Brocade networks employees, families to healthier lifestyles

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Brocade’s senior direc­tor of com­pen­sa­tion and ben­e­fits Leanne Bernhardt par­tic­i­pates at the company’s fit­ness center.

Last May, so many employ­ees at Brocade Communications Systems Inc. rode their bikes to work that the com­pany had to clear out stor­age space in a garage and imple­ment a “bike valet.”

It was all part of a series of well­ness chal­lenges and con­tests designed to get work­ers — or Brocadians, as they’re called — amped up about becom­ing healthier.

San Jose-based Brocade’s one-year-old employee-wellness effort, dubbed WellFit, is heavy on such chal­lenges. Workers can even set up their own fit­ness com­pe­ti­tions with oth­ers using their mobile phones. That’s no sur­prise for a com­pany in the ultra-competitive net­work­ing space. Brocade, with approx­i­mately 4,600 employ­ees world­wide, includ­ing 2,500 in the Bay Area, posted fourth-quarter rev­enue of $550 mil­lion in November. Read the rest of this entry »

20 Steps To Jump Off the Corporate Ladder and Land on the “Souls” of Your Feet, Part 1

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woman_jump

At 23 years old, I thought my life was per­fect. I had grad­u­ated col­lege a year early. My career ran as if it were on a timetable. Sales led to man­age­ment and man­age­ment led to exec­u­tive posi­tions. By the time I was 30, I was pub­lisher of a com­puter mag­a­zine run­ning a multi million-dollar busi­ness unit. On top of that, I had a happy mar­riage and a home in Silicon Valley.

I fol­lowed a sim­ple mantra: work hard, make money, work harder, get pro­moted, make more money. While my career con­tin­ued to esca­late and I con­tin­ued to excel, the fam­ily I grew up in started to crum­ble. In a period of 4 years (1990–1994), I lost my mother, father, sis­ter and favorite aunt. My mother was chron­i­cally ill and dis­abled for ten years and was the last one to die in 1994. Looking back I real­ized the job was the only place where it appeared I had com­plete con­trol of my des­tiny. Read the rest of this entry »

a nice horizontal line A sanctuary where the body can rest and the soul can reveal itself.

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