Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
There are the hard things to do to be successful in careers and business, and then there are the easy ones that get you along the way as well.
This post is about on the easy ones.
But first an intro story.
My week last week was probably like yours; lost of stuff to do, and perhaps too little time to do it.… Read the rest
Yankee baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra (king of malapropisms but no relation to Abe Lincoln on the right) once said “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”
The same is true of most of the organizational stuff that you do that touches people in companies; figure out where you want to end up, and work backwards.… Read the rest
There are few things that are more important than first impressions (that tagline: “You only have one chance to make a great first impression“), the time in-between, and leaving that lasting impression by how you say goodbye.
People can forget at times a lot of bumpiness in that in-between period if the bookend hello and goodbyes are done well.
Sometimes the greatest risk you can take is to take no risk at all.
Or as James Dean phrased it, “Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.”
Three events this week brought that thought squarely home.
It’s a common challenge; how do you talk about what you’ve done if you’ve done well without sounding like the jerk down the hall who everyone calls a cleetus maggot?
In a world where Cheat Your Way to the Top seems to be a common workplace theme song, being accurate and correctly portraying yourself and your accomplishments is critical for getting your fair due.… Read the rest
There are at least two parts to effective communication: a “wrapper” or form in which the information is shared, and the data or actual content of the information itself. Miss both and you bomb, and get one right but not the other and thing can get bumpy.
My colleague Dr. Jo Whitehouse of Jumpstart BioDevelopment flagged a great resource courtesy Canaan Partners for entrepreneurs seeking start-up investment or just general investment period [Disclosure: Dr.… Read the rest