How Does Backward Design for People Stuff Make Leading Edge Sense?

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of th...
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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

Your Career: How to Say Goodbye

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.

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(More) Risky Business: How to Leap Tall Buildings

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.

  1. A colleague who was nudged out of his role with a firm asked for more separation pay than the organization indicated it customarily offered.
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[Canaan Partners’ Workbook] How to Ask for Money

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