This is not one of those posts like, “how do you break down a complex idea like supply chain and explain it so a 2-year-old can understand it.”  This is the story of how I actually tried to explain the concept of a supply chain to babyDiva, who is now 2 1/2.

babyDiva is obsessed with trucks and construction right now.  On our way to school each morning, we discuss the trucks and construction sites we see in great detail.  “That an excavator or a mini-excavator?” “Why that bulldozer not have tracks?” Etc.

Earlier this week, a local restaurant in our neighborhood was receiving a delivery.

It was very exciting.

“Look!  Delivery truck!”
“You’re right, that is a delivery truck.”
“What truck delivery?”
“Water, I think, maybe some juice too.”
“Who those people?”

She was asking about the pictures of the people on the truck.

“Well honey, those might be the people who put the water in the bottles.”
“Oh, those people in the truck?”
“Well, no, it’s just pictures of them.”
“Those people driving the truck?”
“Well, no, the people who drive the truck might be different from the people who put the water in the bottles.”
“Oh, one people put water in bottles, then one people drive truck?”
“Well, actually there might be people who bring the bottles from the factory to a center, then someone else who brings the bottles to a restaurant.”

(Pause.)

“Those people like juice, too?”
“Yes, honey, those people probably like juice.”

“I like juice.”

And that was the end of Supply Chain 101.

It’s weird, synchronicity. Upon my return to work after maternity leave I have found an uncanny similarity between the challenges at home and those at work.

In both cases, I am in over my head taking on new challenges. At home, it’s a second child (an actual living breathing human being, another one!) and at work it’s demand generation and marketing strategy.

In both cases, I’ve had well-meaning people nod sympathetically at what I’m taking on and say, in a kind of parallel unison, “Well, it’s one of those fake-it-til-you-make-it situations, right?”

WRONG.

I don’t believe in “fake it ‘til you make it.” I believe in actually doing it, from day one, knowing I’m going to make some mistakes along the way.

There’s some science behind FITYMI: A 2010 study demonstrated higher confidence and cortisol levels from people using “power positioning” that physically positioned them as seeming more confident. (While this study wasn’t able to be replicated, the core idea, that people felt more confident, was.)

But this idea that we are supposed to “act the part” until we are the part doesn’t sit well with me.  It’s like a self-imposed impostor syndrome – and who needs that?.

I’m not pretending to be miniDivo’s mom – I am actually his mom.  And I’m not pretending to run demand generation – I am actually running demand generation.  I’m learning what miniDivo’s disposition is like, what soothes him, what upsets him; I’m learning how to allocate budget across demand gen tactics and understand the reporting that comes back.

I’m not faking these things – I’m doing them.  Just not at 100% because I don’t know how to…yet. If I’m faking it, I’m not asking enough questions, of myself or of others.  I’m much better off feeling like “I’m doing this for real, I’m not faking it, but I’m also not bad at it, I’m still learning.” I think it’s better for others around me to think that about how I’m doing too.

Why would I hide from my family and friends that adjusting to a second baby is HARD?  And why would I hide from my colleagues that I am doing things I’ve never done before and it’s going to be a little bumpy for everyone?  Well, those are rhetorical questions, I’d hide those things if I was ashamed, or embarrassed.  But I’m not, I just want to get better at them.

Brene Brown has researched and written extensively on vulnerability.  My favorite story about her is as follows:

“I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country — everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, “Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. We’d like you to come in and speak. We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention vulnerability or shame.”

“What would you like for me to talk about?” There are three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change.

So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”

And that’s where I am.  I’m making it without faking it.

This whole thing about women and girls and technology and achievement and how we talk about all of it – it’s real.

Just last week I was talking to a young woman about her post-college job search.  “There are some companies I’m interested in but their online job descriptions say that I need 2+ years of experience.  I don’t have that so I’m not applying.”

