July, 2010

Dan Heath in today’s Reading – “Want Your Organization to Change?  Put Feelings First” – points out that typically when we want people to change, we try to teach them something.  Sounds good, right?  WRONG!  According to Heath and John Kotter, knowledge rarely leads to change. Heath observes that we know that obesity causes significant health problems but people don’t […]

Today’s reading is a short essay, reproduced below, by Roger Schwartz in his newsletter Fundamental Change.  He makes two significant points that caught my attention:  First, accountability is a two-way street.  Not only do your staff have accountability to their manager, but the manager, you, have accountability to them.  And, second, all feedback needs to be timely.  Said differently, it […]

Today’s reading “How to Stop the Blame Game” is by Nathanael Fast, assistant professor of Management and Organization at USC’s Marshall School of Business.  It appeared in the May research blog of the Harvard Business Review. Fast points back to the recent “grilling” of three oil company executives by U.S. Senate committees.  He noted that the executives […]

Today’s reading comes from an Amy Gallo posting How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team to the Harvard Business Review BLOG.  Gallo is a writer, editor, and business consultant.  Her writing on management issues regularly appears in the HRB BLOG.  Earlier she was a consultant at Katztenbach Partners, a strategy and organization consulting firm where she was involved […]