Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter? - Hardcover

Dulski, Jennifer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 073521137X ISBN 13: 9780735211377

Verlag: Portfolio, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Managers accept the world as it is; movement starters push the boundaries to make it more just, compassionate, and even joyful. We all need to decide: Are we managers or movement starters?

Jennifer Dulski, the head of Groups at Facebook, and former president of Change.org, explains how you can turn your mission into a movement that creates change--whether you're at a startup or a political campaign, at a Fortune 500 company or a local community group, or an intern or a CEO. Anyone can spark change if they believe in the power of taking action, no matter where, or how small, they start.

Dulski explains how to create a clear vision, inspire supporters, persuade decision makers, navigate criticism, and more. She pairs her own experience as a startup founder, tech executive, and social change leader with powerful stories of movement leaders from both business and activism.

Our world needs movement starters more than ever. Packed with practical advice and the inspiring true stories of movement starters from all walks of life, Purposeful will empower you to start your own movement and make your mark on the world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jennifer Dulski is the head of Groups and Community at Facebook. She has more than 15 years of experience at successful startups and big-brand internet companies, including as a business unit leader at Yahoo! and as CEO of The Dealmap, which was acquired by Google in 2011. She was most recently president and COO of Change.org. Dulski writes about leadership, management and entrepreneurship for LinkedIn Influencers, Fortune, Huffington Post, and other media outlets.

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1

Be Purposeful

Defining movements

Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference has never tried to fall asleep with a mosquito in the room.

-Christine Todd Whitman, paraphrasing a quote attributed to the Dalai Lama

This book is about how ordinary people make extraordinary change. It's not about politicians or CEOs of large companies who are already bestowed with enormous power and responsibility. It's about how your teammates, your neighbors, and you yourself can mobilize the people around you to bring your visions to life. So how does that happen?

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Five minutes after nineteen-year-old Manal Rostom switched seats with her cousin on a bus from Cairo to the Red Sea, the bus blew a tire and swerved into the desert, rolling over three times. Manal was okay, but her cousin, Mohammed, was instantly paralyzed. He died three weeks later. This shook Manal to her core. Her faith helped her cope with her grief and trauma, and though she had been only moderately religious before the accident, the experience strengthened her relationship to Islam. Two years later, although it wasnÕt necessarily expected by her family, Manal decided to wear the hijab, a traditional Muslim head covering. ÒIt was a way to say thank you to God,Ó she told me, Òfor giving me a second chance to live.Ó

Manal wore the hijab for the next fourteen years. While she faced some criticism from Westerners who were either unfamiliar with the hijab or believe it is oppressive to women, she generally felt accepted in Egypt and Kuwait. And then something changed. More and more women she knew stopped wearing the hijab, anti-hijab articles started appearing in the media, and in Dubai, where she lived, Muslim women in hijab faced criticism and were not allowed into some public spaces. Manal didn't judge others negatively for choosing not to wear the hijab, but she felt that for herself and many other women, wearing the hijab provided a sense of connection to their faith. "I had a moment of epiphany," she said. "If I was to give in and just follow the crowd, then how would anything change? I felt like a dead fish who was just going to 'go with the flow,' but then I decided I wanted to go against the current. I wasn't a dead fish."

In 2014, Manal started a community of women to support each other through a group on Facebook called "Surviving Hijab," a name she chose because that's what she felt she was trying to do. That night in April, she invited eighty women, mainly her friends and family, into the group. When she woke up, she found that the group already had five hundred members. Within months, the community had grown to more than forty thousand women who supported and encouraged one another to be proud of wearing the hijab. Today, just three years later, Surviving Hijab is nearing five hundred thousand women from around the world and clearly fills a need for hijabi women to have a supportive community. Manal's desire to take action has created a movement.

