Goals & Practices

Today’s Tuesday Reading, The Laws of Simplicity, is drawn from John Maeda’s book by the same title, and the associated website.  Maeda is President of the Rhode Island School of Design.  He is an artist, designer, and technologist.  Before going to RISD in 2008, he was a professor and associate director of research at MIT’s Media […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is How to Ask Better Questions.  The essay’s author is Judity Ross, a contributing writer and columnist for Talking Writing, an online literary magazine.  She has written numerous articles and reports for academy, corporate, and nonprofit organizations, including the Harvard Business School.

Several weeks ago, the Tuesday Reading was “Increase Your Team’s Curiosity” […]

Today’s reading, “11 Expert Tips to Help You Be More Productive in 2014”, is one of those pieces written for a specific time, early January 2014, which on second thought, are applicable at any time of the year.  This essay by Kathleen Davis, Leadership Editor at FastCompany.com, shares tips she has compiled from eleven super-productive […]

Several people have asked me recently – how do you know you are coaching and not just having a conversation or giving someone advice? So I thought I’d share this list of Coaching Indicators.  Enjoy! You know you are coaching if the other person says: “That was a great question”. “I never thought of that before”. […]

The Tuesday Reading today, “Strategy Without Execution Is Hallucination!”  has a title that comes from a presentation to a McGill MBA class by Mike Roach, the CEO of CGI, a 31,000 person IT firm.  The essay first appeared in Karl Moore’s Forbes column on Leadership.  The author is Rebecca Black, a McGill graduate and now a […]

Today’s Tuesday Readng, “Three Leadership Lessons from Sochi:  Practice, Practice, Practice,” appeared in the strategy+business blog.  It comes from the pen of Eric J. McNulty, director of research at the National Preparedness Leadership Institute. No one excels without lots of practice.  Most athletes at the 2014 Olympics have been practicing hours almost every day for […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is an essay, “Doing Less, Leading More” by Ed Batista.  The essay recently appeared in the Harvard Business Review’s Blog Network.  Batista is an executive coach and an Instructor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He writes regularly on issues related to coaching and professional development at <edbatista.com>. This essay was recently […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “Your IT Project is Toast – 11 Early Indicators To Watch For”,  is a slide deck that I recently found in InfoWorld.  The author is Roger Grimes, contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center. The IT world and every other world, for that matter, is not immune to projects going down in flames.  Many times when projects […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “An Unexpected Path:  How I became Chancellor”, is an essay by Phyllis Wise, Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.  The essay was posted at LinkedIn.com. Chancellor Wise thinks of herself more as a leader by accident than by design.  After completing her doctorate at the University of Michigan, her goal […]

Peter Senge has written that After Action Reviews (AAR), the subject of today’s Tuesday Reading, are “one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised.”   AARs were designed by the Army as a tool to be used after a project or major activity has been completed.  It allows employees and leaders to learn what […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “Opening Gifts.”  This essay’s author is Roger Schwarz, CEO of Roger Schwartz and Associates and it recently appeared in his blog. Schwarz begins by noting that we receive a lot of intangible gifts from those we work with.  They are often not always wrapped in lovely wrapping paper with beautiful bows.  […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading “Real Influence,” from the title of Mark Goulston and John Ullmen’s book “Real Influence:  Persuade Without Pushing and Gain Without Giving In,” is a continuation of the reading begun last week.  Goulston is a business psychiatrist, executive coach and cofounder of Heartfelt Leadership.  Ullmen oversees the website MotivationRules.com and teaches at […]

I’ve titled this week’s Tuesday Reading “Real Influence” from the title of Mark Goulston and John Ullmen’s book “Real Influence:  Persuade Without Pushing and Gain Without Giving In.”  Goulston is a business psychiatrist, executive coach and cofounder of Heartfelt Leadership.  Ullmen oversees the website MotivationRules.com and teaches at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.  This reading is […]

Today’s reading is a post, “Fors and Againsts,” that recently appeared in the Creative Leadership blog of John Maeda.  Maeda, who currently is the President of the Rhode Island School of Design, calls himself a graphic designer, computer scientist, academic, and author.  Previously, he was E. Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Associate […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading, “Where’s Your Focus?”  is a post on Jim Hall’s COACHING BUTTONS Blog.  Jim is an 2007 ITLP alum from the University of Minnesota where he is now Director of Information Services at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Jim’s essay focuses on Leading – Managing – Doing (LMD) and, in particular, on […]

Leadership lessons continue to flow from the recent worst-to-first Red Sox season.  Here is a great article from Fast Company on David Ortiz and leadership, “World Series MVP David Ortiz’s Big, Bold, On-the-fly Leadership Lessons“. It’s lessons:   1.  Borrow from other industries.  I.e., the huddle. Video of Papi rallies his teammates in dugout   […]

Indeed, as Marshall Goldsmith suggests, “What Got You Here Wont Get You There”, but it is still important to understand that what got you here did get you here.  We have become the leaders we are today because of a unique set of varying experiences.  We’ve been taught new things, shown the right ways, seen bad […]

Many aspire to be a formal leader at some point in their career.  The Tuesday Reading for today has some advice for you:  “Act Like A Leader Before You Are One”.  In her HBR blog, Amy Gallo, contributing editor at the Harvard Business Review, suggests that you begin to act, think, and communicate like a […]

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. […]