Journal Excerpt: The Fall of C.E.O. Women, The Start of brown girl surf
 
December 18, 2011
 
I’m alive and I have all my limbs so I’m trying to put the closing into perspective.  A lot has been done to dismantle the (C.E.O. Women) office.  We’ve sold most of our assets last week and this week is the final push.  The only thing is that we have no staff left – I’m the only one and so I have to manage all of the following:

• Financial management and reports to bank and funders
• Technology management - backing up of data, server
• Grants management …
• All donor correspondences/ communications
  
• All communications and responding to all inquiries that come in
• Brokering Grand Café for the bank
• Selling remaining assets
• Organizing all volunteers for moves
• Managing relationship with the building, scheduling final walk through etc...
• Managing relationship with the bank, scheduling final review of assets
  

I sent this list to my board chair and treasurer to let them know … But as it is, I’m left as the only one trying to manage the final three days of closing of the office.  People expect way too much when you are a Founder.  The good news is that I raised an extra $15,000 from foundations and donors and that the government approved our $20,000 reimbursement request so we will have enough for payroll, which will limit the board’s liability.  They were going to float a loan for payroll as well which I was happy about but now they don’t need to.  My friend and board member gave me a $1,750 (personal) loan to tide me over until we can collect on all the grants.    
 
… I have been actively trying to find a home for Grand Café in it all … because we owe the bank for our line of credit … It is a hard decision because that is nine years of work/research that went into building that asset (and $500,000) and I’m not sure what the bank will do with it at this point but I want it to land somewhere good, but I also want this to be done, so I’m torn …
 
I have been surfing which I’m glad about but skipped my Friday session down in Santa Cruz as I normally do.  I just felt like last week was intense and I couldn’t focus so much on my surfing, but I did get out on Friday and Saturday to Ocean Beach which I was really glad about.  I also started to get a lot of momentum on brown girl surf …

I am so proud of the (web) site and honestly it has been like therapy. After coming home dismantling an 11 year old non-profit I built on my back, I can work on creating something new which gives me a lot of energy.  I’m excited that I am so excited about this …
 
…  If it weren’t for surfing and brown girl surf, I’d be in bad shape I think.  But I feel calm and collected … but I just want this saga to be over with …
 
I have such a wide range of emotions regarding the board that it’s hard to make sense of them.  On the one hand, I have felt left in a lurch by them all year – only half of them fundraised and did what they could … On the other, they are my personal contacts and networks, and amazingly, not one member resigned since the crises … most of them have given or raised significant donations (totaling over $96,000) …
 
So it’s not bad for a small board … I’m glad that brown girl surf will not have one going forward.  I just want to be free from this all - free from the blame, free from the stress, free from this identity that I have held for what seems way too long.  I am Farhana and I am the Founder of C.E.O. Women, but it is not my baby and I don’t feel that way about it …
 
… It sucks being a Founder.  Your DNA is imprinted into the organization and work until the day you leave/ relinquish it but I feel trapped and not in a position to relinquish at this point.  I can’t wait until it’s all over.  I can’t wait to run with brown girl surf and it’s exciting to see it come alive …

I founded and ran a non-profit organization for 11 years with an amazing mission – helping low-income immigrant and refugee women to become entrepreneurs and learn English. After 10 years of running it, I took a needed sabbatical to reflect and rejuvenate. An interim leader led the organization in my absence. When I returned a few months later, it was operating a $50,000 deficit, the first ever deficit in the history of the organization.

As a Founder, this was devastating. It was like coming back at halftime to a 0-4 World Cup game and you’re on the losing team. It’s not impossible to bounce back, but it would take a level of effort I did not have in me after an already exhausting 10 years. The organization eventually closed. My last official day was the 21st of December eleven years ago.

While I made peace with the closure, I never quite got over the loss of its most innovative program - a soap opera series designed to teach English and entrepreneurship skills to immigrant women. I worked on this idea for 9 years, raising about half a million dollars to develop 6 of 18 episodes. Upon closing, the series was given to the bank as collateral for a line of credit that leadership took out in my absence in order to finance the deficit.

Giving over the program felt like a miscarriage, like it never got its fair chance to run. And truth be told, perhaps it was a little too early of an innovation for its time. Many funders resisted the idea of a remote, media-based learning program, now an ironic sentiment in these Covid times. This summer, on a long shot, I decided to reach out to the bank. I asked them to release the program series for me to resurrect. They agreed with full support. It was one of the best pieces of news of my career and life.

If I learned anything through this experience, it’s to not lose faith in your ideas. Ideas take courage. Creativity takes courage. Speaking up takes courage. Honoring and holding worthy your ideas takes courage. And perhaps most of all, I’ve learned that there’s no timeline for courage. You are ready when you are ready.

While I worked on this idea for 9 years it was the amazing team around me that brought it to life. Angelica Matsuno was the ah-mazing Co-Producer and Co-Writer who has been helping me to resurrect it. We were probably the most attached emotionally to this project. Nina Serrano was the incredible writer of the series and Marissa Aroy was the talented Director along with the ever capable Producer Niall McKay who all used their artistic skills, creativity, time and talent to give this idea life. There was also the programs team that worked on distribution, countless advisors, board members, clients and volunteers who helped take the idea to where it was. I’m forever proud of the work our organization did. And I am proud to return to this creative idea, with new eyes and wisdom, in service to all the people it was meant to impact.

