Culture is an Outcome

Organizations confront opportunities to change on a regular basis. Whether it is an update to a long-held policy or procedure, an improvement in how leaders provide feedback to others or an increase on the part of managers to speak truth to power, one retort is heard more often than any other. This most common theme… Continue Reading Culture is an Outcome

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Play Your Way to Innovation

Innovation is serious business, and yet sometimes we are just too serious about innovation. Throughout history, we can see that play actually has served as a reliable gateway to innovation. In Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson illustrates how playfulness has fueled a remarkable amount of innovation and new discovery. Consider Charles Babbage,… Continue Reading Play Your Way to Innovation

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Building Better Leaders

In a recent New York Times article, Laszlo Bock, former senior vice president of people operations at Google, reveals what some might refer to as surprising. After synthesizing 10,000 data points including performance reviews done on managers, employee engagement surveys and even nomination forms for top-manager awards, the Google analysts found that technical expertise paled… Continue Reading Building Better Leaders

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The 7 Fires of the Day

How many of us spend too much time, day in and day out, attending to the “7 fires of the day”? Many of my clients bemoan the fact that the big projects never seem to get the attention they require for meaningful accomplishment. Other newsletters and time-management gurus offer tons of advice, including: Don’t start… Continue Reading The 7 Fires of the Day

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Effort Counts Twice

When it comes to predicting who will succeed in life and business, we often are “distracted by talent”. We tend to place way too much faith in SAT scores, GPAs and other measures of aptitude, even when these standard metrics have been shown to fail as guarantors of achievement. Whether it’s who will survive Beast… Continue Reading Effort Counts Twice

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