Career Management

How to keep them talking about you

February 7, 2011
What’s an easy-to-do, likely-to-be-remembered thing you can do as a leader to learn more about your organization and build connections at the same time? Here’s something a university president once did that students still talk about more than 10 years later.

Building upon relationship economics

February 4, 2011

What if Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had never gone with friends on the two-week camping trip in Colorado that launched their friendship? Since you can never know which relationships will result in great partnerships or business deals, you can’t afford to dismiss any casual encounter as unimportant. Nurturing those encounters is a matter of relationship economics.

4 ways to beat procrastination

February 1, 2011

As people grapple with the urge to put things off, economists and psychologists have turned the study of procrastination into a significant field. And what have they discovered? That each of us is divided. If that’s true, simply trying harder to beat procrastination isn’t going to work. Here’s what will:

Leadership Tips: Vol. 111

January 10, 2011
Stay professional at virtual meetings … Get free advice about running a business from Ask.Inc.com, launched last fall by Inc. magazine and answer site Mahalo … Here’s a suggestion for airport security … Google co-founder Sergey Brin, having conquered search, has set his sights and his money on finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

Good news for optimists

December 23, 2010

Some findings about folks who look on the sunny side: They’re less susceptible to heart disease. Their blood pressure is typically five points lower than other people’s. They live, on average, more than nine years longer than the rest of us.

Leadership rules of behavior

December 15, 2010

As a management professor at Stanford, Robert Sutton heard many tales of woe that led to his business best-seller, The No Asshole Rule, whose thesis was simple: Don’t hire jerks. Beyond jerkdom, however, Sutton has a few suggestions about how to behave and how not to behave as a leader:

When it smells like courage, it’s courage

November 22, 2010

Semblances of virtue are not pure virtue, the philosopher Aristotle said. An action may look good and produce the right outcome, he argued, but there’s something lacking in intent. As a matter of fact, the whole thing could be a fake. But what about courage?

How to pull yourself out of a slump

November 16, 2010
Top performers in every field, just like top athletes, go through slumps. For ordinary mortals, a slump may be less visible than a superstar’s, but it’s built on the same combination of losing confidence, obsessing on errors, fretting over every new move and struggling with hellish projects they once liked. Here are some techniques that can help slumpers snap out of it:

Know when to quit making your case

November 2, 2010
You can fight for causes at odds with your organization’s position, but once a decision is made and directives given, you must comply or go. Consider the story of Robert Drinan, who ran for a U.S. House seat on an anti-Vietnam War platform and, in 1971, became the first Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress.

After the ax: 3 CEOs see the light

October 15, 2010
Here’s how three star bosses reflect on their falls: ex-CEOs Jim Donald, Starbucks; Ed Zander, Motorola; David Neeleman, JeBlue.