Jim Bruce

A tired and stressed out brain hates change.  Change means learning, something new, creating new connections that lead to a new neural network.  And, this doesn’t go well if the brain isn’t ready.  Too often our work lives make it hard for our brain to learn – demands of our jobs and our unhealthy sleeping and eating habits. […]

Among the attributes that all leaders need is confidence – not too much so as to be blinded by benign overly confidence and not too little to feel inadequate. This week’s Tuesday Reading, “To Strengthen Your Confidence, Look To Your Past” <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/to_strengthen_your_confidence.html>, comes from the pens of Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins.  Su and […]

Many leaders spend many late nights in the office, sacrifice their own resources, etc. all to increase the likelihood of success.  Sometimes this comes at the expense of people’s health, their families, and their sanity. But, Patrick Lencioni from Table Group notes in “What Leaders Won’t Do” <http://www.wobi.com/blog/leadership/what-leaders-wont-do>, while many leaders make great sacrifices to increase the likelihood of success, […]

Most of us have experienced team members taking the discussion at a meeting off-track.  It could be to a topic not on the team leader’s agenda, either the written one or the one in only the lead’s head.  Or, it could be to an aspect of a topic on the agenda that has already been addressed, etc. The […]

It’s hard to be a good judge of people.  Because it’s hard we often, almost exclusively, depend on extrinsic markers academic scores, results in previous jobs, job titles, salary, etc.  We can also add extrinsic measures from social media – how many friends of Facebook, followers on Twitter, or who we know in common on […]

From the desks of Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman comes an article sharing the importance of like-ability in a leader.  Zenger is CEO and Folkman is President at Zenger – Folkman, a consultancy focusing on strength based leadership development located in Orem, Utah. Zenger – Folkman has one of the largest known databases of data […]

Justin Rhodes, associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, tells us that excercise can be the answer.  The essay appeared in the Scientific American. Rhodes says that there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that we think and learn better after we exercise.  Part of the reason that cognition […]

This essay first appeared in the Harvard Business Review blog and comes from the pens of Deborah Gruenfeld, Maghadam Family Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Lauren Zander is Founder of the Handel Group. Gruenfeld and Zander posit that authenticity is of great value as a leader […]

Colin Shaw,  CEO, Beyond Philosophy, a customer experience consultancy, shares insight on how to be sucessful.  Shaw notes that in his work life he has had some “great managers and some real idiots” and that he could learn from both.  The good managers he copied and he did just the opposite of what the idiots […]

In “Forget The Mission Statement:  What’s Your Mission Question?”,  Warren Berger challenges us to consider responding to a set of mission questions instead of writing a mission statement that is so general it can apply to almost anything.  He argues that mission questions provide a reality check on whether you are staying true to what […]