Dr Ward pointed me towards a great infographic from Women Who Tech that highlights a bunch of great statistics on women in the workforce, particularly in technology fields.

A few highlights:

• The average social gamer is a 43 year old woman.
• 11% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
• 28% of all students holding a BS in Computer Science are woman, and at Harvard this number looks more like 41%.
• In Fortune 500 companies that have at least three female directors saw at least a 66% increase in return on invested capital.
• Women are starting companies in the US at a rate 1.5 faster than that of the national average.

Aaron Sorkin ’83, screenwriter of the Social Network, used his particular blend of wit and principles to deliver a stirring commencement address for Syracuse University’s 158th graduation ceremony on Sunday, 13 May 2012.

Some of the more memorable quotes:

You’re going to fall down, but the world doesn’t care how many times, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up.”

You’re too good to think that people who disagree with you are your enemy, unless they went to Georgetown, in which case they suck.

You are a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people.

Your parents’ heads are exploding right now. They think they took you home from the maternity ward last month.

Once in a while you’ll succeed, most of the time you’ll fail. The circumstances will be beyond your control.

Decisions are made by those who show up.

We want to be able to earn a living doing what we love.

If you want a little insight into the man, this is easily one of the best interviews I’ve seen, from the office of Steven Colbert.

Part I

Part II

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Syracuse University’s Maxwell School today.  Her conversation with Maxwell School Dean James Steinberg is entitled “America and the World.”  Below is a transcript of the event.

MR. STEINBERG:  Well, Madam Secretary, welcome to Syracuse and Syracuse University.  When we worked together, you told me often how much you appreciated the affection you had for people here and for this community.  And I wanted to assure you, as you could tell from the reception here, the feeling is entirely mutual.  (Applause.)  On behalf of the chancellor and all of us, welcome.  It’s a great chance to have you here, and you can tell how much excitement there is.

I know you get a lot of questions and lot of opportunities to discuss the hotspots of the day, but I’m hoping today, in the time that we have, that we have a chance to reflect a little bit more broadly on some of the challenges and opportunities that you’ve faced as Secretary of State working with President Obama.  And I’ve had a chance to get a lot of questions and thoughts from our students and faculty coming into this, and some of the questions that I want to ask you come from them as well.

I want to begin though by asking you a bit about your first challenges on coming into the office.  You are probably as well qualified as anybody to be Secretary of State.  You’ve been the first lady.  You’ve been a senator.  You’ve seen a lot of these issues.  But what surprised you?  What were the biggest challenges you first faced coming into office?

SECRETARY CLINTON:  Well, first, Jim, let me tell you how delighted I am to be back here in Syracuse at the university in upstate New York and have a chance to see a lot of old friends but also to come to this extraordinary university.  I want to thank the chancellor, with whom I worked so closely when I was senator.  And I also want to forgive her for stealing you.  (Laughter.)

You were my deputy and we were facing a lot of tough issues together, but certainly I could only say multitudinous positive things about coming to Syracuse and living here with such an extraordinary quality of life.  And you and Shere, who is now so ably also serving the university, are deeply missed at the State Department and in Washington.  But I certainly have every reassurance and reason to believe that you are in the right place.  And I had a chance to meet with your class before coming here, and I greatly enjoyed that.

I think that trying to go back in time to January of 2009, if you remember the challenges that we were confronting, particularly the economic crisis, which had such severe impacts here at home but also around the world and had certainly affected the view that people around the world had of American leadership.

So coming into the office along with President Obama and the Administration, I was surprised at how much work we needed to do to reestablish American leadership, to reassure people that the United States would get through the economic crisis, that we would continue to provide leadership on the full range of issues that affect us as well as the rest of the world.

I hadn’t fully grasped how nervous people were until I began traveling in February of ’09 about what they could expect from us.  Because even when leaders and societies criticize the United States, there’s always, in my experience, a thread of concern about where we are and what we will do and whether we can continue to represent the values that we’ve stood for, and serve as an inspiration as well as a very strong presence.

So what surprised me most, Jim, was how much work we had to do in those early months to reestablish American leadership around the world.  And I think we’ve done that.  That doesn’t mean everybody agrees with us, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a lot of work to do, primarily here at home.  Because any leadership that we try to convey elsewhere has to be rooted in strength at home – economic strength, political strength.  But I think we’ve made the case in the last three-plus years that there may be difficult times ahead for the world, but the world will be well-served if American leadership remains as essential today as it has in the past.

MR. STEINBERG:  When you were at the nomination hearing, your first appearance before the Senate, you said to fulfill our responsibility to our children, to protect and defend our nation while honoring our values, we have to establish priorities.  You’ve been in it for over three years.  What do you see as the priorities?  And as Brittany Vira (ph), who’s one of my students, asked:  How would you like historians to look back in 50 years and say what were the priority challenges?

SECRETARY CLINTON:  Well, I must say that I believe in priorities and trying to set them and follow them.  What we found was that we needed a broader list of priorities than perhaps made sense in other times.  Because given the economic crisis – and I go back to that because it overhung everything we did – we could not really go forth and argue for American positions and American values if people thought that we were not going to remain a strong economy that could support that leadership.

So when we look back, I think reestablishing American leadership, having it once again be respected, appreciated, wanted, and having a list of priorities on our agenda that were both specific, like what we’re going to do in dealing with some of the crisis areas from Iran to North Korea and more general about the overarching global problem, like global climate change or nuclear proliferation and other weapons of mass destruction, we didn’t really have the luxury of being able to put some of those priorities to one side.  We had to try to deal simultaneously with a number of pressing issues, some very specific, some more general.

