Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

May 19, 2011 · 11:24 pm

Amazing Women of Vision

ABI Women of Vision sign . ABI Women of Vision

I just got home from the inspiring Women of Vision awards event by the Anita Borg Institute. Huawei was a Gold Sponsor of this WOV and I have worked for months to arrange for 30 Huawei guests to attend from all over the world. Our Senior Vice President John Roese spoke during the opening reception. I should not be staying up to blog about this because I am teaching the first TechWomen Mentor Workshop starting early tomorrow morning but WOV is so exciting, I need to share it.

Today’s award winners were

  • Leadership Award: Chieko Asakawa, Ph.D., IBM Fellow, IBM Research – Tokyo
  • Innovation Award:  Mary Lou Jepsen, Ph.D., CEO, Pixel Qi
  • Social Impact Award: Karen Panetta, Ph.D., Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tufts University

Each winner was impressive in her own way. Each has overcome much to make an admirable change in the technical world. Wow.  Going to an ABI event is always worthwhile, if for no other reason than to talk with the remarkable technical contributors in the audience.  The Women of Vision event is particularly excellent because of the powerful story of each award winner.  I am glad my husband John Plocher could attend the event this year.  He has heard me talk about WOV for years.

John Roese Huawei . Chieko Asakawa IBM
Mary Lou Jepsen Pixel Qi, . Karen Panetta Tufts University

Images Copyright 2011 Katy Dickinson

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May 18, 2011 · 9:14 pm

San Francisco from the Roof

I was born and raised in San Francisco but for the last 30 years I have worked in the Silicon Valley. While consulting on the TechWomen mentoring program, I have occasionally driven north to S.F. for meetings with the Institute of International Education. IIE’s offices are in a building just up the hill from both Chinatown’s Lion Gate, and my favorite French bistro, Cafe de la Presse in the always-interesting Hotel Triton. The view from the roof terrace is amazing!

San Francisco roof view . San Francisco roof view

San Francisco roof view

Images by Katy Dickinson Copyright 2011

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March 8, 2011 · 10:13 am

International Women’s Day, TechWomen

I just talked with my husband by Skype at midnight his time, morning my time. He is in Shenzhen China on a business trip, and I am in San Jose California. John said that about about 9 pm, there were celebratory explosions in the street outside his hotel, presumably to honor International Women’s Day. In 2007, I blogged about enjoying Women’s Day in India. John and I both work for Huawei. It will be interesting to see how our China-based company celebrates International Women’s Day today at the R&D center in Santa Clara.

I am hoping that in honor of the day, we will see even more potential mentors applying for the TechWomen mentoring program. TechWomen will pair women in Silicon Valley with their counterparts in the Middle East and North Africa for a professional mentorship and exchange program at leading technology companies in June 2011. If you are a qualified mentor, please apply using the form on http://www.techwomen.org/get-involved/. TechWomen is funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE), and implemented in partnership with the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology (ABI).

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October 9, 2010 · 10:45 pm

Secretary Clinton Speaks on Mentoring

I was very impressed with the remarks given by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at Fortune’s “12th Annual Most Powerful Women Summit” on 6 October 2010 in Washington D.C.   Her powerful support for mentoring, particularly for women and girls, was inspiring.  The full text of her talk is on the blog secretaryclinton.wordpress.com. One passage of Secretary Clinton’s speech that I found moving:

I am a firm believer in the power of mentoring. There are women and girls in our country and around the world who have the talent, the intellect, the drive to succeed, but who lack the support. I have become convinced that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. And you never know when what you do or say can open that door to opportunity for someone who is ready to walk through it, but could not get under, around, or over it without your help. And still in too many places, support for women is in short supply. But through mentoring, we can help meet that need. And it’s low-cost, high-impact, and deeply rewarding.

I was happy that in her 6 October speech, Secretary Clinton talked about the new TechWomen Program. Telle Whitney of the Anita Borg Institute (ABI) recently announced at the 10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing that the TechWomen mentoring initiative will be administered by the Institute of International Education and its West Coast Center in San Francisco, in partnership with ABI. Secretary Clinton said:

Now, we are just beginning a new initiative called TechWomen that I announced in April during the President’s Entrepreneurship Summit here in Washington. Through TechWomen, we will match women in Muslim-majority countries with women working in tech companies here in the U.S. And we will send American mentors to their protégés’ countries to engage on a wider scale with the people there. We obviously want to harness one of America’s great strengths – our excellence in technology and innovation – and use it to build effective and lasting partnerships with rising women leaders in Muslim countries. And I invite you to participate in that.

As a member of the Advisory Board of ABI for over five years, I am so pleased that ABI is able to partner in the administration of the TechWomen Program.

