Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
There are random events, and there are events that are chock full of patterns: the trick is knowing one set of events from the other, and in figuring out what, if anything, any patterns mean.
Something as simple as a run chart stuck up on your bulletin board wall helps you plot experience, whether it be the number of times your seven year old wakes-up at nights (less common lately – thank goodness) or the number of times things a client calls with one “last” change.… Read the rest
Just as in sports, some people in business seem to have the knack – and luck – of being in the right place at the right time. But how do they do it, and what can you learn from them that can work for you?
Here are six things you can do to raise your discovery profile:
1. Do great work.… Read the rest
Like thousands of others, you probably have already read “Ten Secrets Headhunters (Usually) Don’t Tell You” ( here ) which covered the in and outs of working with headhunters. (Readers can go also through the full basics of job-hunting by reading the “Choose Me, Hire Me” series which starts here .)
But while headhunters can be helpful career advisors, few are.… 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
There are ways to mark time as well as waste it. Camp Mather is neither. Instead it’s a low-frills family camp where I spent last week on vacation with my seven year old son. It is a place for San Francisco families to affirm the milestones that come with personal development and growth for their kids and themselves.
In its 85th year of being a warm getaway place in the splendor of Yosemite for residents of the City with the big heart and cold summers, it’s a venue for the rarity of modern life: unstructured child centered play for kids in a natural setting.… Read the rest
Like the obese man who can’t understand how he’s gaining weight as he grabs a diet Coke to go with his triple Big Mac and large fries, one of the easiest ways to fire someone – like dieting incorrectly – is to hire wrong: right person hired into the wrong culture, wrong role, wrong supervisor, wrong time, or wrong skill set.… Read the rest