How and Why to Make Business Personal
I have a radical proposition to make: all business is personal. Whether you are calling a customer, running a meeting, presenting to your board or having a performance discussion, the impact on yourself and others is a deeply personal one. In fact, everything you do in business affects who you are and your relationships with…
Lead with Toughness and Tenderness
Have you ever found yourself working your butt off and not accomplishing what you want? Revenue growth is slower than you would like. Clients and customers are not closing deals fast enough. New products are slow in the making. Bonuses look slimmer than last year. How do you make sense of all this? Shouldn’t there…
Why We Should Humanize Our Leaders
Many of us tend to see our leaders as heroes or villains. We love them or hate them, idolize or demonize them, in much the same way as the press portrays our presidents. But this conception of leaders as larger than life, as the organization’s Big Brain, undermines leaders and followers alike. It puts tremendous…
Focus on Values, Leadership and Culture for Business Success
Everyone is looking for the secret sauce to success. I have personally spent the past thirty years traveling around the world searching for the recipe. Though I can’t say that I’ve found the leadership equivalent of the Holy Grail, I have noticed that the most successful leaders among us have a very distinct way of…
Three Steps to Developing a Growth Mindset
Everywhere I go these days, business is getting easier AND more complicated. We have access to more information, seemingly unlimited resources and opportunities to succeed. Yet there are more choices, competition comes from everywhere, and it’s tougher to focus and prioritize getting the work done. The world is simply getting more complex. Fortunately, our brains…
When Multitasking Works
We don’t often think about it, but it is such a gift to be able to be a participant and an observer of a conversation at the same time. As humans, we have this wonderful capacity to be witnesses to our own lives. By observing ourselves in action, we can remember where we’ve been, recognize…
Seven Tips for Managing Your Work Relationships
What’s your number one asset as a leader? Your skills? Your education? Your work experience? None of the above. It is your relational capital, your ability to build strong relationships with a wide range of constituents inside and outside your company. Borrowing from an ecommerce taxonomy, your work relationships can be classified into three categories:…
Embrace Anxiety in the Face of Change
Perpetual change. Successful companies and their leaders learn to thrive on it. A recent blog from Mozilla (the Firefox browser folks) proudly talks about how they are gearing up for the next chapter and pivoting to mobile. This past week Tech Crunch reported: Firefox OS developer phones sold out after first few hours on sale….
How to Minimize Stress on the Job
Warning: Your hot buttons can be dangerous to your health. To quote from our CEO Bob Rosen’s book, Grounded: “Feelings such as fear, anger, greed, envy, pessimism, frustration and shame can sap your energy and distract you from consciously engaging those around you and from focusing on what’s truly important. Negative emotions are notorious for…
Six Keys to Living Longer
Leadership is a hard job. You know how stressful it is… never-ending deadlines, people demands, constant changes. It must hazardous to your health! But, is it really harming your health? Well, turns out, that’s your choice, actually. Healthy Behaviors Genetics aside, lifestyle choices play a huge role in determining longevity. Researchers on The Longevity Project…
