Red-Boots Kickass Bitch and Wisdom Hag | S7 E09
What a treat to talk with a fierce feminist who’s been a force of nature for more than half a century! At 71, Nadine embodies a lifelong commitment and ever-evolving talent to amplify her passion for social justice. Her volunteer work in 1964 on Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for New York State Assembly and at Women Strike for Peace with Bella Abzug immersed her in an understanding that sexism, racism, classism and militarism are inextricably linked. She’s been an intersectional organizer ever since. At 60, she left her lifetime home, New York City, and moved to a UNESCO Heritage city in Switzerland, becoming the first woman Executive-in-Residence at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. Eleven years later, she’s still there. Nadine continues to be a “Master Bridge-Builder” as CEO of beCause Global Consulting, and senior advisor of Global Citizens Circle, as noted by her alma mater, Harvard and by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu in the foreword to her upcoming book, The Power of Connectedness. We celebrate our sister-old-bitch, Nadine Hack, who is acutely aware of “her sacred obligation to carry the torch” as long as possible, and know our listeners will be inspired by her wisdom on voice, aging and the power of the collective.
Follow Nadine Hack at:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nadinehack
Twitter: @nadinehack
Instagram: @nadine.hack
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinehack
Forbes Councils: https://bit.ly/35rRBOT
beCause Global Consulting: https://www.because.net
Global Citizens Circle https://globalcitizenscircle.org
+ TRANSCRIPT
Joanne and Idelisse: Welcome to Two Old Bitches. I'm Idelisse Malave and I'm Joanne Sandler. And we're Two Old Bitches! We're interviewing our women friends and women who could be our friends. Listen, as they share stories about how they reinvent themselves.
Idelisse Malave, here we are again in New York. Yes. In New York.
And we're talking to...Joanne? To Nadine Hack, who was, for me, the quintessential New Yorker, someone you could never have imagined... who I did not know or meet in those days, but I've known for about 23 years. And so. To me, New York City and Nadine Hack were inextricably connected.
I would hear stories about the, you know, fashionable in black leather Nadine Hack going at cocktail parties, right. And going to the ballet. And then at 60 years old, which was about 10 years ago Nadine...and she's going to tell you more about this leaves, New York to go to Switzerland. And now it's 12 years later and she is living in Switzerland and loving it.
And we're talking a small town in the Alps. We wanted to talk to Nadine for a lot of reasons. One of them, you know, what took her from New York, which she clearly loved, right? To this small town in Switzerland. And also because Nadine, um, has lived really an extraordinary life of adventure, accomplishment.
She calls herself a fierce feminist and she is very fierce and very feminist and has always lived in a way that is very true to her values and achievement. I appreciated that she was someone who pursued success. Absolutely. She achieved that success. But as you said in line with her, her values, right, she did not, she did not keep herself in a, a small echo chamber.
And you'll hear about that in the interview with Nadine, she'll tell you about all the different places and arenas where she's exercised her skill and talents. And, um, and one of the other reasons we wanted to talk to her is because ...Nadine is absolutely fantastic at, and has always been, is really amplifying what she does, who she is, and what she's achieved.
And it's an area that in my experience, many of us, many women are not that strong or it certainly women in our age group have not been that strong in and are uncomfortable with. And I love...please listen closely to how Nadine reframes, the importance of self-promotion and lifting up your voice and being seen.
That you do it for impact and then so that you can see it gives you access in a way that you won't have, if we're always hiding or what, what is one hide under a bushel? Under a rock I think. No, it's a bushel. You hide your something under a bushel? Anyway, Nadine is not hiding herself. No, for sure. The opposite.
She's very generous about sharing what her strategies and tactics are. She will as you listen. And we start with our classic question. Who are you Nadine Hack?
Nadine: I am a connector in my quirky, wildly circuitously and uniquely nonlinear life about seven decades in which I've taken many seemingly disparate paths at heart. My golden thread is I am a connector. I always have been. I am. I always will be. The connectedness is, is that the core of my every endeavor. And I've been deeply enriched by that.
I am a spider in the middle of a web. And I sent something out here and something down here and they're completely separate disparate. And yet I somehow go if I connect this person to that person or this organization to that business, or this NGO to that UN agency, it's gonna like absolutely benefit each of them individually, but also the whole is always going to be greater than the sum of the parts and something magical is going to come from that.
