Strategy

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 […]

Over the past several weeks I’ve seen many reviews of Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s new book “ The Progress Principle:  Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work.”  Today’s reading “How Small Wins Unleash Creativity” from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge is a summary of that book.*   Amabile and Kramer’s research […]

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, “The Right Response is Not Always Instant” , is from the pen of Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of “The GE Work-Out.”  His latest book is “Simply Effective.” Too many of the flood of messages we receive each day have an implied, or sometime stated, urgency that suggests, […]

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 […]

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 […]

For this week’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to a Harvard Business Review blog post by Linda Hill and Kent Lineback “Better Time Management is Not the Answer”.  Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professof of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Lineback has spent many years as a manager and executive in business […]

Are you up for a challenge?  Josh Linkner in a recent Fast Company blog post, “The 5% Creativity Challenge”, challenges each of us to schedule two one-hour thinking sessions each week.  Linkner is the author of Disciplined Dreaming – A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity and CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners. He suggests […]

The reading today, “Take ownership of your meeting experience”, appeared in the Facilitate.com blog and comes from the keyboard of Danuta McCall, a senior member of the Facilitate.com team.  The reading’s key point is that we, each as individual participants in a meeting, play a role in whether that meeting is successful or not.  We do […]

Today’s reading focuses on building a practice to increase your daily personal effectiveness.  The IT Leaders Program emphasizes being intentional and planful with the use of your time.  Specifically, we’ve suggested identifying and formally setting aside regular times to plan your week/day.  For example, you might schedule time Sunday evening or on Monday morning to […]

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 […]

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 […]

Have you ever been in a meeting to make a decision and before the context can be outlined, a few meeting participants have taken over and are going deeper and deeper into a solution based on a suggestion of one of the individuals?  Today’s reading, ”Go Broad Before You Go Deep,“ from Roger Schwarz’s Fundamental […]

Six months ago, Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science at Stanford University and author of a new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, had a blog entry “12 Things Good Bosses Believe. ”  You can find that entry at <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05/12_things_that_good_bosses_bel.html>. Today’s Tuesday Reading is Sutton’s effort to delve into one of these issues:  “If You’re the Boss, Start […]

Today’s reading is “The Four Capacities Every Great Leader Needs (and Very Few Have)” <http://bit.ly/beWaWF> by Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, a company that helps individuals and organizations fuel energy, engagement, focus, and productivity by harnessing the science of high performance.  This entry appeared in FastCompany’s Expert Blog on October 15, 2010.  (It […]

Today’s reading, “Getting to the Heart of a Disagreement – and Resolving It,” is from Roger Schwarz’s Fundamental Change Newsletter and is found below. Disagreements are natural and inevitable, and their resolution is often crucial to moving forward.  So, how do you resolve them?  Do you focus on developing common ground?  Do you try to minimize the differences?  Do […]

Tony Schwarts, CEO of the Energy Project, says a lot in this short piece “Six Ways to Supercharge Your Productivity”.  His key point is that as a result of the digital demands of the world we now inhabit, we are in danger of undertaking more and more tasks and creating less and less real value. He […]

I came across today’s reading, “Leaders Develop Daily, Not in a Day“, last week in John Maxwell’s GIANT Impact newsletter.  Maxwell is an internationally know writer — over 19 million books sold — and speaker on leadership. His’s thesis in this piece is very straightforward:  “Unless we set aside time to grow into the person […]