Deepak Chopra on Your "Super Brain," Work Stress and Creativity

Deepak Chopra on Your "Super Brain," Work Stress and Creativity: Is the brain a verb or a noun? One of two questions, Deepak Chopra M.D. tells me, that would stimulate an e-mail exchange between he and neuroscientist Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D. leading to the co-authoring of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-Being.

3 Tips on How to Negotiate with the Tiger

3 Tips on How to Negotiate with the Tiger: When viewers first lock eyes with the roaring Bengal tiger onboard the lifeboat in the recently released movie “Life of Pi,” many will probably jump back in their seats. Even though almost all the images of that tiger were computer generated, the creature is fearsome enough to provoke a spontaneous physical reaction.

10 New Year's Resolutions That Will Jump-Start Your Career

10 New Year's Resolutions That Will Jump-Start Your Career: Many of you will resolve to do a whole host of things in 2013. Some will vow to eat healthier, lose weight, or save money?while others will pledge to land a new job, get a promotion, or earn more money.

Seven Ways To Be Indispensable At Work In 2013

Seven Ways To Be Indispensable At Work In 2013: The New Year is, for many, a time of change and resolutions. Be thinner! Be richer! Meet the love of your life!

The Secret to Creativity and Productivity

The Secret to Creativity and Productivity: Do you ever find yourself thinking, "Well, I could move to San Francisco, or New York, or China, or Chile! And I could work in tech, or fashion, or marketing, or something else!" while another voice in your head says, "This is my list of things to do today. I need to go buy groceries, book a bus ticket for tomorrow's trip, follow up with Joe from the conference... "

Top 10 Qualities That Make A Great Leader

Top 10 Qualities That Make A Great Leader: Having a great idea, and assembling a team to bring that concept to life is the first step in creating a successful business venture. While finding a new and unique idea is rare enough; the ability to successfully execute this idea is what separates the dreamers from the entrepreneurs. However you see yourself, whatever your age may be, as soon as you make that exciting first hire, you have taken the first steps in becoming a powerful leader. When money is tight, stress levels are high, and the visions of instant success don’t happen like you thought, it’s easy to let those emotions get to you, and thereby your team. Take a breath, calm yourself down, and remind yourself of the leader you are and would like to become. Here are some key qualities that every good leader should possess, and learn to emphasize.

Ten Ways To Build Better Business Relationships

Ten Ways To Build Better Business Relationships: In the current issue of Family Business, my former colleague Jayne A. Pearl has a wonderful article on The Emily Post Institute, which is, in Jayne’s words still “defining propriety for the masses.”

The #1 Reason Leadership Development Fails

The #1 Reason Leadership Development Fails: Over the years, I’ve observed just about every type of leadership development program on the planet. And the sad thing is, most of them don’t even come close to accomplishing what they were designed to do – build better leaders. In today’s column I’ll share the #1 reason leadership development programs fail, and give you 20 things to focus on to ensure yours doesn’t become another casualty.

6 Tips to a Successful Mentorship

6 Tips to a Successful Mentorship: The business world is brutal, rewarding, difficult, exciting, and can pretty much be considered a rollercoaster of emotions.  Having someone to coach you through it and guide you through the maze of challenges is extremely valuable. I?ve been fortunate to have some amazing mentors in my life, and equally as fortunate to mentor some other leaders. Here are some tips that can lead to a successful mentorship relationship.

Three Steps for Overcoming Passive Resistance

Three Steps for Overcoming Passive Resistance: People can be extremely indirect in how they resist change. Not long ago I observed the executive team of a global media company reviewing strategic projects that had been initiated by a new CEO. The projects were intended to better leverage the corporate "center" through common processes, sharing of best practices, talent swapping, and the like. Although these made perfect strategic sense, the business unit leaders perceived the shifts as a potential loss of autonomy, power, and control. But rather than expressing this discomfort explicitly, they verbally supported the CEO and found more subtle ways to resist.

14 Ways To Be Better At Your Job In 2013

14 Ways To Be Better At Your Job In 2013: With a new year approaching, many people have an “out with the old and in with the new” mentality—and work is usually a big part of that, says corporate veteran and author Andy Teach.

4 Ways To Improve Your Hiring Process

4 Ways To Improve Your Hiring Process: When I was a corporate executive in the area of strategic planning, I quickly learned a very important lesson – the best way to ensure strategy implementation is to hire the right people into the company.

5 Ways to Lead a Meeting: Make 30 Decisions in 30 Minutes

5 Ways to Lead a Meeting: Make 30 Decisions in 30 Minutes: Time is our most precious asset, yet many don’t know how to manage or value it. The workplace demands that we multi-task; employees lose focus and become disorganized, making it difficult to make good decisions and build momentum. Meetings at work have become a commodity – we have too many of them that are not adding substantive value. As such, meetings are losing their impact, becoming distractions and forums for political maneuvering. It’s time to rethink how leaders can maximize engagement and their opportunities when people are asked to come together as one.