And I remember being that girl.  Thinking, “gosh, these companies must get a lot of applications, and I’m sure they discard the ones that don’t meet their published guidelines right away.”  But being on the other side now, I know that’s not how it works.  I know that someone graduating from a top school with two summers of real internship experience would at least be worth a phone interview.

I also know (being a hiring manager) that men don’t have the same reaction to job descriptions They don’t think “I don’t have this one qualification,”  they think, “I have all these other qualifications.” It’s a real thing – HBR even wrote up a study on it.

Then the other night I gave babyDiva a new toy.  It had platforms that snapped together, and gears you put on the platforms, and she had a great time figuring out how it worked.  She took to calling the platforms “tracks” and kept furrowing her brow and muttering how “this track needs to go with this track” with the seriousness of a two-and-half-year-old.

When it came time to clean up, she put the pieces away, then looked carefully at the box. “There girls on here?”  she said.

She was asking if there were pictures of girls on the box.  As in, “is this a toy girls play with?”

I tried to remain calm. “Are you asking if girls play with this?  Sure!  This toy is for everyone.  Did you like it?” I said.  But inside I was scared.  I was worried.  How is it that my two-and-a-half year old was already picking up the message that this toy might not be for her. I work in tech – it made me feel like Peggy Orenstein, acclaimed feminist author of, among other books, Cinderella Ate My Daughter.  We praise babyDiva for being strong as much as we do her appearance, she has tons of building toys and truck books.  How was this categorization already going on in her head?

Well, lesson one in parenting is that you can’t control your kid’s experience. Still, I was disturbed by her question. Much as I was disturbed by my young friend’s inclination not to apply for the jobs she didn’t meet the requirements for.

How do we change this?  How do we build young women so they know they’re allowed to apply for jobs that they don’t fit 100%?  How do we build young girls so they know they can play with any toys they like?

I with this post ended with a grand solution; but I don’t know how to solve this.  I just know I have to do everything in my power to make it different for the women around me.

I worked at Dell from 2004 to 2013, in storage sales and storage marketing, which makes me about as qualified as anyone to comment on the news today. There’s plenty of great financial and strategic analysis available in your favorite publication, so here’s more of a personal view of the news.

Having lived through the days of Dell’s reselling and OEMing EMC products, to the acquisition of EqualLogic which weakened the Dell-EMC relationship, to the acquisition of Compellent which ended it, there’s no doubt that these companies have a storied history together.

When we were reselling EMC, this would be back in the 2005-2008(ish?) timeframe, there were many ways in which we were subservient to EMC.  We’d get deals done for them that their finance group didn’t want to extend credit for; we’d be happy for deals at 3 pts or 5 pts because we were focused on top line enterprise revenue. Most of our deals in the midmarket weren’t sold as strategic solution sales, they were just bundling our hardware with their hardware. It was a huge business to be sure – at one time 30-40% of all Clariion business was running through Dell. But it was a very small number of those that Dell really drove as our own. I should know – I did some of them.

When Dell bought EqualLogic, everyone thought it would be the beginning of the end – and it was. The management line was that there would be opportunities appropriate for each and as consultants, it was our job to recommend the best one. They made flow charts and sales aids and, as expected, it all went over like a lead balloon with the EMC sales teams. I’d work in the EMC office weekly, and increasingly, saw EMC reps working with other partners on deals. We managed to bring back some semblance of partnership at the field level, but with significant challenges around margins, renewals, and account control.

That lead balloon finally thunked down when we acquired Compellent. Within a few quarters, our relationship had ended and Dell struggled (and I’d say succeeded) in standing on our own two feet to sell enterprise server and storage solutions.  We learned to work with the channel communities we had inherited from our acquisitions.  We never would have succeeded in any of that with EMC looking over our shoulder. But we struggled with products that were more elegantly designed but with less mass appeal, especially upmarket.

So fast forward – and here we are today. Dell has purchased EMC and the companies and sales forces and partners and customers have to figure out what all that means. There was a time when Dell and EMC were both flashy, successful companies – Dell with an innovative supply chain advantage and EMC with best-of-breed hardware. And now they both need to be reinvented in an age of AWS dominating, Pure Storage and Nimble IPOing, IBM selling off their server business, and HP breaking up their business.