We often talk in the State Department about how we’re constantly having to juggle the urgent crisis, the immediate threat, and the long-term challenge all at the same time.  Because you can pick up a newspaper any day, you can see what’s in the headlines, but then you can go through the paper and find things that aren’t yet in the headlines that you know will be unless action is taken to prevent, and then you can also discern the trend lines – not the headlines, but the trend lines – of both threats and opportunities that you have to keep an eye on.  So we tried to create a sensible approach toward dealing with all of those in a prioritizing way.  But it was sometimes a rolling list of priorities.

MR. STEINBERG:  And as you tried to tackle that multiple challenge, you spent a lot of time thinking about the role of the State Department, the role of diplomacy.  You’ve initiated an attempt to kind of do the kind of planning that the Pentagon does to deal with the long term.  What do you think are the most important results that have come out of that process?  And how do you think the State Department’s going to change to meet these new challenges?

SECRETARY CLINTON:  Well, what Jim is referring to is that historically the Pentagon does a four-year planning process called the Quadrennial Defense Review, and it’s an excellent organizing tool, both for internal and external purposes.  So they run a process where the different services, the different elements of the Defense Department come together to try to hammer out what are our goals and objectives going to be for the next four years.

The State Department and USAID had never done anything like that.  We were a much more reactive agency.  If there was a crisis, then get the diplomats out the door.  If there’s a humanitarian disaster, then get the development experts out the door.  But in a time of constrained resources, which certainly this must be because of the budgetary pressures we face, I thought we were at a great disadvantage because we were not engaging in a planning process internally to set our own goals and objectives, and therefore we couldn’t explain it to the Congress or the public what is it we were trying to accomplish.

So I instituted the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, the QDDR. It was a quite intense and revealing process.  Why did we do things?  Well, because we’d always done those things.  But should we continue to do them, or should we be much tougher about how we define what we began calling smart power in this Administration at the State Department? How do we take stock of where we are and what we’re doing?  Do we have the right skill sets for the diplomats and the development experts that we send into the field?  How do we understand the role of diplomacy in a multilateral world?  It’s no longer just enough to tend to your own embassies.  How do we have some interconnectivity in region so that we had a better idea of what we were all working toward?  How do we have development that furthers America’s interests while also meeting the humanitarian needs of people?

So we asked all the hard questions.  We came up with some, I think, important conclusions.  I’ll give you just one example.  Energy diplomacy is key to our national security, not only in terms of securing the energy supplies that the United States needs at an affordable cost, but understanding the role that energy plays in nearly every other relationship we have in every region of the world.  It makes a difference if the Europeans are totally dependent upon Russian natural gas.  That’s makes a difference, because then they are going to be much less likely to feel comfortable cooperating with us or with fellow Europeans on certain actions that might undermine Russia’s lock on their energy.  It makes a difference if you’re trying to promote development in Afghanistan whether there’s a pipeline that could come from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan and into India, which we are currently trying to negotiate.

So anyway, we looked and said one of our big gaps is we don’t have enough energy diplomacy expertise.  So we created a new focus for that and a new bureau in the State Department.  We took people who already had some expertise but then recruited others.  We just finished negotiating an agreement that had taken many years to negotiate with Mexico to determine the trans-boundary responsibilities when you drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  And we all remember the terrible disaster of BP.  So there are just an enormous set of issues that are energy-related that have to go to our national security.

And then on the development side, if we can help countries that are discovering oil, and many African countries right now are – Ghana is going to start drilling offshore, Kenya has discovered oil and gas in the Savannas, Uganda is drilling near Lake Victoria.  You go down the list.  The natural resource curse is likely to mean that they will get rich and get more unstable and less equal in the distribution of the revenues from those resources, unless we and other likeminded nations can try to help them understand what it would mean for their future if they had a trust fund like Norway had, or a royalty scheme like Botswana had for their diamonds.  So we’re looking at ways of getting ahead of problems instead of just always playing catch-up.

MR. STEINBERG:  Staying on development for a second, obviously there’s a strong American humanitarian impulse, cares about the welfare of others, and yet lots of skepticism about how effective development assistance can be, the track record not as compelling as maybe one would like it to be.  And even more, people look around, they look at our problems at home, deficits at home, our students worried about their future jobs.  How do you make the case that this is obviously good to do, but necessary to do, given all the other demands for our resources?

SECRETARY CLINTON:  Well, I think that you will never get an argument from me that we have to pay a lot of attention to what we need to do here in our own country in order to get our economy producing good jobs again, giving people upward mobility, returning a sense of economic security.  That is obviously priority one.

The amount of money we spend on development is such a tiny, tiny piece of our federal budget, and it helps us in so many ways.  When there is a humanitarian disaster, whether it’s an earthquake in Haiti or a terrible mudslide and flood in the Philippines, and so many others in between, the American people have historically been very generous in trying to help people respond to the humanitarian disasters around the world.  And I think we will continue to do that. And it’s a public-private partnership.  It’s public tax dollars and it’s private contributions.

And it really sets a high standard for everyone else, because remember, much of the rest of the world has no history of philanthropy, they have no history of the kind of humanitarian response that we have been known for.  It’s beginning to change.  I want to see it change.  I want to see the rising powers also contributing on humanitarian disaster relief.  And we’re beginning to see some of that.

