Love her or hate her, Palin continues to fire up commentators, enrage her critics and engage her supporters. When she jumped ship and resigned as the governor of Alaska, she shocked even her former Presidential running mate John McCain, who admitted on Meet the Press this week that she hadn’t called him beforehand.

While the pundits will continue to debate whether the constant media scrutiny forced Palin out of office or whether she’s plotting her own media empire, the question I have for you is what can you learn from her departure? If your job is driving you crazy, should you stay or should you go?

After a two-week flap, David Letterman finally and directly apologized to Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin and her daughters on his program last Monday night, saying he wanted to say he was sorry “to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the governor and her family and everyone else who was outraged by the joke.”

In case you’re like me and can’t stay up for the late show, two weeks ago, Letterman joked about Gov. Palin attending a Yankees game with her daughter. The joke, in which Letterman seemingly confused Willow, who is 14 and attended a Yankees game that week, with Bristol, who is 18 and an unwed mother, had to do with Palin’s biggest problem being keeping her daughter from being “knocked up” by Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez.

Okay, here we go again. The new rap on Sonya Sotomayer is that she is “overly aggressive,” maybe even a “bully” based on comments by anonymous lawyers on the almanac of the Federal Judiciary.
I have to admit that the whole debate makes me tired. I have constantly advised my female coaching clients that they simply do not has as much “bandwidth” as men, even in this day and age.
What I mean by that is that they are walking a tightrope. They can’t be too angry or, of course, they will be labeled with the B word. They can’t be too soft, or they won’t be tough enough. Men, of course, have the same kind of constraints in corporate America; they also have to be charming to be liked but the road they walk is simply wider.
As I wrote in my book Stop Pissing Me Off! What to do When the People You Work With Drive You Crazy, one of my clients learned the hard way that the war of the sexes still rages in the workplace. Coached by a mentor at her old law firm to be direct with support staff, she endeavored to do that in a new firm. She was brief, clear and direct. It failed miserably. Although the terms law firm and soft culture often don’t belong in the same sentence, my coaching client didn’t recognize that the new firm did, indeed, have a much softer culture. Consequently, the support staff found her approach to be nothing more than condescending and abrupt antics.
She had run smack into the old gender stereotype: men can be rewarded for hard-charging and direct, even angry behavior, but women may be penalized for the same tactics. Instead of being applauded, they’re called bitches. I had to inform my client of the sad truth that women’s styles are still examined differently. Women who fail in male-dominated workplaces leave a trail behind them: “We tried hiring a man but it didn’t work out.” It’s not fair, it’s not legal; but it does still happen.
NPL legal reporter Nina Totenberg analyzed the oral arguments of Sotomayor and found that her style was tough and blunt but no more so than other judges, especially when compared to notoriously tough judges such as Supreme Court Justice Scalia. Early in her judicial career Sotomayor was criticized as being too blunt, and her mentor Judge Guido Calabresi, former Yale Law School Dean, started keeping track, comparing the substance and tone of her questions with those of his male colleagues and his own questions.
As he told Totenberg “And I must say I found no difference at all. So I concluded all that was going on was that there were some male lawyers who couldn’t stand being questioned toughly by a woman. It was sexism in its most obvious form.”
Since I spent ten years standing in front of federal judges, I frequently joke to my speaking audiences that they can’t insult me, I’ve been insulted by professionals. (Not that they’re not professionals, it’s just not their job to insult me.) The people who are critiquing Sotomayor for behavior that most seasoned trial attorneys would find pretty typical should just get a grip!

Many words have been written about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s 2001 assertion in a speech, later published as a law review article, where she said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” These rather innocuous comments have fueled a firestorm (never mind that Justice Alito made similar ones.)
While this all seems like a tempest in a teapot to me, one case where gender would have made a difference is the recent U.S. Supreme Court May 18, 2009, 7-2 decision that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (the “PDA”) should not apply retroactively. In AT&T vs. Hulteen the Supremes found that AT&T is permitted to pay lower pension benefits to female employees if they took maternity leave prior to the enactment of the PDA. Predictably, the lone woman Supreme Court Justice, Justice Ginsburg, dissented.
As I wrote in my book on Sexual Harassment, this decision had its roots in a 1976 decision. Prior to that time, those of us who practiced employment law assumed that only women could get pregnant. In G.E. vs. Gilbert, a woman was fired for being pregnant and sued, claiming sex discrimination. The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court. There, the Supremes - all of whom were male at the time - evidently knew something we did not, since they ruled, quite absurdly, that pregnancy discrimination by employers “was not a gender-based discrimination at all.”
Congress fired back a scathing response to the Supremes by passing the PDA scolding, essentially, “Yo Supremes! Only women can get pregnant.”
So we thought we had that straightened out until last month with the AT&T case. (In her dissent, the current lone woman on the Court, Justice Ginsburg wisely suggested overruling Gilbert so it “can generate no more mischief.”) It is hard to imagine any woman who has ever been pregnant, or has contemplated being pregnant, finding that pregnancy discrimination is not sex discrimination.
While I agree with Sotomayor’s critics that, of course, you don’t want one’s background to lead to race based decisions, you do want, above all else, a judge with wisdom. Wisdom comes from study, yes, but more often from life experience. A diverse and yes, “rich” as Sotomayor tagged it, experience is critical for wisdom.
Coco Channel captured an enduring truth in one sentence: “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, also captured the importance of uniqueness when he said, “America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.” As we teach in our diversity courses if differences make us a better nation, a more relevant organization a more innovative and successful company, we’re going to have to learn to cope with differences while also putting them go good use. I’m proud of the diversity of my own team.
Most of the American public argees. A new Associated Press - GfK Poll suggested that Americans have a more positive view of Sotomayer than they did of any of former President George W. Bush’s nominee’s to the high court. Half backed her confirmation. In the same poll, 63 percent supported affirmative action for women while fewer, 56 percent favor affirmative action for racial or ethnic minorities. Surprising, the poll did not define affirmative action, a critical error since, as I wrote in my book on Affirmative Action most people are confused about the legal definition of this term.
Is Sotomayor different? Yes. Does that difference matter? Yes. We do need a court that reflects the richness of American diversity at least enough to understand that only women can get pregnant.