Now for the lightning round.

What happens to Dell’s storage lines? I spent years – literally – selling and marketing EqualLogic and Compellent. I positioned them against EMC in numerous ways – one-on-one to customers, in marketing materials, and in training sales orgs. This was after years of selling Dell’s OEM EMC line. So I’m very familiar with both. There are ways in which Dell’s products are significantly better technologies architecturally. And then advantages to EMC’s products, most notably more complete product sets and interoperability. All that said, I think EMC’s lines will likely dominate. They have more market share, more respect, and more than a small but exceedingly loyal customer base. It’s one of those cases, where the academically “right” answer to solving business problems isn’t necessarily the one that wins.  It’s mind-boggling to think that the ~$1B spent on each of EqualLogic and Compellent is 1/67th the size of this purchase.

Is this the best time for Dell to purchase EMC? It’s not a bad time. Had the companies merged sooner, however, they would be better positioned. The time and energy they’ve put into fighting each other over the past few years could have been put to better use innovating as a single entity – EMC’s R&D teams are world-class, and Dell’s ability to distribute technology widely to a broad audience is unmatched.

Will the cultures mesh? It probably doesn’t matter to the long term success of the sale, although it may feel bad to lots of employees for a while, and they may lose some great people as casualties to the deal. I think Dell’s culture is a little softer and friendlier than EMC’s, but they are both laden with bureaucracy and politics. Michael (as we called him) is a good leader, and has proven his ability to execute major financial and strategy moves (see, “private, taking my company”). There is a lot of overlap in the companies, which will lead to a lot of political positioning so I imagine it will be a long time before it feels like a single company.

Are you glad you’re out of the fray? Yes, mostly. The impact that I’ll be able to make in my current role and company is significantly bigger (by orders of magnitude) than what I would have been able to do at EMCell. Especially in a time of change like they are about to undertake, when it can be even harder to actually get anything done. But there’s something special about an underdog like Dell, led by an underdog like (Michael) Dell, pulling off a coup like this.

Stay tuned, I’m sure there’s lots more to come.

Marissa Mayer has provided me with a lot of air cover over the years.

She had her first baby right around when I told my manager I was pregnant with my first child, then announced being pregnant with twins recently, just when I came back from maternity leave with my second child.

Both times, it felt easier to talk about being pregnant, being on maternity leave, and coming back as a working mom because of her.  The concepts around being a working mom were in the public discourse, they were top of mind.

There’s a lot of criticism around her decision to return to work so quickly after her children, both times.  Her reported two weeks seems, to any “normal” working mom without a staff of thousands, unreasonably short.  She’s been accused of setting a bad example by going back to work a few weeks after giving birth.

No way.

She’s setting a great example.  A great example of how work-life balance can work.  In her case, being named CEO of Yahoo means that ‘work’ tipped the scales over ‘life’ right then.  She’s saying, “I can be a powerful woman and a mom at the same time.”  For all sorts of reasons the world hates that idea.  But I love it.

Even more, I love that her decisions are causing people to talk about all this.  I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve come back from both of my maternity leaves to a team that believed I was coming back and gave me more responsibility.  But I know myriad women who feel like having had children set them back on their careers, independent of what they would have wanted.

The Byzantine set of laws around parental leave and equality at work have left employers afraid to ask a woman if she is pregnant.  Unable to talk to a woman about work while she’s on leave. Scared to ask about a woman’s plans.  I know why these laws exist and I believe they protect women.  But they also hurt women.  They hurt women by not having childbearing and its associated logistics an audible part of the discourse.