In other areas of development, we do a lot of work because it furthers American security interests.  We fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic or drug-resistant tuberculosis or the spread of malaria, both because we care about the people who are impacted but also because it’s a public health challenge for us.  And so it’s the kind of thinking that is both rooted in our moral obligation to help people in need, but also in a very hardheaded, clear-eyed analysis of what we need to do to get ahead of problems that may end up on our own doorstep.  We fight battles for electoral fairness because we believe that people elected in a fair, free, transparent election are more likely to be allies of ours in many of the difficult challenges we face.

So I think we do have to be smarter and more efficient to ensure that any dollar we spend that comes from us, the taxpayers of America, is well spent, is efficient, produces a result.  And when it doesn’t, stop doing what we have been doing and either don’t do that or make it something you can justify here in the chapel or on Capitol Hill.  But I think if you look – and you can go now – we’ve put all of our foreign aid on the website of USAID.  You can go and look at every penny of foreign aid.

And contrary to what a lot of people believe, we do not spend 10 or 15 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid.  I remember when I would campaign and people would say, “Balance the budget by cutting foreign aid.”  And I’d say, “Well, how much do you think we’re spending?”  And they’d say, “I don’t know, 20 percent.”  And I’d say, “Well, how much do you think we should spend of the federal budget?”  “Well, no more than 10.”  I’d say, “Okay.”  (Laughter.)  So I think that we have to disabuse people of some of the myths about foreign aid, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility to ensure that every dollar we do spend is spent well and furthers our security, our interests, and/or our values.

MR. STEINBERG:  So the other D in the QDDR is democracy.  And also going back to your first testimony to Congress, you quoted your first predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, who said, “The interests of a nation when well understood will be found to coincide with their moral duties.”  There’s obviously been a lot of debate about the role of democracy in human rights.  There are some critics who say that we haven’t been as zealous as we need to be about those.  There are some who worry that even in our own conduct of activities, including dealing with the problem of terrorism, that we’re not being consistent with our moral duties.

We’ve had a lot of chance in the Arab Spring and elsewhere to try to deal and grapple with this challenge.  How do you see it, both the importance of these values and how we implement them in our foreign policy?

SECRETARY CLINTON:  Well, I think that they’re absolutely paramount.  I think democracy and human rights is who we are as Americans and also what we have stood for historically.  But it’s quite challenging to take what are heartfelt values that we care deeply about and implement them everywhere, every time that we possibly can, because there is a lot of challenges with explaining democracy to people.  If you’ve never lived it, you have no idea how it affects you.  You don’t have the sort of years and years of perfecting our union that we’ve gone through.  Democracy can mean different things to different people.  And there are different forms of electoral systems, different forms of parliamentary systems that claim to be democracy.  Iran claims to be a democracy.

And we have to be always consistent in supporting what we think of as the underpinnings of democracy, and it’s not just elections.  Some people have one election one time and claim that’s a democracy.  So we have to constantly be urging more openness, more respect for minorities, independent judiciary, protection of the free press, the kinds of pillars of democracy that over many, many years we have learned are essential for the institutionalization of a democratic system.

And when it comes to the protection of human rights, I mean, we issue an annual Human Rights Report that tries to shine a bright light on the problems that exist around the world.  And for the first time, when I became Secretary, I said, look, if we’re going to be judging the rest of the world, we need to judge ourselves because otherwise, people are not going to pay attention.  They’ll say, well, there go the Americans again, criticizing everybody else, but what about Guantanamo and what about this and what about that?

So we have to be honest with ourselves that despite, I believe, having the greatest commitment to democracy and human rights of any nation, of any society, of any time in history, we make mistakes, we fall short of our own standards, and we have to constantly be asking ourselves what we can do better and how we should behave.  And that’s important for us, first and foremost, but it’s also important if we’re going to have credibility when we speak to the Arab Spring or other countries that are trying to formulate democracies.

And sometimes, publicly criticizing a government over human rights abuses is not the best way to achieve the results you’re seeking.  So we have to modulate how we say what we say and when we say it and who we speak to, because, again, otherwise you won’t be able to protect the people you’re trying to protect in many instances, and you may not be listened to if it just becomes a mantra, a public rhetorical mantra.  It’s very challenging to have those values front and center, to promote them, to implement them, to praise and criticize appropriately, but we try to do it.  I think we end up in a pretty good place.  There’s always a lot of room for improvement.  But it is very challenging.

The other aspect to this is when you have human rights standards that are so foreign to other cultures.  I’ll give you three quick examples.  If you’re someone, as I am, who believes strongly in the empowerment of women and talk about the rights of women everywhere I go – I’ve done this now internationally for 17 years.  Honestly, a lot of – in a lot of places, it’s just not understood.  “Of course, we take good care of our women.  We don’t let them out of the house, so that they never get into trouble.”  (Laughter.)  “We don’t let them drive cars, so that they can never be taken advantage of.  So we are protecting the human rights of our women.”  You can imagine the conversations that I have.  (Laughter.)

Or we believe that you should not be discriminating against or permitting violence against the LGBT community in your country.  And in many places, in particularly Africa and Asia, that is just a totally foreign concept.  I mean, the first response is, “We don’t have any of those here.”  (Laughter.)  Second response is, “If we did, we would not want to have them and would want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.  And it’s your problem, United States of America, that you have so many of those people.  So don’t come here and tell us to protect the rights of people we don’t have or that we don’t want.”  (Laughter.)

And so, I mean, I call leaders and I say, “You’ve got a legislator who’s just introduced a bill that calls for the death penalty against LGBT people.  That’s really a terrible idea.”  “Well, we don’t have any of them.  They’ve been imported from the West” – (laughter) – “and we don’t need them.”  I said, “Well, all right.  Let’s start at something very basic.  Why do you have to kill them?”  (Laughter.)   “Well, maybe you’re right about that.  We won’t impose the death penalty, but they may have to go to prison.”

