,

I know I promised that you would always get my teeth ever since I swallowed my tooth. But my mom accidentally misplaced my tooth so I am sorry I broke my promise. Could you still visit me please?

From,

Puppy

p.s. My mom put it down the garbage disposal so it is not my fault

 

Fortunately, Puppy is now sound asleep and I’ve not only successfully removed the letter from under her pillow, but also deposited a handsome reward in its place, accompanied by the following response:

 

Dear Puppy,

Thank you for the update on your tooth. Of course I’ll still visit you! After all, it wouldn’t be fair if I held you responsible for your mother’s mistakes. Just promise me I’ll get your next tooth, okay?

Keep Smiling,

The Tooth Fairy

 

Playing the role of the Tooth Fairy is obviously not one of my core competencies, but fortunately writing is. Good thing, too, because with only seven teeth down, I’ve obviously got my work cut out for me.

 

 

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Obtaining Buy-in for the Big Move

Posted in Management with tags , , , on February 3, 2012 by jrvitalis

My husband will be getting his Ph.D. this spring and our family will be facing an out-of-state move. In business school, it was always emphasized that obtaining buy-in from employees was a critical factor in implementing any major changes. With this in mind, I’ve encouraged the children to be as involved in the relocation process as possible. As my husband interviews, we look up his location on the map, talk about what it would be like to live in each place, and sometimes even look at real estate online together.

 

So when Puppy announced a couple of months ago that she only had one request about whatever house we ended up living in, I was eager to hear her thoughts. (A blue bedroom? A bunk bed? A play house in the back yard?)

 

But no.

 

With a serious look on her face she said, “I just really, really want to make sure we buy a house with no electricity.”

 

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise since the girl is obsessed with Little House on the Prairie and spends every free minute pretending she is Laura living in the “olden days,” but it definitely caught me off guard.

 

I started explaining all the reasons why it wouldn’t be practical to buy a house with no electricity, but her mind was made up. Obviously I couldn’t agree to her demand, so we ended up comprimising: we’d occassionally turn the electricity off.

 

I thought that was the end of the feedback I’d receive about the move, but last week Kitten made a request of her own. Again, I was eager to hear her thoughts. I expected she’d ask for a purple and pink bedroom (her favorite colors), a loft bed, or even a kitten. Instead, her request stunned me.

 

“Mom,” she said. “When we move I really, really think we should buy a house with a big swimming pool in the living room. And it should turn into a wave pool. And on the other side of it, we should have a hot tub.”

 

Too stunned to argue, all I could think at the time was that obtaining buy-in for this move just might be harder than I expected.

 

 

 

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Framing

Posted in Management with tags , , , on January 27, 2012 by jrvitalis


Just after her fourth birthday, we discovered Puppy was virtually blind in one eye. We hauled her in to a specialist where she was diagnosed with amblyopia. Basically, her eyeballs are shaped dramatically differently, so right after birth, her brain shut off the connection to one of her eyes. In an effort to turn the connection back on, she had to wear a patch over her good eye ten hours a day for eleven months. The good news was that this worked, and her “bad” eye now has nearly perfect corrected vision. The bad news is that “corrected vision” means she has to wear glasses every waking moment of every day for the rest of her life (so her brain doesn’t shut her eye back off).

 

Obviously this wasn’t news we were happy to hear, but my husband and I knew that our reaction would frame how Puppy viewed having to wear glasses. So we made the whole thing very exciting. We took her to the eye glasses store, let her try on as many pairs as she wanted, and encouraged her to pick out a very cool, funky pair.

 

Our plan worked. Puppy received and continues to receive regular compliments about her glasses, and when I told her about contacts recently, she couldn’t imagine why in the world anybody would not want to wear glasses.

 

Unfortunately, our plan worked a little too well. A few weeks ago Kitten told me that she was seeing white dots in her eyes. With a knot in my stomach, I hauled her to the eye doctor. It wasn’t until she announced at the eye exam that she hoped she’d need glasses like her sister and best friend Otter that I realized the whole thing was likely just a ploy to get glasses (which proved to be the case when she was given a perfect bill of eye health).

 

Then yesterday, Otter’s big brother got glasses. When I told the girls at the breakfast table this morning, Puppy jumped up and started dancing. “Yeay!” she yelled. “Now Squirrel, Otter and me all get to wear glasses!”

 

I looked over at Kitten, who was sitting quietly in her chair. Her head was down, and her little chin was quivering.

 

“Are you okay, Kitten?” I asked.

 

She looked up at me, a single tear dripping down her cheek. “It’s not fair,” she said. “How come everybody in the entire world except me gets to wear glasses?”

 

On the outside, I played the sympathetic mother, but on the inside I was howling. How many parents have to deal with a child who is devastated that they don’t “get” to wear glasses?

 

So this afternoon, you’ll find me in the sunglasses section at Target, where I’ll be buying a pair of kiddie sunglasses so I can pop the frame out and give Kitten a pair of glasses of her very own.

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Less is More

Posted in Management with tags , , , on November 25, 2011 by jrvitalis


For those of us in the United States, yesterday was a day of Thanksgiving; a time to count the blessings in our lives and enjoy our families. Unfortunately, with Christmas just around the corner, we are also being bombarded with images of what we “could” have.