These laws and rules make it hard to make a plan like “I’d like to take 6 week off entirely, except for the one video I didn’t have a chance to edit before I left, then be on email lightly for 5 more weeks, then start coming in to the office once a week for a few hours for 3 more weeks, then come in for half-days for a week before returning full time except for when I have daycare drop off (when I’ll be a little late) pick up (when I have to leave a little early), my kid has pinkeye (when you don’t want me to come in anyway) the Jewish holidays in September (a day off for each) and the 60 minutes each workday when I have to express breastmilk, which I’ll do for 3-9 months depending on how soon it makes me want to jump off a bridge.”  But that’s a real life plan.

I don’t think most women should be forced to take only two weeks of maternity leave prior to returning to work.  I wasn’t in physical or emotional shape to do that.  And I think that’s only reasonable to do if you have full-time help who follows you around including overnight, which most of us can’t afford.  And even then, it may not be reasonable physically or emotionally.  But it was for Mayer.  And my eagerness to return to work after the regulated 12 weeks seemed rushed for other people.  It’s pretty personal what works for whom.

People keep saying, “but twins, so different from single babies, she doesn’t know what she’s in for,” but you know what?  She’s an adult with extraordinary access to tools that would enable her to find information (see what I did there?).  She is going in eyes-wide-open.  And she may change her mind once the babies arrive.  But she may decide her plan will work fine.

What’s important is that people are talking about it.  Her right to privacy notwithstanding (because she did choose to be CEO of a publicly-traded company), her decisions are opening a long-needed conversation around how to support women who want to have high-powered positions but also want to have families.

And when you all figure it out, please put the answer in the comments.  Because I would like the recipe for that.

I’m terrible at predictions.  I know a lot of people who can look at the state of an industry and predict, with only slightly more confidence than accuracy, the future.  I’ve never been one of those people.

But as an avid user of Uber, and an interested observer of Bridj, I can make my first prediction: these two companies are solving an incredibly similar problem.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know what Uber is – the on-demand private ride service that acts as an alternative to hailing a taxi.

Perhaps you are not as familiar with Bridj – a private bus service that began about a year ago, serving routes in Boston not otherwise well served by public transportation.  Brookline to Kendall Sq., for example.

The thing is, Uber just introduced UberPool in Boston, which is just like Uber – except you share your ride with someone else who is going roughly where you are going.  You get a discount and a new friend.

And Bridj doesn’t seem to have fixed routes as much as parts of the city it drives between, as determined by where people request rides.

So they seem to be trying to solve the same problem: How to get multiple people where they want to go as efficiently as possible, in a less permanent way than the transit system.

There’s been a lot of discussion about how Uber is part of the on-demand economy – that it will eventually begin to converge with services like InstaCart, Google Express, Amazon Prime Now, and my personal favorite, Favor (the only way I’ve found to get my favorite restaurant, Life Alive, to deliver to the South End).  But I think they are also trying to solve an additional problem – mass people movement.

The criticisms against Uber are familiar to most people – undercutting the taxi industry, taking jobs away from taxi drivers, etc.  I don’t buy those – I haven’t had Uber drivers who didn’t also need the money – it’s creating jobs for people too.  And the taxi industry in Boston is messed up – you can’t call a cab and have it show up reliably, you can’t always hail them, and the credit card machines are “broken” most of the time.

But Bridj nags at me in a different way – it seems to be taking money away from the public transportation system, in a way that can adversely affect the people who need it most.  If all the affluent people in Boston begin taking private busses, what happens to MBTA revenue necessary to keep public busses running?  You actually can get from Brookline to Kendall via the CT2 bus.  It’s just that affluent people in Boston don’t seem to like the bus.

All that aside, the problem they are both trying to solve is interesting.  It’s mathematically complex to solve perfectly, and still a good logistical challenge to solve imperfectly.  I’ll be keeping my eye on this.

The Sunday night prior to returning to work after maternity leave is horrible.

Maternity leave is weird.  I found it to be a month of adjusting to the disruptive disregulating force that is a newborn, followed by a month of Netflix, followed by a month of waiting for it to be over.  I felt like I was living someone else’s life – someone who chooses to be home with a child.

