Making important decisions, acting like a leader, being a person your colleagues can count on to get the job done – all of these are qualities associated with “taking initiative.” So if there’s a lot of extra initiative lying around, odds are you’d like to take some of it for yourself. Doing so, however, can…
There are a lot of ways to handle conflict. A popular one is to escalate them by avoiding the contentious subject, shouting at people who disagree with you, and other fun things like that. But if you’d like to, I don’t know, reduce the pain and agony of your next conflict, then active listening is…
You’ve certainly heard people talk about ethics before. Companies everywhere talk about doing business in an ethical manner, and you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time with wildly unethical people. Now obviously, what constitutes “ethical” can differ significantly from one person to the next, so finding a solid definition of ethics is…
In the past two decades I’ve delivered well over a thousand presentations, mostly live but also increasingly virtual as well (thanks, pandemic!). I’ve spoken to six people and to six thousand, and I’ve been everywhere from theaters to factory floors. No matter where I am, it’s fairly common for someone to ask me when I…
Last month I wrote an article about the way that technology impacts the nature of human work. (You can read that article here if you care to, which you should – it’s awesome.) But I realized later that nothing I said is especially valuable if computers eventually destroy all of humanity. And since that particular…
As everyone in the writing world knows, ChatGPT has come, and the end is nigh. Pretty soon the written word will be owned by machines, and all the people who used to make their living with words (like yours truly) will be thrown onto the proverbial streets. At least that’s the way some of the…
I’m just coming off a very lovely few weeks with my family. We saw friends, went skiing, and spent 12 solid hours on Christmas day together in the living room playing with new toys and games. It has been great. And it has also been educational. Because sometime during all this family-ness I realized that…
As 2022 draws to a close, there are two issues that seem to have completely dominated the year – supply chain, and labor shortage. Those have been the two key drivers at pretty much every conference I have attended this year. Fixing the supply chain is beyond my ability. But dealing with our persistent labor…
At its most basic, effective leadership consists of two key components. One of them is the human element – that’s the part where you’re showing and telling the people who work for you that you’re glad they’re there. This is the piece of leadership that gets the most attention, because there are an endless number…
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about my job is the opportunity to meet people living in places I would otherwise probably never go, doing things I know almost nothing about. It’s given me a chance to see a much broader cross-section of the world than I think most jobs allow for, and my…