Okay.  Let’s – I mean, that’s the kind of discussions that you have when you’re talking about human rights.  And it’s not that people get up in the morning and say, “I’m against human rights.”  It’s that from where they come, on women or LGBT or minority groups, you say, “You don’t treat that minority group very well.”  If you’re talking in the Middle East sometimes, “Take better – be nicer to your Shia or your Sunni.”  Or, “Please don’t discriminate against your Christians.”  It’s a very difficult conversation because it’s just not been one that people have had up until now.  I think it’s very important we do that, but I give you this sort of flavor so that you understand we can either have a conversation and try to convince people to move in a certain direction, to provide greater protection for human rights, or we can lecture at them, we can call them names, we can preach, and the lives of the people who are being discriminated against will not change.

So sometimes I feel that we get criticized because we’re not being as vocal or strident as some in the advocacy community would like on some of these issues, but I’m trying to save lives and I’m trying to change attitudes.  So trying to do that simultaneously is sometimes quite challenging.

QUESTION:  So, Madam Secretary, yesterday was Earth Day and one of my graduate students, Todd Dannon, wanted to pose you a question.  I promise you that this is from him and not from my wife, Shere. But the question was:  Given that we’ve just marked the 42^nd anniversary of Earth Day, do you see any real opportunities for significant environmental progress on the international front?  And what role can the United States play in catalyzing that?

SECRETARY CLINTON:  I am a perennial optimist on even the most difficult issue, and I do think that we can see some progress.  I think, number one, the problem of climate change, of environmental degradation, of pollution and contamination, is not going away.  It’s not been magically disappeared because people don’t want to have a political discussion about it.  It still is affecting people’s lives, and it’s affecting the lives of Americans here at home as well as countless millions around the world.

So because it’s not going away, we have to continue to work toward making progress.  And we weren’t able to get a big climate deal through our own Congress in the first part of the Obama Administration, in part because it was in the midst of an economic crisis and so many people said we can’t take on any more cost, even though I would argue that over time this would be an efficient cost-savings commitment.  Nevertheless, from the front end, there were some initial investments that would have to be made, so people were rightly anxious about the economy and about making those kinds of commitments.

But we did make slow, steady progress towards some international commitment starting in Copenhagen, then in Cancun, then at Durban, and certainly there’s hope for continuing that at the Rio+20.  I was saying to Jim’s class that it is always challenging when you see a problem that you believe must be addressed and you can’t get the political process to respond.  Now you can either become very discouraged and very bitter, with good cause because you think this problem is so pressing, or you can regroup, re-strategize, and keep going.  So that’s what we’re doing.

And I’ll give you just a few quick examples.  Coming out of Copenhagen, for the first time, we got developing countries to agree to anything about climate change.  If you’re in India, China, Brazil, South Africa, your attitude is:  We didn’t make this problem.  The developed world made it.  We’re trying to develop.  Now all of a sudden along comes the developed world and says to us, “You have to pay for your development.” Well, that’s just not fair.  We get to get to the same point of development you all did, and then we’ll worry about something like climate change.

So they weren’t part of Kyoto, they have resisted being part of any international accord under that argument.  For the first time in Copenhagen, the President and I hammered out a deal where they would be agreeing to reporting certain things, which they’d never reported before, and making certain internal commitments.  At Cancun, that was further refined and similarly at Durban.  Because the developed world in Europe, combined with the developing world, wanted very much for there to be a binding agreement on the follow-on to Kyoto that would bind the United States and others.

Well, the United States Congress didn’t accept Kyoto the first time because there was no binding agreement on the developing world.  And now all these years later, the developing world is now leading in greenhouse gas emissions and still has not taken on responsibility, except in a kind of an internal level of accountability.  So our goal was to get, for the first time, everybody realizing we all had to pay something for this problem.  Granted the United States and the West in particular have contributed more over the last century because of our development trajectories to the problem that we face.  So yes, we do have to take responsibility.  But so do they, because what good will it do us if we take responsibility and they don’t.  We won’t make any progress.

Now, the Obama Administration has done a number of things by executive order, particularly increasing mileage for vehicles, going after the pollution from plants – particularly utilities – and other steps that I think the Administration doesn’t get enough credit for, and which I always say to my international interlocutors, “Look, yeah, you’re right.  We didn’t pass some great big climate deal in the Congress, but we’ve been slowly cleaning up our own house, and we’re making progress on that.”

Secondly, with this enormous growth in natural gas, the United States for the first time in many years is actually exporting energy.  And we may find ourselves in a different energy mix.  Assuming we can deal with the environmental issues surrounding hydraulic fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction that are part of this calculus, we may find us in a better position to be able to go after some of the major polluters and some of the major oil producers.

And then I started a group of six nations – it’s now grown, I think, to 10 – we’re just frustrated with the slow process of trying to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, in particular carbon dioxide.  So we formed a group – the Clean Air and Climate Coalition – to deal with non-carbon dioxide contributors, of which there is a lot – methane, black soot, et cetera.  So we’re trying to follow that model to come up with some specific proposals that we can implement.

So we are moving.  It’s not as fast.  And in the face of just the cascade of natural disasters, it seems like we’re not keeping pace.  But we are continuing to move forward.  And at some point, the world will recognize that we do have to have international agreements that we will enforce in order to deal with what are significant climate changes that are going to impact us.  It’s not like we can build a wall around our country and say we’ll keep out the effects of climate change.  And just because we’re not some small island nation in the Pacific that is going the sink in the next decade, we don’t have to worry about it.  We’re already seeing those results.

