What can you learn from the toughest leadership job on Earth?
agine you're heading up a team stationed in Antarctica. And your relationship with some of the crew members goes sour. There's nobody else to enforce your authority. In fact, there's no one for hundreds -- if not thousands -- of miles. And you can't fire anyone. Everyone has a critical role. How do you even punish them? How can you take things away in a situation where everyone only has the minimum amenities to begin with? And there's no one to get…
4 minutes
Team Building: How to use Moneyball at the office to build great teams
ere are a lot of myths about team building. For instance: People are not a company's most valuable asset. The right people are. This is one of the key things Jim Collins explains in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, his exhaustive study of great teams and leaders. He holds Nucor up as a prime example of perfect team building. These guys were so devoted they chased lazy employees out of the factory. Via Good…
5 minutes
How To Overcome Fear Of Public Speaking And Give A Great Presentation
at Dilbert comic is pretty accurate. Gallup says 40% of people fear public speaking -- and some people fear it more than death. Jerry Seinfeld interpreted this as meaning that at a funeral, more people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. Via Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool: A wide variety of studies have crowned fear of public speaking - or glossophobia, for sticklers - as…
5 minutes
Which Job Skills Will Be Most Important In The Coming Years?
2011, Foreign Policy Magazine named Tyler Cowen #72 in their list of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers." He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and, along with Alex Tabarrok, he blogs at Marginal Revolution, one of the most popular economics sites on the internet. Tyler is a New York Times bestselling author, having written 13 books including Discover Your Inner Economist and The Great Stagnation. His latest book is Average Is Over which gives a fascinating look into where the…
8 minutes
The System That All Creative Geniuses Use To Develop Their Ideas
ter Sims is the bestselling author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. It was one of the best books I read in 2012 and I’ve posted about it numerous times (here, here, here and here.) Peter and I discussed Pixar's secret to collaboration, the creative process shared by world class architects and comedians, and the single most important thing everyone needs to be doing to have breakthroughs of their own. My conversation with Peter was quite…
5 minutes
This Is The Number One Thing That Holds Most People Back From Success
at's the number one thing that holds most people back from success? It's not intelligence or hard work. It's your attitude. Sound like the drivel your parents told you when you were 16 that inspired eye-rolling? That's what I thought, too. But then I kept seeing the same thing over and over from experts and research... The War For Talent Is A Myth Marketing genius Seth Godin says it's actually a war for attitude: ...it's not really a search for talent.…
4 minutes
Stay Focused: 5 Ways To Increase Your Attention Span
you guys are anything like the readers of Slate.com, 38% of you are already gone. You couldn't stay focused long enough to engage with this post at all. Is it time to scroll to see more? Too much effort, too busy, meh, gotta go, HEY LOOK SOMETHING SHINY!!! -- another 5% of you just vanished. Yes, attention spans are that bad. Now I'm wondering if I should have made this post shorter. Cal Newport, Georgetown professor and expert on…
3 minutes
Creativity At Work: 6 Ways To Encourage Innovative Ideas
rvard's Teresa Amabile, author of The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, says there are three components to creativity at work: Expertise (People who aren't any good at physics rarely come up with relativity theory.) Creative thinking skills (Are you even trying to think outside the box?) Motivation (Personal interest like curiosity beats monetary bonuses.) Her research produced 6 things that companies and managers can do to support and inspire creative work: …
4 minutes
