Lemons

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Lemons

January 23, 2009. By Peter Lloyd

Ann Piening McMahon was one of 11,000 workers laid off by McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis some years ago. For ten years she worked as a laser communications satellite specialist. Not a job that's easy to find.

Less than half of her fellow pink-slipees were able to find full-time jobs. And most who did took a pay cut. With these odds, it was up to McMahon at age 32 to do some creative, career strategizing.

The first thing she did was take a good hard look at her natural abilities. At age four she remembers pretending to be an inventor. By ten she was fascinated with astronomy. In junior high she won a Earth Watch scholarship which enabled her to spend a summer at a Nantucket observatory with a professor from Yale. And in high school she placed ninth in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and won another scholarship.

At McDonnell Douglas, Ann McMahon often spoke to junior-high girls about her role as a woman in science.

If this were your history, what kind of career would you invent?

With a supply of balloons, trash bags and the imaginations of her young audiences, McMahon began to teach science to pre-schoolers billed as the Science Lady. On the weekends she did birthday parties as the Science Magician or Serendipity.

But teaching was the least of what Ann McMahon did for the children she met. She showed them how scientific they already were with their natural curiosity and their questions, always wanting to know why.

How's that for a right-brain solution to the left-brain problem of finding a job?

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest business problems.

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