Who hasn’t heard about the value of emotional intelligence? Everybody talks about how mere regular intelligence only gets you so far before you hit limits. It makes sense. Emotions affect your relationships and for projects bigger than you can finish alone, which means nearly everything, you need to use relationships. Deeper than how well you lead others, emotions help you understand yourself, so understanding emotions helps you improve your life[…] Keep reading →
You’ve heard the advice that to inspire and motivate people, it helps to connect their task to a higher purpose, right? It seems to make sense. Martin Luther King motivated people to painful and degrading but effective tasks with calls to justice based on concepts of freedom and religion. Patton motivated people to risk their lives with appeals to saving the country. What if you have a team without such[…] Keep reading →
When you think about influencing or motivating someone in business, what tools do you think of using? How do you think of motivating people? Did you think of incentive-based tools based in authority, like bonuses, promotions, raises, increasing or decreasing someone’s responsibilities, threat of firing, threat of demotion, and the like? In my experience, most people do. Why not? We’re used to seeing them used. They work fairly predictably—almost nobody[…] Keep reading →
Do you know you want to improve something about your life but never seem able to? Do you find yourself always trying to understand your problems but never overcoming them? Or just saying you’re just this way and can’t do anything about it, even though you know other people who were like you learned to get past it? You probably have internal objections and blocks stopping you. External hurdles are[…] Keep reading →
Read KQED’s story about how I’ve adopted inquiry-driven project-based learning in teaching my class at NYU-Poly, Entrepreneurial Marketing and Sales, in “Can University Professors Benefit from K-12 Progressive Teaching Tactics?” You no doubt already read my post “Inquiry-driven project-based learning rocks!” describing my experience at EduCon in Philadelphia and starting to value and use this style of teaching. If you didn’t, go there for background. The KQED reporter who wrote[…] Keep reading →
I hear similar reasons all the time that discourage would-be entrepreneurs from behaving entrepreneurially—starting business ventures, non-profits, or just projects they enjoy. This series helps you overcome the top ones I hear. Click on the entries in the Table of Contents to the left to see the posts in the series. Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone, but if it’s for you or your business, counterproductive myths don’t help you. Successful entrepreneurs[…] Keep reading →
A few years ago I posted a series on reasons I hear all the time that discourage would-be entrepreneurs from behaving entrepreneurially—starting business ventures, non-profits, or just projects they enjoy. This series helps you overcome the top ones I hear. I compiled them into easy-to-read series format. Click here and take a look at the series! To whet your appetite, the four discouraging myths in this series: You need a[…] Keep reading →
Following up yesterday’s post on Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz’s talk and my Q&A with him… He spoke on leadership and ethics. I felt honored and flattered for him to describe my question as “A great question, really the core question.” He spoke mainly about the many corporate decisions business and political leaders made that hurt many people and the systems that enabled them, as well as the beliefs and[…] Keep reading →
Sorry no big insight today, but I couldn’t help note that in attending a talk by Joseph Stiglitz and participating in the question and answer afterward, I got to interact with my fourth Nobel Prize winner. I met more of them when I studied physics, in particular studying with one. I also got to be friends with a Professor who had been hired by one of the other laureates in[…] Keep reading →