I think the concept of ‘making an impact for other people’ — or having influence, or getting people to listen to you — are ideas that we sometimes reserve for professors, or authors, or ‘thought leaders,’ or CEOs, or motivators.… Continue Reading
Yesterday, I took a mid-afternoon walk to go get some hipster coffee and listened to a Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Chris Sacca, which was actually just Chris Sacca speaking by himself and answering reader-submitted questions. Sacca was recently the… Continue Reading
Let’s start with a basic idea right up front: most people who become managers aren’t actually good at it. Broadly speaking (and realizing that each case is different), this happens for two reasons: Management isn’t intuitive: What got you there doesn’t work when you… Continue Reading
If you look above, it’s not social media — which I bet most employers (as opposed to employees) would say. It’s actually water/coffee and bathroom breaks, which makes some sense: the former (hopefully not the latter) are ways to socialize with co-workers, and socialization/having friends… Continue Reading
There’s something called ‘social contagion theory,’ which essentially posits that behaviors or attitudes can spread through a network in the same way that diseases do. For example, if you have happy friends, you’re 25 percent more likely to be happy. If you… Continue Reading
The two scourges of the modern workplace are e-mail and meetings, and I think it’s fairly hard to argue that. On the e-mail front, to wit: No one really contextualizes their e-mails (so everything seems urgent) It’s impossible to infer… Continue Reading
There’s some new research from MIT’s Sloan School of Management about senior managers within organizations and their understanding of priorities, and it’s not exactly pretty. (Here’s a summary of some of the work from Fast Company.) The participants included 11,000 senior… Continue Reading
I’ve worked for a lot of senior leaders who seem to hold a belief that the company’s success comes at the expense of its employees, not as a result of their work. What do I mean by that? It’s a common attitude that rank-and-file… Continue Reading