Jim Bruce

… How Do I Respond?   Recently, I came across a short essay by one of my favorite leadership writers, Paul Axtell.  Axtell is an author of several books, including Meetings Matter: 8 Powerful Strategies for Remarkable Conversations,1 and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review blogs. The piece that caught my attention is “How to […]

It’s hard to believe, but after 18 years of formal study, from first grade in a small East Texas school through doctoral study at MIT, I cannot remember ever having a class or having a teacher talk about learning how to learn. Perhaps that’s why Coursera’s MOOC “Learning How to Learn” has been taken by […]

… Others Most Certainly Are   Some 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”     What Emerson was saying is that the way you show up, your presence, can so over power what you say that your words have little […]

Today, most organizations, including a university’s IT organization, structure their work through a set of teams. Other examples include professional sports teams with their structure, their practice day-after-day of plays they may execute in the game, and a surgical team that performs the same procedure, for example, hip replacement, under tightly controlled conditions, perhaps multiple […]

“True wisdom comes from asking the right questions.”            Clayton Christensen   Two weeks ago, the Tuesday Reading focused on some particularly insightful remarks made by a number of this year’s commencement speakers. Now, whenever you select a very small number of speakers, in this case only nine, from a very large […]

… How do I respond?   Compliments are a good thing, right? Everyone likes to be recognized for a job well done. Especially from someone whose work you admire. They are a special form of positive feedback. However, many of us find accepting a compliment with grace to be a major challenge. Too often, our […]

… Helpful thoughts for the next stages of your life’s journey   Every year beginning near the end of May and continuing into early June, there is a flurry of activity at this country’s educational institutions. In the U.S., there are over 4,200 degree granting colleges and universities and over 20,500 high schools who each […]

Yesterday was Memorial Day, our holiday for remembering all those – some 1.4 million from the American Revolution until now – who gave their lives in conflicts while serving in our nation’s armed forces.    The idea of having a time to commemorate those who have died in the line of duty while serving their […]

The MOR Leaders Program, as the name implies, is about leadership.  Just what is it that leaders do and how do they go about doing it?  Two weeks ago, we focused on the humble leader.  There we wrote about what makes a leader humble1 and how a leader can cultivate those characteristics in his or her […]

Daniela Aivazian is the author of today’s Tuesday Reading.  She is an Organizational Effectiveness Specialist in Stanford University’s University IT organization.  Her essay first appeared as a leadership program reflection earlier this year.  [Dani may be reached at [email protected].]   In my second IT Leaders workshop, my coach said something that stopped me in my tracks. “Words matter,” […]