Left Neglected Read Online Free PDF Page B

the day, before my next meeting. I begin eating the chicken Caesar salad my assistant ordered me for lunch as I return a call to the office in Seattle. While I’m chewing lettuce and the phone is ringing, I start skimming the emails that have accumulated in my inbox. The managing director picks up and asks me to brainstorm with him about who of our four thousand consultants would be available and best suited for an information technology project coming in next week. I talk to him while I alternately type responses to a number of emails from the UK about performance evaluations and eat.
    I can’t remember when I learned how to have two completely different professional conversations going at once. I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I know it’s not an ordinary skill, even for a woman. I’ve also mastered the ability to type and click without making a sound, so the person on the other end of the conversation isn’t distracted, or worse, offended. To be fair, I choose to answer only the emails that are no-brainers, the ones that just need my yay or nay, while on the phone. It feels a little like having a split personality. Sarah talks on the phone while her crazy alter ego types. At least the two of me are working as a team.
    I’m the vice president of human resources at Berkley Consulting. Berkley has about five thousand employees in seventy offices located in forty countries. We offer strategic advice to companies all over the world in all industries—how to innovate, compete, restructure, lead, brand, merge, grow, sustain, and, above all, make money. Most of the consultants who work to deliver this advice have business degrees, but many are scientists, lawyers, engineers, and medical doctors. They are all extremely bright, know how to think analytically, and excel at finding creative solutions to complex problems.
    They are also mostly young. Consultants at Berkley typically work where the client is. The consultants for any given project can be based anywhere in the world, but if the client is a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, then that is where the consulting team will live for the duration of the project. So for twelve weeks, a consultant from our office in London, staffed on this case because of his medical background, will live Mondays through Thursdays in a hotel in Newark.
    This lifestyle is workable for the young and single, and for a while, even the young and married, but add a few years and a couple of kids, and living out of a carry-on starts to get old fast. The burnout rate is high. That poor guy from London is going to miss his wife and kids. Berkley can throw more and more money at him to keep him, but at some point for most people, it’s not enough to make it worth the toll this job takes on families. The few consultants who persevere beyond five years go on to become managing directors. Anyone still standing after ten years becomes a partner and, as a result, extremely wealthy. Almost all are men. And divorced.
    I came to Berkley with a background in human resources and an MBA from Harvard, the perfect hybrid of experience and pedigree. My job requires a lot of hours—seventy to eighty a week—but I don’t have to travel like the nomadic consultants. I go to Europe once every eight weeks, China once a quarter, and New York for one or two overnights a month, but this kind of travel is all predictable, finite, and manageable.
    My assistant, Jessica, knocks and enters my office with a piece of paper that reads, “Coffee?”
    I nod and hold up three fingers, meaning a triple shot of espresso and not three coffees. Jessica understands my sign language and leaves with my order.
    I head up all recruiting, the assembly of high-priority case teams, performance evaluations, and career development at Berkley. Berkley Consulting sells ideas, so the people who think up those ideas are our most important assets and investments. An idea that any one of our teams comes up with today could easily be on