It’s a lot of caretaking.  It’s endless hours of diapers, feeding, diapers, rocking, diapers, feeding, and more diapers.  It’s small victories (a 45-minute nap in his crib) and defeats (another laundry debacle.)  It’s worrying about breastmilk and rashes and sleeping patterns and the shape of his skull.

It’s a lot of changes to my body and my person – hormones and breastfeeding and healing, both physically and mentally.  It takes longer than I had remembered.

It’s also a massive adjustment period for the entire family – babyDiva (who is more like bigGIrlDiva now) took to miniDivo immediately – she couldn’t have been sweeter or more attentive – “him needs pacifier” “him cold, him need blanket” “I turn on his white noise?” “‘s’okay Micah, we’re coming…!”  But my own adjustment to being two creatures’ mom was not as smooth.

But parts of leave were lovely, too.  miniDivo was small enough that I could put him in a carrier or stroller and get out and do things – like walk around the city, meet friends for lunch, tour the Taza Chocolate factory, and see the Patriots at training camp!  I formed and grew wonderful friendships this summer.

And miniDivo is a great little guy. He’s content, smiles easily, and sleeps well.  He’s happy swatting at his toys.  I give it a week until he reliably sucks his thumb.

On extremely hot or rainy days, I set the standard for binge-watching television. If this kid doesn’t grow up to flip houses, I’ll be very surprised.  Amazon Prime Video and Netflix kept me busy too.

Our family of four got out lots of weekends to parks, farms, and even a trip to the Cape.  We had many family members visit to help out and spend time with us.

But now it’s back to work.  Back to “real life” – which is the life I want and the life I choose.  A life of technology marketing and startup challenges, of professional growth.  I am fortunate to have a good job to be returning to, with broadening responsibilities, at a company with colleagues and management that respected my time off but eagerly await my return.  And I am eager to get back – to figure out what has changed in the past 3 months, what deals have closed, what initiatives have begun, and feel out the subtleties of culture that have changed over the summer.

I said that maternity leave is weird.  It’s incredibly weird to be out of work for 3 months, then return and pick right up again.  It’s like being at a water station in the middle of a race, taking a break, watching people run by, and then starting up again.  The team will be at VMworld this week, and come back next week energized and excited from a shared experience, while I will still be figuring out how to do this.

miniDivo will go the same daycare babyDivo did/does, so that is all set.  But I wish it were October 1 already.  I wish I could skip the next few weeks of figuring out how we manage daycare drop off and pick up, nightly routines, pumping and bottles, while settling back in to work and just find the “new normal” already.

So Sunday Night Blues it is.  Epic Sunday Night Blues.

Last year, after meticulous research, and extensive hemming and hawing, I bought a tablet.  I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1″.

And I’ve kind of hated it since it arrived.

I tried to like it.  I love my phone (Nexus 5, previously a Samsung S2), and believe in Android.  I downloaded all my favorite apps, set up my background picture, and lounged on the couch, waiting for the magic.

Except I think I’m not a tablet person.

I love using my phone – shopping on Amazon, reading articles in Feedly and Pocket, and using Gmail, Facebook and Twitter.  I play some games and do a lot of reading.

But I haven’t taken to the tablet.  I don’t like not having a physical keyboard, and I find that when I am using a device the size of the tablet, I expect it to behave like a desktop.  It’s like the difficulty I had when switching from Windows to Mac (not having the right buttons or control over the right things), but an order of magnitude worse.

I knew I didn’t like the tablet from the get-go, but I figured when I was on maternity leave I’d use it a lot.  I knew that as a person I hate new things, particularly new technology, so I didn’t return it right away.  I figured I’d want a device to browse on one-handedly, while tending to miniDivo on the other hand.  Or that I’d just find it convenient.

I don’t.  I use my phone for most things, and my MacBook for writing longer missives, or if a page doesn’t work well on mobile.

I’m curious what an Android laptop would feel like – maybe that will be my next acquisition.

