When you hear about polarization in leadership, what do you think? You think polarization is a problem, right? Do you think about how polarized politics silence moderate voices? … about how leaders treating everything as black and white miss the nuances of your thoughts? … about how you’ve learned to see things with nuance, which you consider more mature? … about polarizing leaders whose divisiveness you don’t like? Maybe not[…] Keep reading →

What makes relationships last? What makes one person loyal to another? These questions apply to personal relationships as well as business. They happened to come up with a client on business and as we talked about it, the conversation covered more personal relationships, the way you like business conversations to become. In my experience, relationships may start with things like common interests, shared histories, common friends, and other things that[…] Keep reading →

Do you have performance reviews at work? Do you want your next one to look great? A great way to make that happen is to get your manager or whoever rates you on your side, motivating them to evaluate you more positively. How do you do that? First, recognize they benefit from you doing well. The better their reports do, the better they do. Even if you think your manager[…] Keep reading →

Here’s my talk at Harvard. I talked about not dwelling on deciding, when appropriate, and instead moving toward execution, a major part of leadership. Someone in the front row recorded it with a small camera, so I hope the casualness of the recording doesn’t distract.

I saw this ad in the subway and confess it made me smile, but if you want to like your job more, I suggest it gives counterproductive advice and focuses your attention in the wrong place. The door was opening and I didn’t have time to get all the text, but it reads If the best part of your day is taking a 20-minute break to throw birds at pigs,[…] Keep reading →

The series of posts below covers creativity, mainly exploring counterproductive mainstream myths about it. I used to view “creativity” as vague, but a few sources dramatically and convincingly changed my perspective. One was a class at Columbia Business School called Systematic Creativity in Business, by Jacob Goldenberg. Creativity being systematic was designed to appear in the course name as a contradiction, but isn’t when you understand the material. His book[…] Keep reading →

Most of your identity is the culmination of the choices you’ve made. You choose all day every day. Many people have trouble making big choices, for some choosing is even debilitating. If you do, you’re holding yourself back from living your life more fully. I used to dwell on decisions too. In my second year of business school I saw many of my classmates dwelling on choices between different job[…] Keep reading →