So that's what I mean when I say I'm a connector. Now as Joanne asked me a different dimension of it, which is how has that deepened as I've aged, I have reached the age where not a week goes by, not a week where I don't have at least one, if not two or more, either deaths or learn of someone who's so absolutely severely life-threateningly ill that they're going to die soon.
I mean, I buy sympathy cards in bulk now, so that I have them at the ready when, when I learned about it. And my husband's 15 years older than I am, his 86, he's going to be 87 in May. There's something, always there's the existential reality that we're each going to die, that, that that's always present.
But there's something about aging where the finite list of what's ahead is just immediately in your face. You can't deny. And so I've come now to really treasure every moment and, and experience it as a gift. And also to cherish every relationship, which is why as much as family and friends always meant to me and I always was like the one who was convening them and let's have a dinner party. Let's have a birthday party. Let's have a gathering. Now, any opportunity I have to interact with my friends and my family, it's soul nourishing for me now. And I prioritize it.
In my fifties I very much felt a huge sense of loss because it was the beginning of, and remember Jerry's 15 years old or so, so our circle, and I've always kind of, I left home before I turned 16, pretending to be 27. So I'm like 71 by chronological years. And I'm like, I dunno, a hundred thousand my living years, you know?
And so when I was young and you know, it was the height of the, the, the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental, Rachel Carlson, Silent Springs, the environmental movement, the anti-war movement. And I totally believed we were going to like change the world then, right then and there.
So I looked at it as a sprint. I had to run as hard as I could, as fast as I could. I hit my, you know, maybe two decades later, my, I started to think, ah, you know, this is more like a marathon because I started to see like a lot of other people who were doing social justice work getting very burned out and, or becoming kind of cynical or bitter.
And, and we will, we've all experienced the people who just like suck the juice out of life. And I didn't want to be that way. And I, and I have a very vivid, exact moment when I was celebrating the 60th birthday of a very famous friend who will remain unnamed and during the entire party he was just griping about how the world hadn't given him what he deserved.
And when I walked out, I turned to Jerry and I said, I don't want to be that way when I'm 60. So I have to like find ways to replenish myself, nourish myself, renew myself. So I started thinking marathon pacing, you know, self-care. And then some more decades past, and I thought, okay, this is not a marathon. This is a relay race.
And I'm just not going to see in my life, the fruition of all the causes that I've been advocating, but that doesn't mean that I don't have a sacred obligation to carry the torch as long as there's a living breath of air in me.
Idelisse: So these days Nadine is, carrying the torch, but she's carrying it in Switzerland, based in Switzerland, and not New York.
Nadine: Yeah. I was recruited to become the first woman executive in residence at IMD business school, which is in Lausanne. It's ranked number one in the world in executive education, which is what it is like, there, there are other schools that are ranked higher in MBA, EMBA, but it's ranked very high on all categories, but in terms of executive education, it's the go-to school.
And, um, the way like Harvard has a fellow in residence, Rhodes scholar in residence, or practitioner in residence, IMD because it's an executive education business school as an executive in residence. And, um, I'd have to say, I completely broke the mold of what executive in residence at IMD, the guy who had it before me was the head of Unilever Europe, Africa, Asia, Middle East, the guy who had it before him was the head of Nestle's the America's, North and South, all the guys, all the white guys who have held it before me and I was the first female. I was the first non-European and I was also the first specifically to focus on responsible leadership.
I mean, I'm literally living in a UNESCO medieval wine village on like Geneva surrounded by the French and Swiss Alps. We came for a year, which is, you know, the minimum of, of commitment to be an executive in residence. In the bylaws, the maximum is two years. So I came for a year with the understanding that if the university and I agreed I'd stay a second year.
Here we are going into our 12th year. We came for the post. We stayed for the beauty of the region.
I had to Google it up and I was first recruited because they they've decided not to market in the US because they don't want to compete with Harvard. And, um, but I'm out of pocket as I'm like turning the key for an unpaid job, thinking, but this really also ties into like the power of age. Like I was thinking how many people at age 60 get the opportunity to do start a whole new chapter, not knowing what that chapter would be. I just leapt into it, huge leap of faith. And it turned out to be like the greatest, amazing blessing. Amazing. Because you just honestly can't believe how, how great it is where I live.
Joanne: So Ide there is Nadine living quite the idyllic life in a beautiful part of Switzerland.
Idelisse: Yes.