I’m half way through my maternity leave.  MiniDivo is doing great, and the rest of us are also happily adjusting to the “new normal.”

Being away from my job gives me a chance to daydream.  Believe you me I am not daydreaming about being home permanently with kids.  That life is not for me.  But there are several other careers I can imagine having had in another life.  Not like “movie star” or “olympian” but actual normal jobs that normal people have that I know some other Sheryl in some other universe is doing right now.

1. Traffic Engineer.  Being out and about in the city all day, I get to see a lot of traffic flow and intersections.  The best intersection is the one at Cambridge St and Mass Ave in Harvard Square where the left lane can turn right and the right lane can turn left.  I find that intersection completely aesthetically awesome and clever.  I also can tell you about all sorts of walk signs that blink at the wrong time (false negatives, not false positives, but still).  I actually know a friend of a friend who has this job and I swear I’d love it.

2. Forensic Accountant.  There is no part of me that could be a detective or a police officer or even a crime lab tech.  But I could totally hunt through hundreds of pages (screens?) of financial data to track what happened to different transactions and where the money went.  The idea that the answer is there but someone has to find it is so appealing to me.  I’d be great at finding anomalies and missing money.

3. Math Teacher.  When I was in high school, my friends all though I was going to become a math teacher.  I love explaining how things work and teaching people how to figure it out themselves.  (I had a pretty good tutoring run in high school.)  I loved math – and I was lazy.  I used to derive the quadratic formula during exams rather than memorize it.

4. PhD in Theoretical Computer Science.  I’m not saying that I could have gotten in to a PhD program or that I would have finished it, but I am saying that for the final exam in my theoretical computer science class in college I finished in 25 minutes when everyone else took 3 hours.  I figured that I either totally got it or totally blew it.  It was the former.  Figuring out how a Turing machine would process a certain problem or how to reduce different problems to be like (or unlike) Traveling Salesperson was just a logical extension of the brain teasers I had been doing my entire childhood.  I may have been the only person who thought that class was “fun.”

Never fear, I’m not jumping off the Product Marketing ship anytime soon.  Just doing some daydreaming.  As Gavin DeGraw sings, “I don’t want to be anything other than me.”

I’ve taken a little hiatus from blogging while on maternity leave.  More on that in a future post but the TL;DR version is that it’s a lot of diapers, figuring out strategic times and places to sleep, and too much laundry.  MiniDivo is doing great – and babyDiva is an attentive big sister.

But I did notice something about online purchases (of which we make quite a few) that seemed worthy of comment.

Impulse purchases used to be made in stores.  You went into Target or Whole Foods or somewhere else for a few items, but something caught your eye and suddenly you were pushing a full shopping cart out to the car.  Maybe your favorite sports drink was on sale or maybe you saw some throw pillows you had to have or maybe it was just that you realized you were short on toilet paper.

But impulse purchasing is done differently now.  When I need something at home – and that might be diapers, shout wipes, an Abby Cadabby doll, granola bars, face soap, ziploc bags, dog food, or vitamins (for example) – I open my Amazon app and order it.  Two days later it arrives.

I don’t keep a shopping list for the week and then on the way to Target think through which items I “really” need.

I don’t exhaustively search the places in our house where we store things and ensure that we “really” are out of said item.

And I don’t wait for things to be on sale or comparison shop.

I have the impulse to buy it and so I do.  So the game for the retailer of how to increase impulse sales is no longer about what merchandise to put on endcaps or in the checkout lane.  That’s good news for my wallet.  Rarely with online purchases do I actually buy a “suggested for you” item or have something catch my eye like it would in a brick and mortar store.

But the bad news for my wallet is that the retailer has made it as easy as possible for me to order: a simply navigable app, one-click purchasing, 2-day shipping, good return policy.  My credit card is saved so I barely even notice when I spend money.  That’s all bad news for my wallet.

Impulse purchases occur at home these days.  And for a sleep-deprived parent of an infant, they are quite common.