Watch program trailer below:

(Re-post from my 5/6/14 Surf Life Executive Coaching blog)

The other night I was hanging out at my surf buddy Alex’s home.  Alex is a mathematician who teaches computer science and researcher at U.C. Berkeley (she’s also a total ripper). I noticed a cartoon-like cut-out of her face placed on a shower background with a conference logo on it.  When I asked what it meant, she explained that the running joke amongst mathematicians is that all the insight and best ideas come to them in the shower.  It got me thinking for a second.  So mathematicians generally get their “ah-has” in the shower.  Where have I gotten mine all these years?  It got me thinking a little more about innovation and insights and inspired me to share a few key lessons I’ve learned along the way.

1.    Talk to unlikely partners

One of the innovations I worked on in my career (among a few) was an entrepreneurship education program for immigrant women.  I was trying to figure out how to use technology and creative media to create greater access of the program to more women.  I started the project in 2001, developed the non-tech prototype over a period of years, got pilot funding in 2007 to develop the media, and then a second round of funding in 2009.  It was a LONG, creative process.  At one point, we even won the innovation award from the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, the national governing body for our industry.  

Hands down, talking with people that had absolutely NOTHING to do with immigrant women, entrepreneurship and non-profits often challenged and stretched my perspective throughout the innovative process and helped us look at problems differently.

We are often so deep in our own innovation and building it, that it is easy to get lost in that perspective and easy for that perspective to narrow.  When you talk with people who have absolutely none of the normal assumptions you would have while developing your innovation, product or idea, out-of-the box ideas start to generate.  You also open up your idea to people who think and solve problems differently.

I remember in one week talking with a marketing professional for Chiquita bananas and then a juice entrepreneur, a community college professor and two veteran engineers of HP.   All had such interesting and different insights to share on our work and thought about how to approach or solve for things in different ways.  This was one of the things I enjoyed most about the process - bringing together a hybrid of perspectives and coming to a new idea or insight based on these conversations.

Others see what you sometimes can’t.  The richest ideas always came from this type of cross-pollination of perspectives.

2.  Shift perspectives

In addition to getting outside perspectives, it is equally important to be shifting YOUR perspective and your team’s perspective all the time. 

This is an exercise that is done a lot in coaching.  You can be sitting and twiddling your thumbs over something, but if you move to a different part of the room, and look out the window, you will see it differently.

Back to Alex – my mathematician friend.  That same night, her boyfriend hands me a piece of art that he had scribbled on a napkin.  My first instinct was to twirl it around in different directions.  Each angle I shifted it to, I saw something completely different on the napkin.  At one angle I saw a rooster.  At another angle, a face … and at another, a metropolis.  But it was all the same piece of art.  The same concept applies to innovation.  Shifting yourself around in relation to the issue you are trying to innovate on can lead to new thinking.  When you look and shift perspectives, the questions to contemplate are:

How do I add value from here?
How can I make it better?
How can I solve the problem?
Does it match what the end user is requesting? 

3.  Focus

Looking back, this is one of the biggest lessons I have learned about facilitating innovation.  If you try to solve too many problems in one go, you may end up being a jack of all trades and master of none and not solve any problem well. By having a laser focus on the problem you want to solve, you are more efficient in solving the problem at hand.  Focus on what’s most important first and then add the bells and whistles as you go. My intention is not to spew the same ole same ole.  But from experience, all I want to say is when at all possible, simplicity is golden.

4.  Trust your instincts

In my experience, instinct plays a key role in knowing which way to take your innovation.  Very often, big picture thinkers have the ability to hold a lot of diverse perspectives in their heads, which allows them to see a path or trend forward, sometimes at a subconscious level.  This becomes challenging for the leader, because they may be taking leaps of logic in their head, and will need help deconstructing their logic model in order to bring people along into what they see.  Sometimes, there is so much advice and input that it’s hard for the leaders to access this intuition. 

You take in information and then you need to trust yourself and take responsibility for directing it in a specific way.  It’s almost like finding your wise, centered voice on the innovation.  Many will want to give you all sorts of advice.  Take some with a grain of salt.  Ultimately, trust your instincts. 

5.  Understand that innovation is a function of time

I remember discussing this point back in college with an über smart philosophy masters student in my metaphysics class.  He said to me as we were conversing on some philosophical concept: “innovation is just a function of time.”  In other words, someone is bound to eventually come up with the idea you have.  And very often, innovation is happening simultaneously; just because you’re thinking of an idea and it is original doesn’t mean someone else isn’t thinking of it too.

Case in point, I launched Surf Life only to realize a few months down the road that a fellow surf instructor, whom I met in Costa Rica years ago and who now resides in the Netherlands, was in the early stage of launching Beach Life Coaching, another coaching and surfing combination model for women.  And she was working on a retreat to Costa Rica, too!  We had no idea we were each working on such similar concepts.   It didn’t surprise me that someone in a parallel universe was putting together a very similar set of things.

You have some choices here.  Either accept innovation is a function of time, see what you can share and learn from the other person, believing there is enough of a need in the world for you both to serve, or you can whine like a baby and feel sorry that someone is "taking your idea" when in reality they probably just came to it on their own.  (I highly recommend the former, especially if you are in the business of solving problems and making the world a better place.)  Understanding innovation is just a function of time, frees your ego of the “I came up with this first” mentality and propels you to collaborate or even rethink what you are doing.  The realization that me and  my friend were working on similar things prompted us to connect and share our experiences and ideas, and to even think about collaborating on a future surf and coaching retreat for women. 

Hope these tips have been helpful to think about.  It’s important to note that this is just my perspective;  I know there are other innovators out there, and let this be a post that invites other perspectives into the mix.  Have you spent years innovating on a concept or idea?  What did you learn?  When did you come to your “ah-hah” moments?  In the shower?  On the loo?  We’d love to hear from you! (Hey, that rhymed!)