Joanne: And like a lot of other women we talked to and this is a question that we often pose. If you don't think of yourself as retiring, right. Where are you? What is the state?
Idelisse: How do you think of yourself?
Joanne: Exactly. And so Nadine tells us.
Nadine: I was never going to become a retiree. I was never going to be on a golf course somewhere. I was never going to be playing tennis. So I used to say to people, you know, all stopping an organizer when they're throwing dirt on my coffin and, and, and that's probably true. And I have to say there's two ends of the spectrum of people who inspire me.
Those people like Granny D you know, that, you know, 99 years old going around the country stirring up trouble. And then there are the 18 year olds, who are doing like brilliant intersectional organizing. And I am so inspired by them and they are my mentors, like. Like we have a two way street mentorship.
Like they, I love working with young people because I learned so much from them and I get so much hope from them and they're grateful that I respect them and treat them like, they're my mentor. And there, they also feel like they're being mentored because I've got a whole lot of experience under my belt.
So it's this delicious, I love being with really young people and I, love being with really old people who are motivated and who are passionate.
I didn't even think about going back to work and I'm not, I haven't for a long time been, been pulled to like go to another meeting, join another board, be on another conference, uh, network with a new group of people. Oh my God. Enough basta done. Did it been there? Done that? Still, I just recently was asked to do a workshop on women's empowerment with some feminists in Saudi Arabia.
And I just could not turn that down. So I'm going to Saudi Arabia at the end of February.
Idelisse: And now we get to the part that I'm so excited about, which is Nadine generously sharing her enormous knowledge and skill around self-promotion.
Joanne and Idelisse: And what's so important about that, Ide, as you were saying, is that it enables you to be seen, to be heard, to have an impact and amplifies your impact, amplifies your impact.
Joanne: And as someone who's worked with Nadine, it infects you with confidence when you're working with Nadine, which I appreciate hugely.
Idelisse: Yes. I can imagine that when you walk into a room, you walk in a little bit more with a little more energy and...more entitlement is maybe a strong word, but yeah. That you should be there and they should be happy for you to be there.
Joanne: Exactly. So let's hear her talk about how that happens.
Nadine: Older people in general, I know I'm generalizing and it's terrible to generalize, but there's always a kernel of truth in a generalization, older people in general are somewhat skeptical of and or dismissive of social media and online stuff. They they're, they, they can be very dismissive. Like I don't need to see a tweet about what you ate for breakfast.
I don't want, you know, and, and therefore they don't participate in anything that's internet based. I mean, now with COVID and zoom calls becoming the kind of de facto way of meeting. At least everybody now is using one online platform, Zoom, you know, and they use another online platform, email. And, you know, but, and maybe some of them have a website. Maybe not. Maybe they do a blog, maybe not, but, but very few are really actively interacting. And this goes back a long time ago. Cause alongside, I mean, I, I wear so many hats simultaneously and alongside of my consulting work, I've always taught. So when I was still in New York and running, because global consulting there as, as an Inc, uh, now run it from here as Asaro, which is the same thing for Switzerland.
I was teaching a graduate course at NYU. I actually created the course and was teaching it and um, it was a course on global development and I had a segment on, um, amplifying your voice through the internet and I would break for every segment of the course I taught I would bring in experts in that particular field.
And I would say, so whether you're running a little not-for-profit in Puto, Mozambique, or you're, you know, working with the global worldwide wildlife fund, you can amplify whatever you're doing by using the internet. And now I'm going to turn it over to the people who can tell you how to do that. And when I, and I heard myself say that and I said, okay, maybe you have always been walk the walk.
Don't just talk the talk. You weren't telling all your clients and all your grad students to use the internet. And you don't have a clue about what you're talking about. So you've got to learn. And my, my staff, like I've always, I've always worked with younger people. I always like to have young people. I, I, I've never had a team where I haven't had people in their twenties and now I have teams where people are in our teams, the guy who helped me figure out how to change my MailChimp.
I started working with him when he was a high school senior. So it's, it's amazing what you can learn from young people. My my staff had been trying to tell me, like, you need to blog, Nadine, you need to plug it. And I was like, oh my God, I'm already so like another thing I have to learn something new. And they said, no, it's just like typing an email.
It's just on another thing. It's just typing into a box and adding a picture and let us show you. And, and actually my, my first blog post was, it was when I went to, um, Liberia. When Ellen Sirleaf Johnson with held the women's colloquium. And my first entry was I'm a blonde virgin and this is my first time.
