My post at Inc. today, “How Beatles Producer George Martin Succeeded Where Every Label Failed,” begins: How Beatles Producer George Martin Succeeded Where Every Label Failed George Martin signed the Beatles in 1962 after every British label rejected them. How the experts missed the opportunity happens more than you think. I played Abbey Road until the stylus on my child’s cheap record player destroyed each groove from Come Together to[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “This Insidious (and Subtle) Innovation Myth is Killing Your Creativity,” begins: This Insidious (and Subtle) Innovation Myth is Killing Your Creativity This specious myth is so commonly held enough that few challenge it. Yet overcoming it is easy and rewarding. Thomas Edison was an outlier. For someone to invent so many products and succeed with so many, even accounting for his failures, just doesn’t happen,[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “My Inc. post today: Like TED Talks? This 99-Second Video Covers Them All,” begins: Like TED Talks? This 99-Second Video Covers Them All Everyone loves inspiration, so we enjoy TED talks. But do they change behavior or just make us feel inspired? Who doesn’t love feeling inspired? I do, so for a long time I loved TED talks. No longer. Why not? Because I distinguish[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “How to Win an NBA Championship as a 66-Year-Old Grandmother of Five,” begins: How to Win an NBA Championship as a 66-Year-Old Grandmother of Five Knowing your values and living by them enables you to achieve the value of what others only dream of. This is a post about values, living by them, and achieving more through it. You read Inc.com. You value achievement. Let’s talk[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “Why Disaster Was the Best Thing to Happen to Me as an Entrepreneur,” begins: Why Disaster Was the Best Thing to Happen to Me as an Entrepreneur You want experience in people you hire and yourself too. Only the more useful the experience, the more painful it is to gain. Do you know how to tell how good at something someone is? I’ve learned: Clueless[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “Why 44 Percent of Top U.S. Executives Don’t Want To Hire You,” begins: Why 44 Percent of Top U.S. Executives Don’t Want To Hire You A survey of U.S. executives found 44 percent said Americans lack soft skills, which traditional education poorly teaches. Other methods work better, luckily. I went to business school mostly to learn business’s “hard” skills—ones we can quantify, like accounting and finance.[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “Avoid Taking a Job You Hate by Doing This in Your Interview,” begins: You could have learned in the interview why you’d hate your job if you’d had this perspective. Learn it and make your interviews productive. If you ever left a job you expected to love, or endured hating it, these words likely ring true for you: “People join good projects and leave bad management.“[…] Keep reading →

My post today on Inc.com, “2 Questions To Ask in Every Interview So They’ll Want You Back,” begins: Instead of trying to show off, making you look like a commodity, use these techniques to make interviews two-way conversations where they’ll want you back. Isn’t that what you want from an interview? If you want one thing most from an interview, you want the interviewer to want you back. If you want[…] Keep reading →

If persistence pays off, how far do you persist? How often do you persist (politely) until you’ve wrong an opportunity dry—absolutely, completely dry? As I wrote on Inc.com yesterday in “How to Build the Best Relationships With Both Leaders and Superiors,” people appreciate helping others—if you behave like you deserve it, but not like you’re entitled. A student of mine was applying to graduate school. She told me how she[…] Keep reading →