Goals & Practices

Today’s reading – “Stop Chasing the Wrong Priorities”  – comes from the pens of Kelly Goldsmith and Marshall Goldsmith and appeared in a recent CBS News blog.  Marshall Goldsmith is a well-known author, leadership thinker, and executive coach.  Kelly Goldsmith is assistant professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. The reading builds […]

Recently Daniel Markovitz wrote “To-Do Lists Don’t Work” for the Harvard Business Review blogs.  I found the posting to be a good discussion of why we all wrestle with making our to-do lists work and decided to share it as today’s Tuesday Reading.  Markovitzis president of TimeBack Management and the author of A Factory of One. He […]

Today’s reading – “Why Appreciation Matters so Much” – comes from the pen of Tony Schwartz, President and CEO of The Energy Project and author of Be Excellent at Anything. Schwartz observes that a recent world-wide study by Towers Watson found that the single highest driver of engagement is whether or not workers feel their managers […]

Hear from members of the MOR Associates team and past program participants as they give an overview of the Leaders Program and what to expect in the months ahead in this video.     

Anna Biggers, ITLP alum from University of Oklahoma, suggested today’s reading –  “’No’ is the New ‘Yes:’  Four Practices to Re-prioritize Your Life”.  Tony Schwartz is author of this article, which appeared in the Harvard Business Review blog last January.  He is president and CDO of The Energy Project. Schwartz notes that we all have back-to-back meetings, more email […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “Not Achieving Your Goals?  5 Common Mistakes”which appeared in the CBS business blog recently.  Kelly Goldsmith is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.  Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading leadership thinkers.  He is author or editor os some 30 books on leadership and management.  Each of us sets goals […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “What to do when you’re stuck” is from Margaret Heffernan’s blog atCBS News.  Heffernan has been CEO of five businesses in the United States and United Kingdom.  A speaker and writer, her most recent book Willful Blindness was shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book 2011. Heffernan begins by noting that […]

We all need to have a “listening” tune-up from time-to-time.  Today’s reading “How to Really Listen”serves that purpose.  The article is from the Harvard Business Review Blogs and was written by Peter Bergman, author (“Get the Right Things Done”) and strategic advisor to CEOs and their leadership teams. Listening is hard, one or the hardest of the […]

Today’s reading is a short piece “Nix Ambiguity and Focus for Lasting Change” by Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, as well as Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. In this piece, a true story about eliminating narcotics abuse in a health-care network […]

Today’s reading “You are what you learn”comes from Scott Adam’s blog at dilbert.com and was drawn to my attention by my oldest son. The key point in Adam’s short essay is simply: A person changes in a fundamental way as he or she engages with a particular field of knowledge, i.e., when he or she […]

It’s easy for me to imagine that I don’t procrastinate.  But that would really be stretching the truth, stretching it a lot.  The reality is that no one of us is immune to procratination. Today’s reading is “Stop Procrastinating…Now”by Amy Gallo, a contributing editor at the Harvard Business Review. There are lots of reasons why we procrastinate: […]

In MOR’s several Leaders Programs, we routinely talk about the need for everyone to set aside time on a regular basis for reflection, for work on strategic projects, and for planning.  In today’s reading “An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day“, Peter Bregman proposes a very structured plan for planning and thus for gaining control of […]

You may have run across the term “decision fatigue” in your recent reading. John Tierney in a lengthy NYTimes article “Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?” writes: “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get anyry at colleagues and families, spurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket, …  No matter how rational […]

Today’s Reading, “Go Ahead, Take That Break”, comes from Whitney Johnson’s HBR Blog.  Johnson is a founding partner of Rose Park Advisors (Clayton M. Christensen’s investment firm), and is author of the forthcoming book “Done-Dream-Do:  Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream.” Many studies have shown how important rest is to the human brain.  […]

Today’s reading is a short piece by Jeff Haden, “One Small Step for You – One Giant Leap for Employees”.  Haden learned much of what he knows about management as he worked his way up the printing business from forklift driver to manager of a 250-employee book plant.  The rest he picked up from ghost writing books […]

Today’s reading is the Schumpeter* column “Too much information”, from the July 2, 2011 issue of The Economist. The column notes that “information overload is one of the biggest irritations of modern life.”  The author goes on to note that the ”data fog“ is thickening at the time when workers are compelled to take on additional […]

This week’s reading comes from an interview Robert Mcgarvey had with Larry Bossidy that appeared in the July 2003 issue of the AmericanWay – “It’s All In The Follow-through” – about the time Bossidy’s book Execution was published.  Of particular attention is the sidebar at the very end of the piece. Bossidy is the former chair of […]

John Baldoni is an internationally known leadership educator, coach, author, and speaker.  Today’s reading, a recent BNET blog post, is “’I Don’t Have Time’ and Other Excuses Managers Give for Not Coaching” and can be found at <http://bit.ly/mPG92a>. Baldoni notes that most leaders know that coaching is part of their job.  And, companies that have […]

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 […]

I recently stumbled across a post “ The Toughest Choices a Leader Must Make”(which is alternatively titled “Thinking Strategically About What You Want to Accomplish in Life”) that really caught my attention.  Its author is Ray Blunt, who is Associate Director and Fellow at the Washington Institute fro Faith, Vocation, and Culture.  His focus as a leadership […]