Can One Personality Trait Determine Your Career Success?
What ONE trait has been shown to impact career and overall life success more than any other?
(No, not that.)
The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff
Most of us are technical. We like to be fact-driven. We embrace technologies of all flavors, including computer hardware, software, mobile devices, the Internet and social media. We tolerate opinions of others that differ from ours, but we prefer tangible, hard evidence that supports any position or argument. The problem is that organizations are made up of people, not just computers and equipment.
We like research studies and analytics to gain insights and foresights, as well as to solve problems and pursue opportunities. But, darn it, people get in the way.
Are You a Rebel?
Organizations need more “champion” behavior from their middle managers. Linkedin discussion groups frequently chatter about poor guidance from executives. A recent discussion had many discussants moaning about their CFO function’s reluctance to implement activity-based costing (ABC) principles for lame reasons such as it would result in two different sets of product costs or that ABC is too complicated to implement. This is nonsense.
What Leaders Can Learn from Wild Animal Trainers
A command and control leadership style may have its time and place. But at the negotiation table? You may find concession-making skills will work more in your favor. When I last spoke with negotiation expert George Kohlrieser, he eloquently compared the delicate dance between an animal trainer and animal to managing concessions during negotiations. Concession making…
Today We Celebrate a Woman Who Saw the Future of Computers
Happy Birthday, Ada Lovelace.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day celebrating the life of Lady Lovelace, a nineteenth-century countess who published a paper that might be the first computer program ever devised. Ada Lovelace Day uses her as a symbol for women in science, hoping to bolster support for girls around the world who might be discouraged from pursuing science, technology, engineering, math, chemistry and the like.
How to Commit to a Goal
Here’s a brief story about why we all sometimes get distracted from the most important goals in our lives. Perhaps you recognise it?
You are thinking about changing your job because your boss is a pain and you’re stagnating. As the weeks pass you think about how good it would feel to work for an organisation that really valued you. You think this might be a good goal to commit to but…
Overcoming the Unwritten Rules of Budgeting
What Rules?
We all have personal ‘rules’ and beliefs that direct the things we do and how we respond to situations. Many of these rules are ‘unwritten’ – that is we follow them religiously even though they are neither compulsory nor explicit company policy. We do them because we do, quite often without thought as to their origins or whether they actually make sense.
Improving Strategy Execution through Effective Budgeting
Budgeting is nearly always portrayed as a management process that helps an organisation to execute strategy. Fine words indeed, but how many budgets and associated budget processes actually support that ideal? Surveys reveal the reality that most budgets are totally disconnected from strategy and that the resources essential to success are often missing or unavailable. …
Getting Big Projects Done: Balancing Task-Focus with Goal-Focus
Successfully completing large, complex projects can bring great commercial, scientific or artistic rewards. Unfortunately these types of projects, by their very nature, also provide endless opportunities to falter along the way.
Early hiccups can send motivation into a tailspin, doubts cloud good judgement and the wood is lost for all the trees. There are so many reasons to jack it all in or do a bad job, and we need only choose one. That’s why any insight from psychology is welcome.
How do you get team members to learn how to divide their attention between task- and goal-focus?
Hybrid Strategy Management
Despite my lack of doctoral and/or Harvard credentials, I’m going to go out on a limb and challenge a bit of the conventional wisdom that’s been passed unto us by Michael Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors – 1998), later revised by Treacy and Wiersema with their Value Disciplines model (The Discipline of Market Leaders – 1997), now taught in nearly all business school programs, and which crops up at least once at every business conference.