Courage

Disaster Recovery for Emotional Outbursts

November 12, 2010

You’re a professional, right? [Waiting for the affirmative.] Yep, that’s what I thought. Me too. One of the hallmarks of professionalism is emotional restraint; I pride myself on my ability to zip my lips when needed. But once in awhile, I experience a momentary lapse—times when exasperation or sarcasm gets the best of me and [...]

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Tasty Salsa and Avoiding Snap Judgments

September 8, 2010

If you’ve been a People Equation reader from the start, then you know that last year, I taught myself the hot-canning bath method of preserving food and learned a few things along the way.  This year, I used the Labor Day weekend to do some late-summer canning. At my request, Mr. People Equation obligingly stopped [...]

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The Z Factor

September 2, 2010

KNOWING WHEN TO ZIP YOUR LIP IS KEY TO SUCCESS Given that my company’s tag line is “master the people equation”, I’m always on the look-out for clever “equations” that tie to human dynamics. Of course, people are far too complex to be reduced to one “correct” answer like a math equation. Still, it’s fun [...]

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Managing Large Group Discussions

August 26, 2010

ENLIST YOUR AUDIENCE TO MAKE THE LOAD LIGHTER Ever go to a conference break out session and experience 90 minutes of lecture, paired with the never-ending Power Point slide deck?  It’s not a very engaging experience, is it?  Now, imagine attending a four-hour conference break out session, with 70 other people in the room with you. [...]

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Making Decisions, 100 Years at a Time

June 3, 2010

I’ve been watching reruns of the Ken Burns series The National Parks  on PBS. It’s an in-depth look at the birth and evolution of our country’s national park system.  Called “America’s best idea” by writer and historian Wallace Stegner,  men both famous ( Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir )and lesser-known (Stephen Mather , Charles Young) were [...]

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5 Lessons Learned from a Failed Project

May 29, 2010

Last week, I wrote about a powerful leadership lesson learned when my key project crashed and burned.  People Equation reader Nancy asked about the lessons learned from that experience. Indeed, there were several. But first, the story of “The Institute”, the project that gave me both fits and gifts. . . Years ago, I joined [...]

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Redemption

May 23, 2010

Have you ever led a high-visibility project that has crashed and burned? I have and it taught me a powerful leadership lesson. Read on . . . The Back Story Many years ago, shortly after I joined a Fortune 500 company, I was assigned to manage a project called the “Institute”. The Institute was an [...]

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Boundaries of Fearlessness

March 27, 2010

In his book Linchpin Seth Godin draws a distinction between the words fearless and reckless. Fearless people, he says, are “unafraid of things one shouldn’t be afraid of.” They push through any imagined “threat” to make a presentation to a difficult customer or conduct a challenging conversation with an underperforming employee. On the other hand, [...]

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It’s Only “No”

March 23, 2010

When I was a kid, struggling about going for a new opportunity my mom would say, “What’s it hurt to ask? The worst they can say is ‘no’.”    Same message by Dan McCarthy of Great Leadership in his post Career Advice Part 4: You Have to Ask for It. . .  . . . [...]

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Awesomely Simple

February 14, 2010

Book Review: Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action By John Spence In the introduction to his book Awesomely Simple, author John Spence declares: “everything in this book is from real life: you’ll find no fluff, no grand theories, no intellectual back-flips.” Readers who want complex organizational theories or a rigorously annotated [...]

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