I said this morning, we’ve already moved villages on the Alaskan coast that used to be protected in the winter from a thick bed of ice that would freeze the water in front of these villages so that the storms would not hammer the villages and erode the land.  And now the ice is neither there nor as thick, and so we’re already doing things that mitigate against the effects of climate change.  So it still is a piece – a big piece of global unfinished business that we’re trying to make slow but steady progress on.

MR. STEINBERG:  So on issues like climate and democracy, these obviously have a big impact on global public opinion towards the United States.  And when you and President Obama took office, one of your priorities was to try to influence global public opinion and try to restore America’s reputation.

How far do you think we’ve come?  What are the challenges ahead?  And in particular, how do you see the new media, and how are you using the new media to try to influence the great debate about the perceptions of the United States?

SECRETARY CLINTON:  Well, I think we’ve made progress, but it’s a daily struggle to make sure that we are conveying accurate information about what we’re doing.  Now if somebody disagrees with what we’re doing, that’s fair.  But if they disagree with something we’re not doing and we’re not even thinking, that’s a problem.  So we try to get ahead of the information flow, which is much harder today than it was five years, 10 years, 20 years ago.

When I got to the State Department, we did no social media to speak of.  We had very little even language-appropriate outreach on the media.  I think there had been an attitude up until then that there were certain set feelings in certain places, there were certain elements of the press that were going to be anti-American no matter what, so it really wasn’t something we should worry about too much and not try to take on.  But in the 24/7 media world that we’re now in, with billions of information sites – because everybody with a cell phone or a computer can be a commentator, can be a contributor, can be an activist – we had to get more on parity with that, and we’ve worked very hard to do it.

But it’s tough, and I’ll give you an example coming out of the Arab Spring.  I thought we were not being quick enough in reacting to Arab public opinion – both pro and con, but particularly con – about us and the role we were or were not playing, a lot of conspiracy theories about what the United States was kind of doing behind the curtain, which were not true.  So I said, “Well, I want more of our Arabic speakers out there.”

And one of the responses was, “Well, a lot of our best Arabic speakers are young.  They’re young Foreign Service officers, they’re just getting started.  If they make a mistake on the media it could ruin their career.”  I said, “Well, I’ve made more mistakes than I can count.”  (Laughter.)  And at some point, we have to be more willing to take some risks, because we can’t sit around and take 48 hours to respond to a story that is breaking on a blog or Twitter somewhere.  We have to get into the mix.  Will we make mistakes?  Will young people in their 20s and 30s?  Yeah, just like people in their 50s and 60s will make mistakes.  But we have to be in the flow of the moment.

So we began to change that.  I mean, the resistance or reluctance was totally understandable, because if somebody gets out and says something that has an unfortunate effect or they stumble when they’re talking or whatever, that’s a problem.  But the alternative, which is to be so worried about saying anything, is absolutely unacceptable in today’s world.  So we are out there every day.  We are – we do a lot of both formal and informal media work.  I’ve done internet chats with Egyptians and Iranians that would be simultaneously translated into Arabic or Farsi.

We’ve really tried to get out there to make the case that – we’re not asking people around the world to agree with everything we do.  We don’t agree with any other nation.  We have our own interests.  We are pursuing those.  Let’s not kid ourselves or anybody else about it.  But the United States is standing ready to assist those who want a true democratic transformation.  We believe in that.  So I think we’re improving dramatically.  We still have a ways to go, which is why I hope some of you will think about the Foreign Service for a career, because we need you.

MR. STEINBERG:  You led right into my next question, which is – as you know well, you can spend time on a campus – there’s a tremendous commitment to public service among young people.  But there’s also, I think, a reluctance, especially about federal government and politics, a sense that it’s hard to get ahead, you don’t get a lot of respect.  What can be done and what would you say to young people who are thinking about that, seeing other choices in their life as to why they should take on the slings and arrows that go with the kind of career that you pursue?

SECRETARY CLINTON:  Well, first of all, I know how publicly service-minded young people are today.  I see it, I hear it, and I am very pleased about that.  And I also recognize what Jim is talking about, which is a certain level of skepticism about government and politics.  I think skepticism is part of the American DNA, so I’m not sure that’s all new.  I came of age during the Vietnam War, and there was a lot of skepticism, so you’re in a good tradition of American skeptics.

But at the end of the day, we have an enormous obligation to participate in and to invest in our country.  I mean, it is such an honor for me to travel around the world as your representative and speak on behalf of the United States of America.  And government service can be so rewarding and can make a great contribution.  Obviously, over the course of many years, I’ve known people who have made that commitment, and I work with some of the best and smartest people I’ve ever worked with at the State Department and USAID, who really make a difference in the lives of Americans and in the lives of people around the world.

So our government’s not perfect.  Human beings aren’t perfect.  There is no such thing.  But certainly, it is a worthy and an incredibly rewarding enterprise to be part of government service.  So be skeptical, but don’t be cynical.  And if you have any interest in pursuing that, whether it’s at the local, county, state, national level, I hope you will.  You may take to it and find your life’s passion and career.  You may decide it’s not for you.

Politics, especially if we’re talking about electoral politics, is very challenging.  There’s no doubt about that.  But I often tell people that politics is part of everything you do.  There’s academic politics – I was on the faculty of a law school.  There’s church politics.  There’s family politics.  There’s corporate politics.  Everything you do, to some extent, is “small p” politics, where you have to get along with people, you have to express opinions, you have to marshal others to your side of an argument if you’re making a presentation in a corporate boardroom or in an academic faculty meeting.  So it’s, I think, short-sighted to say you don’t want anything to do with politics, because you will, in some way or another, be involved in the, quote, “small p” political process.