I have to say my kids and I are disappointed. It’s been over a week and we’re still not over the loss. We thought we had a shot at having the first gay Elvis American Idol. (Although as the New York Times carefully noted, Adam Lambert has never formally declared his sexual orientation.) With his ever changing hair, his white leather or impeccably tailored outfits and his soulful style, Lambert had the ability to change how we saw the pop contest forever. Maybe the show could be a unique reflection of a new voice in American music, instead of a rather predictable piece of show business fluff.
I can’t imagine how anyone watching Lambert perform The Tracks of My Tears or I Can’t Have You could remain unmoved. Much has been written, of course, about his ability to bend a song to his own brand. Just as much fun as watching and listening to Lambert rip through Led Zepplin’s Whole Lotta Love was to watch the judges sit in stunned silence as if saying ” I don’t know what you just did but I love it!”
But what I liked even more than his constantly changing looks were the way he faced the judges when they gave him feedback. You can learn a lot about how to accept feedback from Lambert. He didn’t tear up, argue, or huff and puff. He looked them straight in the eyes, as if calmly responding to every comment: nothing that you say can change who I am or what I’m doing. I know who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to feedback at work: of course you should. But you need to have a core that stays still not matter what anyone’s saying to you. With that core in place, you can then listen to feedback, take what you like and leave the rest. The rest may not be worth anything or it may contain valuable advice but if you don’t know who you are before you start listening, it will be hard to sort our the wheat from the chaff, the cloying comments of a Paula Abdul from the constant carping of a Simon Cowell.
Before I became a speaker and author, I spent ten years standing in front of federal judges. Because of that, I frequently joke to my audiences, it’s hard to insult me. I’ve been insulted by professionals! Not that you’re not all professionals but it’s not your job to insult me. I do listen to feedback but whatever I receive isn’t going to alter the core of who I am.
Listen and learn, yes, but do so in a way that leaves your soul intact.

In the rush to beat up on Elizabeth Edwards over her book tour this week, for publicly exposing her pain over John’s infidelity, the allegedly, resulting baby (who she insists, strangely, on calling ‘it”) and her reaction to the betrayal, we seem to have forgotten an important point in this saga: The other woman, Rielle Hunter, worked for John.

Unless you’ve been trapped under a Hobbit hut without a computer, you’re probably one of the 120 million worldwide viewers who’ve downloaded Susan Boyle on YouTube bringing the house down with “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables.” One of the great things about the 48-year-old unstyled, uncoached, rather frumpy-looking British spinster is that, when asked by Simon Cowell, “What’s the dream?” her response was “I’m trying to be a professional singer.”

Not, “I want to be famous” but “I want to make a living doing something I love.” Somehow, that touched me more than all the ambitious 20-somethings who want to rule the charts.

Miss California

My goodness, but Miss California has had a tough couple of weeks hasn’t she? First, she brings down the wrath of a significant portion of the American public by coming out against gay marriage in response to a question by Parez Hilton in The Miss USA Pageant, which allegedly cost her the crown. Then, this week, nude pictures of her taken as a teenager show up on the Internet.

While such problems may seem far removed from your work-a-day woes, they actually both reveal relevant lessons.

In selecting quarterback Matthew Stafford No. 1 overall, the Detroit Lions committed to a six-year contract wroth at least $72 million.  The guarantee:  a record $41.7 million, up 39% from a year ago when the Miami Dolphins guarteed offensive tackle Jake Long $30 million in the top spot.

Agent Tom Condon, who did Long and Stafford’s contracts said that “Money follows the football, “That reflects the importance of the quarterback to the success of the team.”

Well, duh… With Detroit’s losing record, I think we can all agree that they really, really need a great quarterback but 72 million?  Don’t you wish that you had Condon to negotiate your next raise?

Was this a drug test or an intelligence test? One has to wonder, since these two potential draftees were given weeks of notice, not only as to the exact time of the test but also as to the type of drug to be tested for and the amount of time the drug residues would remain in the body. Hello!