We live in a culture that conditions us to want more, more, more. More money, more prestige, more choices. Paradoxically, research by Sheena Iyengar, a Columbia Business School professor and author of The Art of Choosing, indicates that offering too many choices actually leads to lower levels of satisfaction.

Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But think about it. How many times have you been overwhelmed by making some simple decision, and then afterward kicked yourself in the pants for having made the wrong choice? But with so many options, how could you possibly have picked the right one?

This lesson hit home recently during a birthday party Puppy attended at Chuck E. Cheese. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the venue, Chuck E. Cheese is a children’s destination that allows kids to play games in exchange for tickets, which they can later trade in for prizes. Having earned something like 110 tickets, Puppy had a wide selection of toys to choose from.

She stood at the counter agonizing. First it was a sucker and a bracelet. Then a top and a sucker. No, maybe a notebook and a pen. On and on it went. She was one of the first children at the counter, and was still standing at the counter after every single party attendee had traded in their tickets and made their selections.

Finally, I gave her a two minute warning. Puppy managed to make her final selection (a sucker and a green plastic lizard) before I had to put my foot down, and she seemed thrilled with her choices.

But it wasn’t five minutes into the ride home before I heard Puppy mumble, “I should have chosen the orange lizard.”

That’s when it hit me; the whole process was so overwhelming, it would have been virtually impossible for her to have left feeling like she’d made a good choice. Maybe less really is more.

(As an aside, Dr. Iyengar happens to be blind, making her research on choices all the more compelling. There is a fascinating New York Times article about her and her work at this link.)

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Who Gets What?

Posted in Management with tags , , , on October 25, 2011 by jrvitalis

With the death of the visionary businessman Steve Jobs, the issue of succession planning has undoubtedly been on the minds of corporate leaders around the world. I didn’t realize it until yesterday, but apparently it is a topic up for discussion in our household as well.

Both Puppy and Kitten were home sick with croup. Puppy was working on a sewing project, and I’d pulled out a kit I keep that contains a variety of miscellaneous items such as pins, old jewelry, and buttons. Having never seen the kit before, the girls were delighted. They set aside their projects and immediately began sorting through the kit, digging for treasures.

Before long, Puppy held up a small fabric pouch containing a small gold chain and pendant. “When Mommy dies,” she shrieked, “I get this!”

Not one to be left in the dust, Kitten jumped on the bandwagon and grabbed a small pack of amethyst stones. “Yeah, and when she dies, this one is mine!”

With that, the floodgates were opened and both girls raced to stake claims on their treasures.

I sat watching in bemused silence, remembering full well all the times I’d made similar comments to my mother as a child.

Finally, Puppy and kitten grew tired of the game and fell silent.

“Girls,” I pointed out. “When Mommy and Daddy die, everything we have is going to be yours.”

“Yes,” Puppy piped up, “But with all this stuff, I think there is going to have to be some serious coin tossing to decide who gets what!”

Her comment wasn’t totally out of left field because when my grandmother passed away recently, she wrote something similiar into her will. As the mother of fourteen children, she must have known the issue of handling her estate would be complicated. Always one to think outside the box, Grandma directed that each child label each item in the house they wanted with a stick-it note. After the funeral, anyone with their name on an item with more than one name on it was directed to roll a dice for that item. Whoever had the highest roll “won” the item. This simple but creative solution removed much of the drama from what otherwise may have been a long, painful affair, and while I hope it will be many years before my children have to worry about such matters, I’m happy to know this issue has already been resolved in our household.

I wonder if Apple can say the same?

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Think Outside the Box

Posted in Management with tags , on September 30, 2011 by jrvitalis

Think outside the box may be the biggest cliché in business, but there is a reason it lives on. It works, both in business and in parenting. Take nighttime at our house for example. Until recently, Puppy was never a great sleeper, and Kitten struggled to make it through a night without calling for Mom or Dad. It’s not far from the truth to say I’ve read every “how to get your kids to sleep” book on the market, and at various times I’ve implemented techniques from many of the books.

But despite advice from the experts, I’ve found one of the most useful techniques to encourage sleep in my house has been a tool I’ve not seen in any baby sleep book: a dreamcatcher.

Dreamcatchers—round hoops with webs woven inside and decorated with feathers—are from Native American traditions. Tribes such as the Ojibe believed that dreamcatchers had the ability to filter dreams, allowing good ones to pass through and trapping the bad.

The dreamcatcher turned out to be a lifesaver for Puppy, who would blow her bad dreams into the dreamcatcher at night and go back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that only good dreams would be allowed in her head.

The dreamcatcher worked with Kitten, too. Until a few weeks ago when she woke up in the middle of the night scared of the shadows on her wall. After comforting her, I encouraged her to blow her scary thoughts into the dreamcatcher and go back to sleep.

She shook her head. “Mom,” she said. “The monster wasn’t in my heart, it was on the ceiling!”

I consider myself fairly adept at thinking outside the box, but in my middle-of-the-night stupor, I couldn’t come up with a response.

Oh well. The sleep was good while it lasted.

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