Electoral politics is very, very hard but exciting.  It’s exciting to have ideas that you would like to work toward.  It’s exciting to convince people to work with you towards implementing those ideas.  And again, politicians are human beings, so you get what you expect with any group of human beings.  Some are incredibly admirable, and some are less so.  But the fact is that the reason democracy is so worth defending is that we don’t give any group of people a monopoly on the truth.  One of the challenges that some of these new democracies are going to face is if they are a religiously based political party, you get into arguments where it’s not just politics; it’s also faith and religion.  And so how do you argue against that?  How do you compromise over that? So I think politics in our democracy is especially important today to continue to make decisions that will benefit our country.  And I make an urgent plea for evidence-based decisions, and in the budgetary arena, decisions based on arithmetic and not ideology.

So we need people who are willing to get into politics, knowing how hard it is, willing to keep going at it, understanding you have to compromise, but sometimes getting a little bit is better than getting nothing at all.  And so I would urge that people who are interested in politics, working in a campaign, working for a political leader – a county executive, a mayor, a member of Congress, whomever – see it up close and personal.  Decide whether it’s for you.  It may not be, but I certainly never thought I would ever run for office or hold office.  I certainly never envisioned being someone running for president of the United States.  But I believe in the political process, and I don’t think we have an alternative.  I mean, we can cede decision making to people you may not agree with, but you’re not willing to get out there and argue against them because, you know what, they may attack you.  They may say terrible things about you.  And it may not just be that one person; it may be legions of people across the cyberspace world.

So you have to be willing to enter into the political fray, but I think we need you more than ever.  So I commend public service, whether it’s in a not-for-profit NGO, the faith community, government service, politics, because we really need to keep replenishing the energy and the ideas and the idealism of the next generation involved in our politics.  And we also need more citizens who take politics seriously.  I mean, we can disagree on what we should do on climate change, and that’s totally fair game.  We may not want to make the investment because we have other priorities, but let’s not disagree about the science.  We can disagree about what to do about the deficit or the debt, but let’s not pretend you can keep cutting taxes and end our deficit and debt.

I mean, so let’s have an evidence-based discussion.  That doesn’t mean you have to agree with the solutions that are proposed, but we do great damage to our political system when we act like ideology in the American political process is more important than facts.  We are a fact-based people.  One of the reasons people from all over the world could come here and get along and work and succeed is because they didn’t have to be captured by ideology or by religion that tried to dictate how they lived.  That could be part of their private life, their private belief, but our politics were wide-open debates about who we were as Americans, where we were going, what we wanted to achieve.  And we need to get back to that, and we need to be very honest about what the facts are.

And then we can argue about the politics.  After you look at the arithmetic and you realize, you know what; cutting taxes is not going to produce huge amounts of revenue.  We tried that in the 80’s.  It didn’t work so well.  My husband had a different idea.  He kind of understood arithmetic, and so he said, okay, we’ve got to do a little of this and a little of that.  And we got to a balanced budget and a surplus.  And then we get a chance to actually eliminate our deficit and our debt, and we decide no, we’re going to cut taxes again, because that’s going to create more revenues, which of course it didn’t.  And then we have two wars that we refused to pay for, for the first time in American history.  And guess what?  We’ve got a huge deficit and a just unbelievable debt.

And if we’re really concerned about it, then let’s have a reality-based conversation about it.  And we don’t have to fix it.  We can take the consequences if the political system can’t bear the hard decisions.  But let’s not pretend there are easy decision that can resolve climate change or debt and deficit and all the rest of it.  Because what I see happening in other countries is a refusal to face hard decisions, and I don’t want that to be us.  That’s not who we are.  We’ve always been a pretty realistic people.  We have a lot of disagreements, but we not only need to set the standard for democracy, we need to set the standard for the kind of reasoning that should underlie any kind of democratic enterprise.

MR STEINBERG:  Madam Secretary, there’s a lot we can talk about, but as the dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, I can’t think of a better note to end on.  So let me thank you for coming here and spending time with us, and really great to have you here.  Thanks so much.

SECRETARY CLINTON:  Thank you.  Thank you all.  (Applause.)

This piece was originally posted at Fast Company on 27 March 2012 as part of the Innovation Uncensored Series.

When I first came across the idea of Generation Flux, I immediately said ‘Finally, there’s a name for people like me! I could feel better about the craziness of my resume, knowing there were others who might also get the blank stare and ‘huh?’ when people looked at it. Luckily, I’ve only had to hand it out a small handful of times in my life.

After taking a deeper look at this idea of chaotic progress–or, as Fast Company describes, a mindset that embraces instability, that tolerates and even enjoys recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions–I related to the idea more and more.

Being a Generation Fluxer isn’t about doing a lot, or hopping around between jobs. There’s an aggressiveness and progressiveness to this mentality that is makes us unwilling to accept status quo, and a (sometimes overwhelming) realization that there’s always a better way, there’s always something that can be improved, and, at least for me, there’s always an opportunity to make the world a better place. Without having pinpointed or defined this philosophy, these characteristics have always driven me, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but they’re always there.

Regardless of success, I raise a glass to my fellow Gen Flux-ers and hope they never sit on their laurels until they’re good and ready to do so.

This piece was originally posted on ForbesWoman, 28 March 2012.

