Dorrier Underwood

Do you know you don’t listen….? I have examples of times you asked about the very thing someone just said. And you interrupt! I always thought of myself as a good listener. People tell me that, and they also say I hear things most people don’t hear……..so what was Nancy trying to tell me? Have I been fooling myself? Have others been kissing up to me? WHAT WHAT?? That was my initial reaction to Nancy’s assessment. I could tell she was a bit uncertain how to say that to me. And I also know that if Nancy Dorrier is giving me input, I ought better listen. Not because I’ll be in trouble if I don’t (although that young conversation is in the mix), it’s just that if she is going to bring this up, there really is something for me to take on. She is my champion, the very one I asked for. And so I look. I know I have a short attention span at times. No wonder that one of my listening filters is “get to the point.” One of the ways I have dealt with that is to engage in the conversation ...

His whole job is creating a new possibility. He creates it in the listening of others, whom he has never met, yet with whom he claims and creates a profound sense of kinship. And he does it by acknowledgment. Talking about a populist, a man who obviously lives for those moments in front of people, in front of the cameras, in front of the whole damn country, willing to be ridiculed and to expose his flaws, for a cause he believes to be a mighty one. Talking about Joe Biden. He got me, in person, in a way I wasn’t expecting. His message was predictable, about protecting Medicare and looking out for the middle class, but his authenticity was not. Politician. We spit the word out with disdain. Joe gives back the luster to the profession by demonstrating it: he was informed (lots of facts and figures which he openly challenged the assembled press to check, saying “they ought to!”); he was funny, by noticing what was going on, not by reciting jokes; he was PRESENT and di...

My first week with a "bad back" is over, and looking back, things will never be the same. I will never (probably) reach down quickly to pick something off the floor without bending my knees. Used to be easy before Wednesday, September 5th at about two in the afternoon. On the floor, staring up at the rough hewn beams of the floor above that makes the ceiling at Atherton Lofts, hearing Ginny typing, catching my breath that won't come normally because of this sudden catch in my back, I wondered what had happened to me. But I have to go to the bathroom! Worse, I have to go see the President! Both Presidents came to town the day I threw my back out.  I had been eagerly expecting to see Obama in person at his acceptance speech, but found out that same afternoon that I wouldn't be able to go after all. When they moved the speech inside about 60,000 of us had our dreams crushed. But I wouldn't have been able to go anyway! Not with my "bad back....

We walked into Marguerite’s, the quaint, if-I-hadn’t been in central Florida-almost Southern-like café near the bay in Dunedin, ready for the kind of meal you can only get in such a place – the “famous” homemade chicken salad on lettuce or in a sandwich, fresh coconut cake on a cake stand on the counter, beside a jar of homemade cookies. Evie wanted to sit under the butterflies that floated over the tables in the back, but those tables were all filled by “snow birds,” the older people who flock to Florida in the winter, or go there to retire. So we took the table by the window, across from two older women deep in a loud, hard-of-hearing conversation. Our waiter, a wiry, obviously stressed young man with a bit of a rush swirling about him, smiled, walking towards us, and asked the usual question, “What would you ladies like to drink?” Katie, who comes here often, mainly because it is across from the Dunedin library that she and Evie love, said “What is your special tea today, is it ...

Everyone else followed the same protocol: stand behind the lectern; look at your notes below the mike. But she didn’t stay safe behind the big block of wood on the stage. Even as the applause continued for her famous name, she started messing with the microphone, taking it off the stand and unwrapping the cord from around it. Then she stepped out in front of the lectern, in her professional-looking black patterned dress just above the knee, put her hand on her hip, and unleashed that Kennedy magic. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend definitely has the family poise, charisma, humor and intelligence, not to mention the ability to play a crowd like a musical instrument. I found myself wondering what it would take for politics to become thought of as an honorable profession again in America – FDR, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Howard Baker, Sam Ervin, Sam Nunn, Leon Panetta – we admired their character beyond their political positions. And then I looked at the crinkles around her eyes and...

I am so used to looking at life as a mechanistic process, that the notion of life as “a complex adaptive system” requires me to give up thinking my usual way. It’s not that I find complex adaptive systems hard to understand or even illogical. I just notice that, left to my own automatic devices, I can be counted on to regard phenomena of all kinds in a linear, mechanistic fashion, whether or not the phenomenon in question is living or inert. Most of what we care about is in the realm of life (family, social systems, stock market) rather than the realm of machines (bridges, levers and dials).   We all went to college for levers and dials—even me, in the College of Education. As a student teacher in a classroom with 25 college-track seniors who just wanted the formula for getting A’s in English and were quite peeved I didn’t provide it, I was on my own when Miss Mallory, my supervising teacher, was out sick the last day of school. I had graded their compositions, and one...

Dorrier Underwood Certified as Women's Business Enterprise  Charlotte, NC – August 15, 2012 – The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council has granted certification as a Women’s Business Enterprise to Dorrier Underwood, a Charlotte-based management consulting firm that specializes in organizational consulting and executive development.  “We pursued certification,” said Nancy Dorrier, president and co-founder of the firm, “because our clients asked us to. Many of the largest, most successful, forward-thinking corporations in the world are committed to doing business with Women Business Enterprises because of what it creates in the world.” By including women-owned businesses among their vendors, corporations and government agencies demonstrate their commitment to fostering diversity and the continued development of their supplier/vendor diversity programs. “Being certified gives us another way to partner with businesses that share our commitment to ha...