Change

Today’s Reading “Why Leaders Play Chicken” comes to us via the HBR Blog Network and is from the pen of Ron Ashkenas.  Ashkenas is managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and author of the recent book, Simply Effective. In this piece, Ashkenas reminds us of the game of chicken that most of us played when we […]

One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that people behave differently when their environment changes.  When we are at a place where people are quiet, say a church or a library, we’re quiet;  when we are at a sporting event where it’s loud, we’re loud. Why then, when we try to make changes […]

Joe Urich from the University of Iowa shared this piece with his on-campus cohort last month and I thought it was worth sharing with everyone.  “Lessons of Fort Sumter”was published in early April in the Wall Street Journal.  The author is Bret Stephens, a columnist for the Journal. In the short piece he distills from […]

To some extent, and more so for some than others, we are all problem solvers.  Most of the time we use ad hoc, informal, personal processes to solve problems.  And, these often work at the “good enough” level.  However, sometimes we miss good solutions, and even fail to identify the problem correctly in the first […]

Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, has a new book, “Alone Together.”  In the book, Turkle raises an interesting point about how we get and maintain each other’s attention in our always-on-connectivity culture.   In one review – MITnews’ “The lonely crowd” by Peter […]

Wayne Turmel, writer, speaker, president of Greatwebmeetings.com, begins today’s reading, “Virtual Meetings Are Like Broccoli” <http://bit.ly/icPr7O>, by saying “Running good meetings for remote teams is like eating our vegetables:  we know we should do it, we know how to do it, it’s critical to our health in the long run, and we rationalize our way […]

In the sports world, a “clutch” player performs best when the pressure is on.  [See “Learning to be a ‘Clutch’ Leader” by Sean Silverstone, editor of HBS’s Working Knowledge newsletter.]  In the thinking of Paul Sullivan, New York Times business columnist and author of “Clutch:  Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don’t,”  the best example of a “clutch” […]

Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft and previously a key figure at Software Arts and at Lotus, and founder of Groove, is leaving Microsoft after a short transition period.  Shortly after he made his announcement, Ozzie wrote “Dawn of a New Day,” as an email to Microsoft’s Executive Staff and his direct reports.  He also posted […]

Today’s reading is a Matt Richtel piece “Growing Up Digital, Wired fro Distraction” which first appeared in the New York Times on November 21, 2010.   This piece caught my attention for three reasons: 1.  The picture it conveys of teenagers’ use of technology today.  While my kids, three decades ago when they were  teenagers, were distracted and, in […]

Some people seem to be born full of confidence, while others have difficulty speaking up about their ideas.  Is confidence, then, something you are born with and therefore that those of us less gifted, just have to muddle through? No!, say both Jessica Stillman – London-based free-lance writer with interests in green business and technology, and […]