Over the last few weeks, a long-standing thought that’s been floating around in my head has been solidified: programming, coding and tech skills are not only attractive to have in any number of professions, but they’re becoming necessary in order to really “do a good job.”

The Obama Campaign team announced last week that it would be opening a volunteer office in San Francisco focused solely on finding tech talent. Acting as “a hub for technology and innovation … The Obama campaign’sTech Field Office will offer volunteers the opportunity to write code and support the campaign through tech innovations.”

Co-director Catherine Bracy is no stranger to the importance of tech skills. She previously held the position of administrative director forHarvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which has as its sole mission to “explore and understand cyberspace.” [Sidenote: As a woman, and one who spends a lot of time championing women in technology, I would be remiss in not pointing out the general calling for more technical women as well, but that's for another day.]

Obama’s team believes that digital innovation is what will give them a real leg up in reaching their constituents. It’s a necessary addition to their process, and one they feel will bring them more success.

READ FULL ARTICLE

I’ve had Brian Solis’s new book - The End of Business As Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution – on my shelf for a few months now, so I’m diving in (and he’s conveniently structured it with short chapters, which are greatly appreciated!).  The first chapter dove right into the idea of how technology has fundamentally changed the way we as people and as consumers have changed our habits and the way we receive and process information.

…people are balancing virtual and real-world relationships in the moment.

The constant desire for interaction comes down to shared experiences and staying connected. The truth is that we’re always on.

Where’s the balance?…how can this be used more productively?

I find myself revisiting a widely accepted notion: technology changes, people don’t. But nowadays, I’m not so sure. Technology is indeed changing, but it is also changing us along with it…we are learning to live our lives online, revealing a bit more about ourselves with every status update, check-in, tweet, and social object we publish….Technology is changing us, and as it does, it can improve how we learn, share, and communicate.”

DO YOU THINK THIS IS RIGHT?

He continues by suggesting that we should not fight this trend, but rather work with it:

…it is the responsibility of the host to realize the changing nature of human interaction to not discourage outside interaction, but to steer the experience to include everyone in one’s own way…to create moments that are nothing short of engaging.

Using an anecdote from his own experiences, he describes how he was out to dinner with several colleagues, who were all, at one point, buried in their phones.  Instead of forcing people to put their phones away and starting conversations “on other topics,” Solis instead recognized that the device was likely not going away and took steps to incorporate that process into the conversation by having his colleagues ask questions of those they were connecting with through their devices:

It was the beginning of a realization for me. If I could steer experiences, I could connect with people at the table as well as those they’re engaging with on the other side of the device.

The trajectory of the book is to then take this thought-process into how we act as businesses, organizations etc in reaching out audiences.  While I greatly respect this shift in the business world – realizing how to maximize this shift in behavior with consumers – I struggle with how realistic it is for our personal lives, etc.

My husband recently sent me a CNN article on “The Rise of Nomophobia: More people fear loss of mobile contact”  and even I, who’s connected, said to myself “this is something I need to fix.” Will it be simply accept to move beyond the no-eye-contact conversations, the distracted discussions, and the anxious panic of a device-less moment? Is that a shift we should be encouraging on a personal level, a healthy one for society? Can we honestly say that it’s ok that virtual connections are slowly taking the place of in-person connections?

Technology is changing us, and as it does, it can improve how we learn, share, and communicate,”

I don’t have an answer to this per se, and at the moment I’m leaning towards the “no” side for the above questions…. but it’s something interesting to think of.  WHAT DO YOU THINK?

I’m excited to be part of Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored event on 18 April in NYC.  The event is described as follows:

INSIGHT. INSPIRATION. IMPACT.

Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored event embodies the ethos of our brand and represents the culmination of our work throughout the year. Innovation is at the core of everything we do. Every day on our website and in each issue of the magazine, we delve into the new ideas and radical creativity that are rippling across every industry, measuring their impact to determine how and why they matter.

At Innovation Uncensored, we turn that coverage into a real- world conversation, where the people on the pages come to you and share what they know. Surprising stats, smart techniques, best practices, true confessions—it’s not just the nuts and bolts of business; it’s the heart and soul. And that’s what makes this event different.

Several GIT-ers are headed to SXSWi this coming weekend, and we’ll be having a panel discussion on Sunday, details below.  Let me (@just_kate) know if you’ll be down there to say hi!  And please use the hashtag #GITSXSW so we can keep up with the fun.

PANEL: Everybody’s a Bloody Entrepreneur! Or Are They?

Sunday, March 11th, 12:30-1:30
Salon C, Hilton

Hashtags: #sxsw #bloody

There was an article – or 100 – the other day that said something about entrepreneurs being…The life blood of society! The new drivers of our economy! The largest employers of our citizens! The solution to our problems!

And what about all the LinkedIn profiles stating “Entrepreneur” as a title?

But are all these “entrepreneurs” really entrepreneurs?

We’ll be hashing through what entrepreneurship really means, what a startup really is, and what innovation really makes a difference on society and the economy (what is “making a difference” anyway?). Our panel will be a group of diverse “entrepreneurs” – from high-growth speedups as described by Startup America to social entrepreneurs who might not provide huge financial returns but contribute in other ways – and we’ll be talking about the similarities and differences between everyone’s idea of their own Entrepreneurship.

It’s a frank discussion on some of the realities and frustrations surrounding this debate.

Panelists:

Jesse Draper
CEO/Host, Valley Girl Show

Jesse Draper is CEO of Valley Girl, Inc. Draper, most commonly referred to as “The Valley Girl” is creator and host of “The Valley Girl Show“, named “Must see startup TV” by USA Today. She has pioneered the way of new media with “The Valley Girl Show” and has grown a following using non-traditional media sources. Under the Valley Girl umbrella, she also runs Lalawag, the largest technology-focused blog in Los Angeles.

