Do you want to improve your leadership skills? Does this describe you: Highly motivated? Limited time? Want to know top-5 business school culture (or just learn to lead like someone from one)? This series will help you. Columbia Business School provides a service to its students helpful to anyone — it has each MBA candidate take a 360-degree report and gives each a coach to help interpret the results and[…] Keep reading →

I compiled a series of posts on experiences and lessons from coaching MBA students at Columbia Business School. Click here to read the series. Meanwhile, here’s the introductory text: Do you want to improve your leadership skills? Does this describe you: Highly motivated? Limited time? Want to know top-5 business school culture (or just learn to lead like someone from one)? This series will help you. Columbia Business School provides[…] Keep reading →

I try to look at things from a systems perspective when the perspective applies and helps. We often talk about a criminal justice system. If a system is a set of interacting or interdependent parts forming an integrated whole, parts not forming an integrated whole do not make up a system. Large segments of what we call our criminal justice system increasingly seems a non-system we’ve mislabeled out of hope[…] Keep reading →

Do you have people you can’t avoid that annoy you and want to handle them more effectively? Normally I think of this situation at work, but I’m sure it applies to some people with their families on Thanksgiving. I build on the following two principles and apply them to personal relationships: Great teams are built on strengths. Don’t look for blame but take responsibility for improving things to the extent[…] Keep reading →

A reader wrote, after reading a few of my posts about not using Facebook and LinkedIn, yet following up discussions from Reddit here: Josh, I have a silly question that I can not stop thinking about. What is the difference between ReddIt and FB or LinkedIn? For me it sounds like a valid preference. A preference that is similar to preferring CNN in the early 80’s over the major networks,[…] Keep reading →

I’ve done burpees daily since December 22, 2011, at 40 years of age, starting with 10 a day, building to over 50 per day. I haven’t missed a day or burpee. I started them with a friend and they became one of my top daily habits—the first I simply started from scratch and never stopped. Why burpees? Top burpee values: If you know of any other exercise with these advantages,[…] Keep reading →

Part of this site’s new functionality that my awesome web designer is creating (he isn’t accepting my linking to him possibly partly from humility, but mostly because his career is taking off beyond web design into other areas and probably can’t work much on the web any more) is series, a list of which you can see by clicking on “Blog” in the navigation bar above. Knowing me and how[…] Keep reading →

Many people make the mistake of thinking that some things they think are beliefs and others are not beliefs but facts. Or that they are just right. For example, if you ask them who they think might be the next President, they might say it could be Hillary Clinton. They’d say that was a belief because they can’t prAove who will become the next President. They just have to wait[…] Keep reading →

I coached a client recently who felt like she had a lot on her plate. She was trying to figure out plans for the next year, where many decisions depended on each other and she couldn’t figure out which to do first. When she explained them to me it seemed clear the order in which she had to do each, but she was swimming in so much information she couldn’t[…] Keep reading →