And then I posted all these things from...I was in a hotel in Liberia.
And then I started, you know, I started exploring all these different platforms, social platforms. And it's only in the actual doing of it that you experienced with the power of it is. And as, as a connector for me, it was like, oh my God, this is like connection on steroids.
Like you can meet whole communities of people doing things that you would never have met other than the fact that you comment on somebody's, well, again, comment is the important point here. I, I really believe that the use of social media has to be interactive. Like I hate people were just broadcasters, you know, the people who they, they send you their newsletter and they send you an email, read my latest article and read.
And even if you comment on, you know, even if you write back to them, I read it. I loved it. I commented on it. You don't get an answer from them. Like that's not, that's not connecting. That's just broadcasting. So, but when you do connect and you engage.
It's got a ripple effect that's so powerful, which is why I love working with young people. Because they, they understand this world so much better than I do. I remember seeing my granddaughter when she was still in a high chair, sitting in front of a computer screen, playing a game, which was there were birds and there were fish all over the screen and you had to, and there was a uh, fishbowl and a bird cage, and you had to put the birds in the cage and put the fish in the bowl.
And I thought, oh my God, Skyler's learning drag and drop pre-verbally, have no conscious memory of her first computer interface. Like I have no conscious memory of crawling my first crawling. Whenever I work with younger people and I say, okay, let's do this. And directionally I'm I'm I'm I'm right in like the direction they'll respond, well, how about if we do that? And there that is always exponentially better than my this. There's so much smarter. They really know how to use, how to communicate in ways that are visual, tight, concise, clear, concise, compelling capture people's attention. I'm so excited by what I learned from them.
Idelisse: You know, Nadine, I think what is so important about, at least what I hear you saying, is that even how you started, right? It's about amplifying your voice, but amplifying your voice for impact. Because you have a purpose that you're trying to drive, but it's also about being seen. So you can see, right?
Nadine: This whole level of engagement and therefore if you're seen you get to see, and then you get to connect.
Idelisse: So it is. It feels so central to the work itself rather than, you know, some kind of marketing or self promotion effort.
Nadine: And this is like what, when I'm doing the women's leadership development programs, whether I'm doing one at IMD business school, on the campus in Lausanne, or as I said, I'm going to Saudi Arabia to be working with a group of women there. I've been in Zurich working with FIFA, with women. What the biggest part of what I'm doing is helping women find in them their own agency, autonomy, and authority and claim it and not feel like that's bragging because there's a difference between bragging and owning who you are.
The decision-makers are still men and some of the environments are super, super toxic. And these men, so here are these young women who are making their way up through, you know, into like managerial, like senior managerial positions, where they have, where they have a title. And they have responsibility, but they are being demeaned, disparaged, diminished by the men, above them, below them, alongside of them.
They're watching their male colleagues get promoted over them. I mean, you know what we've known forever, they're discovering. And, and, and sadly, they've internalized too much of that outside perception of them and, and they've internalized it. And the biggest thing is to kind of step up and say, I know who I am.
I know what I'm worth. If you can't see it, that's your loss. But I know. And, and so a big part is helping other women. Find that place. And the only way I can help them find that place because if I keep looking for it inside of myself, but, you know, knowing who I am and that's good, the bad and the ugly and owning the whole of it.
I feel extremely blessed, fortunate that my mentors from 1964, were Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, that I got to work with the two of them. It was Shirley's first, a New York state assembly race eight years before she, you know, ultimately became a Congresswoman and ran for president un-bought and un-bossed. And Bella at Women's Strike for Peace.
And when you talk about completely different personalities. Bella was in your face. Shirley was, you know, very, uh, Caribbean, well-trained, uh, like steely strength, like no way, don't you even think of leaving me out of this discussion. Like don't you even like just a look could be like...And they are the ones who taught me. Well, first of all, they taught me very important message that racism, sexism, um, uh, classism and militarism, or were inextricably interconnected and that it was vital to work in, um, kind of a coordination to work, to, to build consortium's, to build coalitions, the power of coalitions and the power of that.
That, that was one really, really big early, you know, to, to, to get to, to cut, cut my eye teeth with such icons and with such strong women who were so unambiguously clear and often when I would be, very often, um, when I was younger, not so much now, but I would be told, I, I have men say things to me like we'd like your kind of feminist better than Bella Abzug.