With so many supporters behind her, Manal knew that more was possible. In addition to her job at a pharmaceutical company and her role leading this community, Manal is also an athlete-an avid runner. She faces even more criticism as a hijabi athlete, with people constantly asking her things like, "Won't you be hot running in all those layers?" She is often the only hijabi runner in races she competes in, and has seen it as an opportunity to help reduce stereotypes of Muslim women. But she wanted to do more. On the recommendation of a friend, and with the support of all the women in Surviving Hijab behind her, Manal wrote a letter to Tom Woolf, the head coach for Nike in the Middle East, titled "Nike Middle East-Veiled Women Runners. :)" In it, she described her community of women and how she wanted to empower them to be active and do sports, even in the hijab. "The reason why I'm contacting you is because I have noticed that all pics featuring the Nike Club runners have no veiled women in them!" she wrote. "It's the Middle East, shouldn't we have some?" When she hit send, she was terrified.

But her terror was unjustified. Not only did Tom reply, he said, "Thank you for your email. Its timing is perfect and I have been having similar conversations with the Nike team here. How are you set to meet . . . at three p.m. tomorrow?" Of course, Manal agreed. And just two months later, in January 2015, Manal became the first hijabi woman featured in a Nike ad campaign. In March 2015, Nike invited Manal to become the first coach of an all-women's running club in Dubai. And finally, in March 2017, Manal was invited to Nike headquarters in Dubai for a big surprise-the company announcing Nike Pro Hijab-a line of athletic wear for hijabi women that would launch in early 2018. When she heard the news, Manal says she broke down in tears for every struggle that she'd read about on Surviving Hijab. "It was magical," she told me. "It was the first time that a multinational brand said they would cater to this segment of Muslim women. That swoosh gives us power."

Nike highlights on its website how Manal and other Muslim female athletes tested prototypes of the product for features like fit and breathability and also gave important cultural feedback, like the fact that it had to be completely opaque. And though Nike was not the first company to make a hijab for Muslim women athletes, having such a big brand behind her gave Manal an enormous sense of accomplishment. She felt that she and others in Nike Pro Hijab gear could be role models for young girls, who would now see that it's possible to both support your faith and achieve all that you want to do in the world. Manal learned that shared purpose can help a community overcome stereotypes and drive change.

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Neil Grimmer still describes himself as a misfit and a punk rocker. Though he has held senior positions at IDEO and Clif Bar, his early life as an artist and as a musician in a punk band plays a huge role in informing who he is today. And when Neil became a dad, it was the misfit in him-the questioner of authority-who rebelled against the options available to parents to feed their children. There were no organic baby foods on the market, so Neil and his wife, Tana Johnson, cooked their own baby food. As two working parents with a toddler and a newborn, they were knee-deep in caring for their kids, often staying up late at night to cook baby food and pack healthy lunches for their older daughter in daycare. After ten oÕclock one night, while they were pureeing the Òvegetable du jour,Ó Neil thought, ÒThere has to be a better way. There must be a way for working parents to feed their kids healthy food, without having that trade-off between convenience and health.Ó He committed to find a solution that could fit into busy parentsÕ lives. With that inspiration, Neil used his creative and entrepreneurial spirit to create Plum Organics-a company built to help parents raise healthy kids with healthy food.

That purpose informed every aspect of the company-from product creation to team building and hiring to how they ran their weekly meetings-and helped them get through even difficult times. It wasn't always easy; Neil told me how he and his cofounder, Sheryl O'Loughlin, sometimes felt as if they were on an island surrounded by sharks. They had never started a company and were learning on the job. It felt as though there were many hazards, from which investors to work with to how to run manufacturing, and later to personal health issues that can arise from the stress of running a startup. They weren't sure whom they could trust. At the same time, the company's clear purpose to help families be healthier allowed them to build a close, intimate connection with everyone who worked at the company, the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 073521137X
• ISBN 13: 9780735211377
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: M.E.G Cards & Gifts; 443000000000; paula@megcards.com; ; 48 Cloyfin Road; Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road; Coleraine; Londonderry; BT52 2NY; Irland