Suzy Welch Dishes

Lisa Berg / NBC NewsWire Suzy Welch, journalist, author and wife of ex-GE powerhouse Jack, talks about her new book 10-10-10—the formula she invented for solving life's hardest decisions—how she left her first marriage and the day she and Jack fell in love. Read part two of Tina Brown’s interview with Suzy Welch.

Suzy Welch, fortysomething Oprah columnist, former Harvard Business Review editor and co-author with her husband, former GE CEO Jack Welch, of Winning, has just come out with 10-10-10, a book that purports to be a life-transforming idea. The title refers to her strangely contagious problem-solving device: Look at your current life dilemmas and ask how you will feel about your choice of decisions in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. Sound simple? Not really. Because Welch's point is that the technique is only the beginning of a psychic workout that helps you dig deep and define your own values. You can apply 10-10-10 as much to whether you should take that business trip when the kids don't want you to or whether it's time to take the buyout and jump ship. In a sense, America is in the middle of a giant 10-10-10 moment of its own, forcing itself to look beyond the next 10 minutes.

"On my third question he says, 'Turn that tape recorder off.' I dutifully turned it off and he said, 'Do you have a guy?' That was the end."

On Tuesday afternoon, shortly before her book party, I had lunch with Suzy and we got into it all.

10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea. By Suzy Welch. 240 pages. Scribner. $24. Tina: How'd you get the 10-10-10 idea?

Suzy: It was 14 years ago, I was a working mother trying to crack the code—the uncrackable code—of being a loving, present parent and a successful, promotable employee. And got invited to give a speech to a bunch of insurance executives in Hawaii. This was a gigantic deal.

I was senior editor at The Harvard Business Review. I was one of probably 15 or 20 of us. This was this gigantic career achievement. Someone actually wanted to know what I had to say. They were going to pay me 1,500 bucks to go to Hawaii to tell people what I knew. I had arrived—in my own mind. But the problem was these four little children all under the age of seven at that time. I couldn't leave all four of them with my husband and feel good about it. So I thought the perfect solution was to take two of them with me to Hawaii. I mean, completely deranged, of course, in retrospect. The daughter gets sick on the plane. The son gets sun poisoning the first day. But it comes to the absolute pinnacle of disaster when I am delivering the speech to the insurance executives they had paid me to give, and I had put the two children in a hula-dancing class to warehouse them during the speech. And as I am giving the speech, I see these little bodies pressed up against the windows in the back of the room and I'm thinking to myself, "Oh my God, this can't be happening." And then they burst through the door and come running into the room as I'm delivering the speech, in their hula skirts. I finished the speech, I came right off the stage, and they went and clutched onto my legs. Buried their faces in my waist. And the insurance executives were staring at me and I was staring at them and I thought, "Something has got to change."

It's such a great story. We have so all been there. I actually have always found that mixing the kids with the business does not work in any shape or form. And the whole idea—when I read about politicians that bring their kids to work I think, "Who are they kidding?" That is what obsessed me about Sarah Palin. It couldn't possibly have been happening the way she described it.

One thing that kills me when people bring their kids to work is the assumption that other people in the office enjoy it. They want your kids in the office? Who is actually enjoying that? That is a decision you have to make. You have to separate lives. Are you going to blend them at someone else's expense?

Click Below To Hear Highlights From The Interview