A wise man once advised living life by a compass, not a clock. In today’s option-packed world, that counsel is more pertinent than ever. Look around you. Many people—“busy” though they are—seem to amble through their days in a directionless cadence, leaving the footprints of their lives meandering down a road that’s meandering itself. There’s…
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If you Google “famous introverts,” you’ll get an interesting list of luminaries: Albert Einstein, Rosa Parks, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Gore, Marissa Mayer, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Buffett, Mahatma Gandhi, Barack Obama. “But wait,” you might say. “How can people like that be shy? Barack Obama? Are you kidding me?” If that’s your…
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For some people, the very idea of “negotiating” is not just unappealing, it’s downright scary. It’s often tainted with connotations of coercion, pressuring, or even trickery. All those tired clichés about used car salesmen perpetuate the myth that negotiations are something to be dreaded. In short, negotiating is stressful and can bring out the worst…
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When it’s done right, leadership is hard work. There’s always the delicate balance of caring for people while getting important things accomplished. The two are not at all incompatible, but there’s still the balance. And it always occurs in the context of “what’s happening now.” Today’s context includes a global pandemic. Economic turmoil. Civil, political,…
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If you’re like most people, you make thousands of decisions each day. Sure, most of those decisions are unconscious and inconsequential—like will you put on your left shoe or right shoe first? Of course, many decisions do have varying degrees of consequence. Among all the products and services on the market, which ones will you…
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In a world of so many competing interests, making smart decisions is harder than ever. So much so, in fact, that some leaders get stuck in the quicksand of indecision. What they apparently don’t understand is that indecision is a decision. Putting issues “on hold” is seductive and deceptive. Problems don’t disappear. Challenges don’t mysteriously…
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In this topsy-turvy world, we have three options. We can resist change and fade into irrelevance. We can wait and react to change, then hang on for dear life and hope to survive. (We likely won’t.) Or we can proactively anticipate change, then adapt and thrive. It sounds simple enough. But the landscape is littered…
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Meetings. Can’t get enough of ‘em. Like you can’t get enough of acid reflux and toothaches. Sarcasm aside, you know that meetings are part of your workplace reality. They just are. And many studies show that, on average, employees spend nearly 60% of their day on work coordination instead of focusing on their skilled, strategic…
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Crystal balls have a poor track record. But when it comes to the way people work, we can be certain that in many ways the future will bear little resemblance to the past. Work practices that seemed unthinkable yesterday don’t raise an eyebrow today. Many of the jobs that humans did for ages are now…
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