Two publications about mentoring which I recommend to those who want to know more about this powerful tool for change:

Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009 By Katy Dickinson, Tanya Jankot, and Helen Gracon (Sun Laboratories Technical Report TR-2009-185), 2009

Intelligent Mentoring: How IBM Creates Value through People, Knowledge, and Relationships By Audrey J. Murrell, Sheila Forte-Trammell, Diana A. Bing (IBM Press), 2008

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June 4, 2010 · 1:56 pm

Summit on Women and IT in Portland

Recently, I participated in the fascinating National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) annual Summit on Women and IT, in Portland, Oregon. A year ago, I wrote a blog entry called Women in IT: Think Globally, Act Locally about a similar NCWIT event. I learn so much and meet such interesting people through NCWIT!

This year, I lead a table discussion on “Visibility for Women as Great Technical Thinkers” and I was also part of a panel called “Evaluating What We Do: Challenges and Solutions”. For the panel, I presented data, analysis, and methods from my 2009 Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009 Technical Report. Our panel moderator was Dr. Wendy DuBow (NCWIT Research Scientist). The other panelists were Tricia Berry (Director of both the Women in Engineering Program (WEP) and the Texas Girls Collaborative Project (TxGCP) at The University of Texas at Austin), and Dr. Debra Richardson (Dean of Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine).

Because of another eruption of Iceland’s volcano, a speaker from Scotland could not attend. The last-minute replacement speaker was Brian Nosek Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia and Project Implicit (a collaboration of the University of Virginia, Harvard University, and the University of Washington). Dr. Nosek gave an impressive and surprising presentation on “Mind Bugs – the Ordinary Origins of Bias”. Other presentations which were memorable included a panel on Women in Open Source and a presentation on the University of Michigan’s “Approach to Increasing Faculty Diversity”.

I was pleased to be able to see more of Portland. (Yes, it rained every day.) I enjoyed riding their excellent public transit system and saw Portlandia at last. I first heard about this huge copper statue during a lecture by Tom Wolfe in 1980. I also saw the umbrella man (“Allow Me” sculpture), Powell’s City of Books, and a variety of moose heads (one of which had its own flying squirrel companion).

On a street near Powell’s,  there was a delightfully peculiar set of objects: a concrete chair painted bright pink next to a tiny plastic horse carefully tied with a steel cable to an iron ring set into the street curb.  The unexplained arrangement somehow seemed a very-Portland.

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Images Copyright 2010 Katy Dickinson

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January 29, 2010 · 1:49 pm

Goodbye Sun – It’s Been a Great Ride!

My last blog post at http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog/:

I have been laid off by Sun-Oracle. It has been a wonderful 25 years!

I joined a relatively-unknown startup three years before it went public. I enjoyed working with some of the greatest Engineers on Earth and together we made Sun a success which changed the world. I had a splendid ride. I worked for Sun since 1984 in Engineering, Marketing, Quality, Operations, Legal, Standards, Strategy, and finally for the Chief Technologist’s Organization and Sun Labs. I am looking forward to the next adventure.

I hope that the SEED worldwide mentoring program participants, mentors, and managers will create new programs and opportunities in all of the new places they will go. For those who stay with Sun-Oracle: keep contact and support each other. There is nothing like SEED now at Oracle. Consider creating it, locally or globally. It will take too much time and an unreasonable amount of work but it will be worth it. It has been an honor and privilege to create this worldwide Engineering community and to work with such inspiring people. I hope you will continue to work with each other and with me. Please connect with me on LinkedIn and Facebook.

I have two wonderful kids who have grown up running around at Sun. Jessica is now a Junior at CMU (in Qatar for a Semester at CMU-Q) and Paul is in High School. Sun is their lifetime context for work. My husband, John Plocher and I met at Sun and I were lucky enough to work at Sun together for 17 years.

2005-2010 http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog/ entries and new additions are now available here at https://katysblog.wordpress.com/.

I welcome your job recommendations. Your support is always appreciated.

How to Find Katy Dickinson After 29 January 2010

Katy Dickinson Process Queen 2006 Poster, used with permission

Image Copyright 2006 Sun Microsystems, Used with Permission

Blog entry by Katy Dickinson

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January 26, 2010 · 11:09 pm

Business Process Architecture: What Project Managers Need to Know

As I wrote on 13 January 2010 in Planning Poker and SEED (Estimating and Rating Tools), I recently attended an interesting meeting of the PM PM SIG. They kindly asked me to return to talk tomorrow at their 7:00 am meeting on the topic of “Business Process Architecture: What Project Managers Need to Know”. This talk is based on my 6 January 2010 Process Success Measures material.

I included my two favorite process quotes:

  • Lawes are ordained as rules of vertuous and sociall living, and not to be snares to trap your good subjects: and therefore the lawe must be interpreted according to the meaning, and not to the literall sense.
    – King James I, England, 1604
  • If rules cannot or ought not to be enforced, they should not exist.
    – “Standard Code” for US Trains, 1899

You can see my presentation slides (including Peanut Butter Robot instructions and a list of useful tools) at:

Blog entry by Katy Dickinson

28 March 2014 and 6 January 2017 – Links were updated

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