I go don't you dare say that. I say the only reason I can have any soft edges is because bella was like a bull who had to like literally push her way through concrete walls. And because she did that, I'm standing where I am.
Joanne: So you know, Ide, to me, that is another aspect of Nadine's generosity, that she acknowledges where she came from, who she worked with, who she learned from...
Idelisse: ...and who supported and opened the way for her. You know, I love that piece about she didn't basically have to be pushy because Bella was pushy for her and all of us to some extent.
Joanne: And as she talked about that, I also thought about the, the Nadine that I met in 1999. And how deliberate she was about also how she presented her style, her style she had, and has, such a definite and intentional style
Idelisse: And self presentation or representation, whatever you prefer to call it. Yeah. Is very, um, inline with this whole concept of promotion and of taking up some space.
And I loved, and, you know, we do these interviews on Zoom these days, and I loved, you know, when she appeared on the screen that she had a sequin top on sitting in the library of her home in Switzerland, um, looking incredibly elegant.
Joanne: And reminding us, again, and again, as we learn that you make so many choices every single day, even when you're a little Hollywood square, right? On a zoom screen.
Idelisse: Well, it's true, but it's also, I mean, you and I have this ongoing conversation these days about self-presentation, whether it's, you know, about our hair or whatever, but also. We happily went shopping the other day together for the first time in a long time. And we went vintage shopping to make up for the absence of my favorite stores, Century 21, the clothes, but it was this whole question of style. And then it's part of a woman's right to choose how she presents herself. And for older women, you know, like Nadine this is an active resistance to say. I decide what I think is beautiful, not you.
Joanne: As she says.
Nadine: Blue nail polish, but I still, I don't own a pinstriped suit. This is like ....These are my work clothes. I put on work clothes to be on this podcast. So I took out of my default t-shirts my t-shirts are older than most people...but getting dressed for work is still like a sequin, weird leopard pattern. So, because what I want to say right away is if you're looking for boiler plate, if you're looking for ordinary. I'm not your gal. Like I am, I am really different and I'm going to show you different. I'm going to, I'm going to show up as who I am and you're going to see it.
And if you don't like it, I'd rather know that right away, because I don't waste my time working with you.
Everybody else in the (inaudible), you know, I'm guilty of like doing a huge amount of work in my pajamas and slippers, you know? So I've been like a little bit less conscious of it, but whenever I do something like this or, or I'm working with people, I'm coaching, especially if it's the first time, like if I'm, if I've been working with them for a while, I'm comfortable showing up in my pajamas.
They know who I am once they know who I am, but, but it's very conscious of, you know, I'm, I'm still hip. I'm still hot. I'm still cool. I'm still rocking it. You know, my, I don't have that here. It's downstairs. My, I wear a backpack. I don't, I don't have a purse. I don't own a purse. I gave away all my purse because it's just more comfortable.
One little black backpack that I wear all the time. I just gave a speech for the business women of the business and professional women BPW, which is an international organization, but I gave a speech for the Geneva chapter in Geneva last week. And it was one of the first, you know, face to face again, testing, mass, everything.
And the woman who asked me to do this, the president who knows me, bought me a little keychain. I wish I could show it to you on the screen. It's a red, high heel boot with diamonds, like crystals in it. And she said, because you need these, you, you have of anybody I know should have this, these red kick-ass boots.
And when she said that, I said yes, like that that's so, so that's still who I am in my spirit.
And at the same time, fully embracing hag wisdom. I mean, I'm an old lady who's been around the block. I know my shit, you know, so it's like both, both things are really true simultaneously. I'm a red boots kick ass bitch. And I'm a wisdom hag.
Joanne and Idelisse: Joanne, I remembered what Nadine doesn't do is hide her light under a bushel and to our listeners. This does not have to be your last encounter with Nadine. There are lots of ways to connect with Nadine, including, through she's very present on YouTube and other places, giving presentations, being inspiring.
She has a book coming out called The Power of Connectedness, which you have to buy in some way when it, when it gets published. Um, and so hoping that this is just the beginning of your introduction to Nadine, this fascinating human being.
And for us, Two Old Bitches, we want to thank the Two Old Bitches team. I love that we have a team.
Loubna, Katharine and Melissa, We thank you, uh, for all the work you do, but also how supportive and generous you are and how you make us feel. Thank you. Thank you.
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