Over many years, I've racked my brain for the single word that represents THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE of a successful business. Go ahead. Try it. What words come to mind? Communication will probably cross your mind. Maybe Accountability ... Leadership or Culture ... as well as personal characteristics like…
Go ahead. Raise your hand if you've never made a mistake I f your hand isn’t up, how willing are you to own and admit your mistakes? What's the Difference Between a Lie and a Mistake? [pullquote]If you make a mistake and are not corrected, this is called a mistake.…
PREPARE to Win … or get ready to get your butt kicked! In our travels, we’ve seen plenty of obstacles to success, from making the tough decisions to staying focused on execution.As if all that isn’t enough, there are still a few more barricades around the corner.Lack of preparation is one of…
What does it take to get on the Medal Stand and out of the Grandstands? She's won 17 Olympic medals. 12 of them are gold. She holds 13 world records. She's been Sports Woman of the Year twice. She's obviously a remarkable swimmer. She did all of it after having…
I have been working with a young CEO who recently acceded to her company’s leadership.
She was the successor to a more authoritarian regime and found herself working overtime to establish a more collaborative and less hierarchical environment.
She wanted to bring people to the table, encourage a stronger cultural bond among her employees and build a more inclusive culture that valued the contribution of each individual.
People welcomed those changes with open arms, eager to embrace a culture they much preferred.
What emerged along with a more engaging and transparent culture, however, was a cadre of executives so eager to please their new leader, and to be a part of her leadership team, that they acquiesced to every idea and plan. (more…)
It lasts about 300 to 400 milliseconds. It occurs about 10 to 20 times per minute.
Over the course of a day, excluding about 8 hours of sleep, it amounts to about an hour and 20 minutes on average, a fair chunk of time in our waking day.
If you consider that the universe is about 14 billion years old, about 54,000 years would pass by during any given span of those milliseconds.
Some might argue that we can’t see anything during that period.
Yes, all that happens in the blink of an eye … about 1/3 of a second.
It ain’t much but in those small fractions, a lot can occur.
If you’re not authentic, who are you?
Years ago I was traveling regularly to Asia, and wanted to buy my wife a Cartier tank watch, a style that was very popular at the time.
I visited a reputable jeweler where most of my partners had been shopping for over 20 years, and found exactly what I was looking for. My wife was ecstatic, and I saved a lot of money over what I would’ve spent here.
[pullquote]“If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake you are no longer authentic.”~ Jean-Paul Sartre[/pullquote]
One day, it stopped working. Cartier is a highly reputable brand, so I didn’t hesitate to send it to their New York facility for repair.
Imagine my stunned surprise when several weeks later they returned it with a note that said it was a reproduction.
A fake.
I not only bought the watch from an established retailer, but I had the beautiful Cartier box, a written certificate of authenticity and a warranty card. All of it was fake.
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You probably know someone, don’t you, who is a star performer who believes that her achievements go unrewarded?I’ve talked about the value of incentives before, but it keeps coming to mind as I talk to senior executives who don’t seem to have spent any time at all considering whether their incentive plans are working as intended … or whether they need to be revised.
In some ways, it reminds me of the comment that Bloomberg attributed to Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, during the $20 billion bonus scandals during the 2008-2009 financial meltdown.
According to Bloomberg, this was his comment … (more…)