Tag: leadership

Experience: What You Get When You Don’t Get What You Want

I saw a sign the other day that read, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” It sounded pretty true to me. Sure, you get experience when you succeed, but if you think about it, the truly valuable lessons are learned when we don’t get what we want. This short […]

Doing the Wrong Thing – $8 Million; Doing the Right Thing – Priceless

Just the other day I read a story in one of our publications about Kara Jorud. Kara worked for the retailer Michaels as a store manager beginning in 2001. By all accounts, she was an exemplary manager and a hard worker. Her job required her to work extremely long hours, including weekends. In late 2007, […]

Hot List: New York Time’s Bestselling Hardcover Business Books

The following is a list of the bestselling hardcover business books as ranked by the New York Times’s with data from Nielsen BookScan on October 18. 1. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh. The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented […]

Character Counts

My oldest son was home from college recently and asked me to read a paper he was working on. The paper, for a business management class he is taking, was about leadership. I didn’t have to read very long before I found my son addressing the topic of the character of a leader. I must […]

Self Interest or Team Effort?

I was in a meeting yesterday and our discussion centered around how we could really engage certain people within an organization. We weren’t long into the discussion when someone said, “I always think that people are motivated by self-interest.” My first thought was that his comment was a bit cynical. But as I thought about […]

Decisionmaking 101

Have you ever considered that more of your difficulties at work come from decisions that are NOT made than those that are? How often do you wait for a decision to come from “on high” only to discover that by the time it does the opportunity has passed you by? My guess is that if […]

Words of Wisdom

Each week, I sit down at my computer to write. Sometimes I’ve been tossing an idea around in my head for the better part of the week and the words just flow. Other times, I’m racking my brain for something I feel is worthy of writing about. In one of those moments when the latter […]

Hot List: Wall Street Journal’s Bestselling Hardcover Business Books

The following is a list of the bestselling hardcover business books as ranked by the Wall Street Journal with data from Nielsen BookScan on September 20. 1. StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath. Are you unsure where your true talents lie? […]

death by meeting

Death By Meeting

OK, I’ll admit it, I don’t like meetings. I’ve never been a big believer in meetings. And while I know that sometimes meetings are necessary, I avoid them as much as possible. You see, I think Peter Drucker had it right when he said, “Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the […]

Like Brett Favre, Mark Hurd Takes His Game Elsewhere

I was intrigued to learn this week that Hewlett-Packard had sued to prevent its former CEO, Mark Hurd, from joining Oracle Corp. as co-president. You may recall that a few weeks ago I commented that I thought HP had done the right thing by parting ways with Mr. Hurd after he violated the company’s standard […]