I’ve been reading and rereading Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton and Heen. I find it particularly useful because it identifies the thing that has always baffled me about “those” conversations: they’re not about facts and logic. Even though we spend inordinate amounts of teeth-grinding time on “But you said…” and “I don’t remember [...]

20-30 Years Old and Suddenly Sitting at the Boss’s Desk

I was recently interviewed for an article in the Wall Street Journal for the column You at the Boss’s Desk. Here’s the article: 
I wanted to expand on the topic a bit. For people in their 20’s and 30’s a sudden promotion to a management position can have its joys and challenges. Of [...]

Quitting to succeed

Seth Godin, author of Tribes and Small is the New Big, has another book out – The Dip.
An important and audacious premise of The Dip is that quitting is sometimes the very best action to take to get what we want. Godin says, “we fail when we get distracted by tasks we don’t have the [...]

10 things businesspeople can do to adapt in the new economy

It’s rough out there.  Customers have lost their discretionary income.  Some have no income at all.  If you do business to business  then you know budgets have been severely cut back.  It seems like nobody’s buying.  So what do you do while things are slow.
10.  This economic situation is temporary and if you can wait [...]

Group selection and coaching for adaptability

For background: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/the-controversy-of-group-selection-theory/
There is a scientific theory in evolutionary biology called Multilevel Selection Theory, or Group Selection Theory.  The short version is that Darwin wrote about only one part of evolution – the evolutionary success of adaptive, fit individuals.  However, some groups survive even if the individuals in them are not the fittest in the [...]

Millennial Leaders: Will they survive?

Margaret Wheatley (http://www.margaretwheatley.com/) has said
“I strongly believe that the old leadership paradigm has failed us and that our current systems will continue to unravel.  This has changed what I do and whom I choose to support.  I no longer spend any time trying to fix or repair the old or to improve old leadership methods.  [...]

How coaching can fill the gap left by retiring Boomer managers

Though the economy is stalling many retirement plans, there are still a whole lot of empty management holes being left behind retiring boomers.  
As experienced managers retire, companies face the challenge not just of replacing them, but of bringing their replacements up to speed efficiently and effectively.  In many cases, Boomer’s replacements, often Millennials (people [...]

Top 10 tips for managers working with Millennials

Here’s the top 10 tips for managers working with Millennials:
10. Put yourself in their shoes.  Remember what it was like being 26.  Did you understand why your parents and their friends did what they did?
9. Rewind 20 to 30 years.  You’ve had years and years to learn.  They haven’t.  Start there.
8. Delegate using the Tell, [...]

Attributes that make vendors valuable to CIOs

In http://blogs.cioinsight.com/cgi-bin/mte/mt-tb.cgi/15776, Eric Lundquist in CIOInsight lists the attributes CIOs believe make employees valuable who are headed for mid-level manager positions (Society for Information Managers (SIMS)).  
Turns out they are the same attributes that make vendors valuable, too.  In my opinion, they are the attributes that make ANYONE valuable!
All of those attributes are coachable.
All of [...]

Twitter for business 2

I’ve blogged before about the need to move from a machine-model of business to an organism-model.  Here’s a perspective from CIO Insight that sees twitter as a catalyst for the ecosystem in which business is an organism:
“Dave Winer, a developer who helped pioneer RSS (Real Simple Syndication), XML-RPC (the standard that evolved into SOAP) and other Web [...]