Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
Outstanding talent from Hillary Clinton to Mao Tse Tung to Robert Downey, Jr. has been humbled and managed a career rebound.
Here’s one more comeback-in-progress to add to the list: Jonah Lehrer.
Lehrer’s attempt has lessons for anyone who has stumbled, made stupid mistakes, or taken a fall for someone else.
Maybe you.
Lehrer has been publicly psychoanalyzed, editorially flogged, and digitally despised.… Read the rest
It can be tough being a candidate, whether it be for a job or even one of those roles of a more public political variety.
Even if you’re seen as a slam dunk pick (think Hillary Clinton as the “inevitable choice” during the 2008 presidential campaign), things derail. The same is true of job candidates.
A client recently was being wooed by a firm until he thought they’d gone frosty on him; his hunch was that they’d decided he was really a “generalist” in background when they’d figured out they really wanted a “specialist.… Read the rest
Every job candidate’s dream is to have several job prospects that meet your job specs and simultaneously produce offers when you’re ready to make a decision.
Sometimes it really does work out that way; most of the time it doesn’t. And what you’re left with, as the anonymous poster on Quora this morning noted, is a “way to extend a job offer” so they can see what other offers surface?… Read the rest
Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” and advanced a number of prophetic ideas – all from the vantage of the 1960’s. McLuhan’s thoughts apply to you – including predicting the over extension of technology, and the intensification of the world community to its present expression as a “global village.”
McLuhan’s quip regarding message and medium was the thought of my morning at WordCamp San Francisco – an event for blogging geeks that is akin to baseball fans attending spring training – and experienced how presenters such as Scott Berkun, Vanessa Fox, Matt Mullenweg, et al.… Read the rest
We live in a world of spin: from embellished resumes to downright lies, people seem to have forgotten truth with their honesty manners. It’s hard to know if it’s always been this way, or if it’s changed over time. Certainly George Washington, whose birthday was celebrated last week as a US Federal holiday, would be appalled. George, as the legend goes, was the young man who voluntarily told his father that he had chopped down a cherry tree rather than lie about it.… Read the rest
Cheating – a less polite way to say exaggerating facts and misstating the truth – is rampant.
While the name of the Dreamgirls song was Fake Your Way to the Top , it might as well be Cheat Your Way to the Top. As Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. – author of a weekly column and the book “ Forward From This Moment ” – said in a recent NPR interview ,” This whole idea that you can cheat your way to the top and it doesn’t matter – and it’s the same as if you’ve worked your way to the there is one of my pet peeves.”… Read the rest