Draper is an actress meets entrepreneur and is also known for her role as Jesse, the nanny, from Nickelodeon’s hit show “The Naked Brother’s Band”.

Kate Brodock,
CMO, Girls in Tech
Executive Director of Digital & Social Media, Syracuse University

Kate is Executive Director of Digital & Social Media at Syracuse University, where she leads university-wide efforts in the field. She is also CMO of Girls in Tech, a global organization for women in technology and entrepreneurship, and on the Strategy Board of the Meta-Activism Project, a think tank making digital activism smarter. She is Founder & Chair of Other Side Group, a social media marketing and content production firm that has a sweet spot for writing.

She specializes in social media marketing, content production and entrepreneurship and works diligently and passionately for issues around women in technology and entrepreneurship. She likes to write when she can, and regularly does so for Forbes Women, Mashable and several other outlets.

She holds an MBA from Goizueta Business School at Emory, an MA in International Relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and BAs in History and Political Science from University of Rochester.

When she’s not doing all that, she gets outside a lot – biking, hiking, skiing, sailing, whatever – is a very non-professional musician, likes dry humor, a great glass of bubbly or craft beer, great people, and loves life.

Nicole Glaros
Managing Director, TechStars

Nicole is the Managing Director of TechStars in Boulder.

Nicole got her entrepreneurial start in the 4th grade, orchestrating cousins into theatrical plays and charging neighbors admission. From there, she founded three startups including PropertyManagementShop.com, all of which are still operating. She has spent nearly a decade working to improve the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Colorado through leadership roles at various organizations and incubators such as CTEK, Investor Avenue, CleanLaunch, and the Advance Colorado Center. She considers herself privileged to have worked with nearly 100 brilliant and gutsy seed-stage web software entrepreneurs.

Nicole graduated with her Master’s Degree from the University of Florida, likes to do at least one philanthropic thing annually, and shares the wonderment of parenthood with the love of her life, Mark.

When not thinking about TechStars, you’ll find Nicole on the slopes or on her bike, hanging with her big fat greek family, traveling to some exotic destination, or generally making a fool of herself to entertain others.

Kate Dohring
Founder, Rock It Media

Vanessa Keitges
President & CEO, Columbia Green

Alec Ross serves as Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, where he is tasked with maximizing the potential of technology and innovation in service of America’s diplomatic goals and stewarding Secretary of State Clinton’s 21st Century Statecraft agenda. In this role, Alec helps ensure America’s leadership and advances the State Department’s interests on a range of issues from Internet Freedom to disaster response to responding to regional conflicts.

Alec started his career as a sixth grade teacher through Teach for America in inner-city Baltimore where he lives with his wife and their three young children.

Discussion:

Let’s talk about menstruating cows in Africa. Alana Berkowitz wanted to build a program that brings together citizens in Africa and has them build a program around finding technological solutions for themselves, based around a contest, called Apps for Africa.

The winner was iCow, which was an SMS-based app that can be downloaded to the most basic phone and maps menstrual cycles, dairy cycles etc for subsistence-level dairy farmers. They can just use this app to find someone in the region who wants to buy a dairy cow.

You can take a lot from this story. The thing that most strikes me is power. I think about the changing nature of power around the world. If we had tried to do this 5 years ago, we would have had to have the cooperation of a huge telecom company, it would have taken a huge amount of money to develop the app, we would have had to spend as much money on marketing.

But now, you no longer need these resources. Citizens themselves have the ability, the power, that they didn’t have previously. The one thing I’ve learned from my time with Secretary Clinton is that there’s a massive redistribution of global power. From hierarchies to individuals and networks of individuals.

There are four main things I see social media having had an impact on global power structures. Firstly, social media has accelerated movement making, mobilizing.

Secondly, it enriched the information environment. So places historically closed, the access to information was spectacularly different in a short amount of time.

Thirdly, it helped make weak ties stronger for the purposes of exercising discontent.

Lastly, it facilitated leaderless movements.

The same type of networked dynamics that we saw taking place around the world also took place in the US when the SOPA/PIPA debate exploded. For the first time, there was conversation happening.

This isn’t an American critique, it’s to show that this is happening all over the world. In the face of this, there’s an inevitable loss of control and fear of government. This isn’t uncommon. After the printing press was invented, there was about 200 years of litigation around this device, to try and control it.

As citizens become increasingly connected, there’s a defensiveness that comes from governments. We saw this in the Arab Spring. Each country attempted to shut down connection to the internet.

Another page in the “How to be a Dictator” Handbook is censorship. There are sometimes massive investments in increasingly sophisticated mass technologies to monitor information and identify sources of discontent. When things are more calm, it’s about how to arm up for an increased surveillance state.

The 21st Century is a lousy time to be a control freak. Governments don’t like this loss of control. It’s the test of the character of a nation-state to see how they respond to this loss of control. Do you fight it?

I want to give you a few examples of how we’re trying to leverage this positively at the State Department. We’re got a young women running a program virtually to connect them to the state department and be able to work as a “diplomat” around the world.

Another is TechCamp. Why don’t we leverage America’s techies and put them to work for our development goals? We put these TechCamps in place around the world. We’ll identify a challenge and the techies geek-out a solution.

What’s the best way for us to adapt to this world of change? My one piece of advice I’d give to a world leader is that it’s not the strongest or the most intelligent that win, but the most adaptable to change.

Thank you.