[Early Spring 2015] The Envelope, Please

It’s a time of year when even the most distant observer notes that winners are separated from something referred to as losers. Who you are can be confused with what you’ve won (lately).

College bowl games, Super Bowl, Golden Globe, Writers Guild of America, Grammys, Oscars – all proclaiming who is/was hot, and maybe by inference, who is not.

Barack Obama got into the act with his January State of Union address noting that his campaigning days were over – eliciting cheers from Republicans – followed by a telling tally – “I should know because I’ve won both of them.Read the rest

[Life Back West] Early Summer 2014 – “Save Water: Drink Margaritas”

Clever won’t guarantee success though it might get you noticed.shutterstock_192535826

C. S. Lewis once noted “No clever arrangement of bad eggs ever made a good omelet” and that’s a pretty smart way to size clever by itself.

So I chuckled as I saw the slogan on the back of the wait crew shirts at the recently re-opened La Rondalla restaurant in my San Francisco Mission neighborhood.… Read the rest

The Talent Test: The Problem with “High Potentials”

The headline in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month blared “Employees with ‘High Potential’ Need to Know.

There’s just one problem. If you want to screw up talent, tell them they’ve got high potential – shorthand for they’ve been tapped and they’re great.

Why?

Research (Carol Dweck) shows that labeling folks doesn’t work to improve performance. In fact, labeling folks (“great,” “high-potential,” etc.Read the rest

Executive Leadership: Do Mormons Have the Secret Sauce?

Unless you’ve been under a rock recently, you know that the topic of Mormonism is hot, and the subject of Mormonism and leadership may be even hotter.

What’s up?

There are things that have put the religion in public view such as the Tony award winning hit musical The Book of Mormon and the series finale after five seasons of Big Love, about a polygamist Mormon family of a husband and his three wives.… Read the rest