Organizational

Learn from Success

Posted by on Jun 29, 2011 | 0 comments

“Learn from your mistakes.” How many times have you heard this? It’s good advice, as far as it goes. The lessons of our failures are valuable — burn your finger once and you learn to steer clear of the hot stove. But how often have you conducted an autopsy of a success? What might you learn if you did? Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s reader-friendly book “Switch — How to Change Things When Change is Hard” invites us to devote more attention to our successes — both for what we can learn about how to solve a problem and to help avoid overwhelm...

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The Benefits of Over-Communicating

Posted by on Jun 4, 2011 | 1 comment

When in doubt about who’s doing what, OVER-COMMUNICATE. Ask questions. Air assumptions. Clarify, clarify, clarify. Frequent, direct communication prevents you from assuming that your colleague is going to do something, only to find out when it’s too late that he thought you were responsible. (Remember the old saw that when you ASSUME it makes an ASS of U and ME? It’s true.) Over-communication of this kind also prevents you from stepping on your collaborator’s toes when you take action that you thought was obvious without discussing it with her first. Explicit...

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The Stop Doing List

Posted by on Dec 9, 2010 | 0 comments

If you’re like me, you have a To Do list — whether the high-tech version on your smart phone or the low-tech kind written on a Post-It, or perhaps just maintained in your head. But do you have a Stop Doing list? Maybe you should. I got this idea from Jim Collin’s illuminating book, Good to Great — Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Part of what makes good companies great is not being overly diversified. The great companies he studied pursued a single “Hedgehog Concept” (being the best at one thing rather than being an also-ran at a...

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In Praise of Partnership*

Posted by on Jun 21, 2010 | 0 comments

  I’m not sure when “partner” became a verb, and truth be told, my inner lexicographer probably winced the first few times I heard it. But now I have adopted it whole-heartedly. So much so that today I partnered with a terrific coach and consultant, Leigh Marz, to interview for an exciting consulting project involving three non-profit entities that are — you guessed it — partnering in service of a shared mission. Partnership offers so much more than going it alone. For Leigh and me, partnering provides complementarity of skills and experience. Our...

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It’s Not Just For Kids

Posted by on May 19, 2010 | 0 comments

  The very best parenting manuals translate to other aspects of life, as well. In her classic parenting guide, Positive Discipline, Jane Nelson asks, “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse?” It does sound crazy when she puts it like this, doesn’t it? But this belief is at the core of a discipline strategy that depends on punishments, blaming, and shaming to stop undesired behavior rather than trying to address the cause of the behavior. Meanwhile, my own experience tells me that feeling good usually...

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Law School Grads — Where Did Our Drive Go?

Posted by on Apr 29, 2010 | 0 comments

  “I don’t expect to love my job. There’s a reason they call it ‘work.’ That’s why they pay me for it,” my friend said to me at lunch yesterday. She is a senior associate at a big San Francisco law firm, and like many in her position, she is overworked and stressed but doesn’t know how else she can support her family. What has happened to all of those bright-eyed, eager law school graduates who were intellectually excited by their work, who wanted to make a difference, who loved the challenge and the puzzle of figuring things out? Far too...

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