5 Trends Defining the World of Work and Leadership in 2013

5 Trends Defining the World of Work and Leadership in 2013: Grab a glass of eggnog and let’s settle down to speculate about which trends will drive the world of leadership and work in 2013. Sure, everyone’s prognosticating at this time of year, while also reflecting back on what they expected of 2012 – what happened, and where their spidey-sense came up short. So why not me?

How to Hire Key Players (Video)

How to Hire Key Players (Video): Oliver Guinness, an investor, says you should figure out your hiring needs in advance -- and look for people who are smarter than you.

Ego and Business: 6 Famous Failures, and 4 Easy Steps to Keep your Own Ego in Check

Ego and Business: 6 Famous Failures, and 4 Easy Steps to Keep your Own Ego in Check:

“There are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry”  General George Armstrong Custer, 1876     --Game, Set and Match: Sitting Bull My 3 Favorite People: Me, Myself and I

  How much does ego cost your company? How about your career? A noted career psychologist says

How to Be a Great Leader in a Time of Change

How to Be a Great Leader in a Time of Change: What makes a great leader? Erika Andersen – fellow Forbes contributor and author of Leading So People Will Follow – says we have an almost instinctive knowledge, thanks to thousands of years of evolution. “For most of history, who you chose as a leader was a life-and-death decision,” she says. “That’s deep wiring, and it’s not going to change in a couple hundred years.” The secret to recognizing these true leaders has been encoded in the heroic fairy tales that have been passed down, she says, and are just as true for contemporary business leaders as they were for medieval princes. “Leadership tales exist all around the world, and tell you what to look for in a good leader. They have important information embedded in them.”

Notre Dame's Manti Te'o: The 5 Steps to Authentic Leadership

Notre Dame's Manti Te'o: The 5 Steps to Authentic Leadership: My mother was rabidly Irish and my father rabidly Catholic so it was perhaps inevitable that as a boy I would rabidly root for Notre Dame. Over the years I've lost most of my taste for football, but Notre Dame’s remarkable success this year triggered some left over nostalgia that I didn't know I had. In fact, I recently found myself rooting around the web just trying to find out how Notre Dame first got its sobriquet the Fighting Irish. I never did find out, but I stumbled instead on this interview with Notre Dame’s star defense-man  Manti Te’o. Anything but a typical “jock piece,” Te’o movingly describes the prayer that eventually sent a young Mormon man with a lifelong dream of playing for Southern Cal to Catholic Notre Dame instead. But more impressive still, is his description of the mid-season death of the young woman he loved and the wisdom he learned from her. Before every game, for example, his girlfriend would write a note from her hospital bed urging him to always be “humble.” And if the tone of his interview is any indication, then this remarkable young man has taken her lessons to heart.

From Customer Management to Customer Engagement

From Customer Management to Customer Engagement: Empower your People and Reap the Rewards

How To Overcome Workplace Distraction

How To Overcome Workplace Distraction: Everyone knows how distracting life at the office has become. Midday yesterday I slacked off on my email and I now have 102 unread messages. The red light on my desktop phone is blazing, telling me I have voicemail waiting. There are two projects I should be doing, including one that involves compiling many disparate pieces of information and interviewing several business school professors. Then there are the personal tasks that compete for my attention, including a stack of health insurance papers I should file. And I don’t even sit in an open-plan office, as most workers do these days. I can shut my door.

How To Make Year-End Performance Appraisals A Constructive, Not Demotivating, Event

How To Make Year-End Performance Appraisals A Constructive, Not Demotivating, Event: It's that time of year again.  The time in the business world where managers and employees face, often with anxiety, year-end performance appraisals.  The managerial challenge?  How to make these evaluations a candid and constructive but not demotivating event.

Efficiently Yours: Six Secrets to Email Mastery

Efficiently Yours: Six Secrets to Email Mastery: One of our biggest time wasters only came into use by most people within the last ten years - fifteen years for certain office workers, twenty for a few professionals in high tech, and a little before that for hard-core computer geeks and academics. Email is far too new a tool for most people to fully recognize the stranglehold it has on productivity.

Flourish As An Influential Leader - Think Like A Negotiator

Flourish As An Influential Leader - Think Like A Negotiator: What do employee reviews, vendor selection, venture funding, and project planning all have in common? They all involve persuasion and negotiation. Although most business interaction is not formally labeled as a negotiation, communication in the workplace is most often used to reach an understanding, resolve differences, or produce an agreement on a course of action—these are, by very definition, the goals of a negotiation. As a leader, it is essential to your success to use the skills and mindset of a negotiator.

11 Ways to Eliminate Average

11 Ways to Eliminate Average: At a dangerously high rate, our society is inundated with average - average customer service, average response time, average intelligence, average cleanliness, average taste, average design, average technology, average sales pitch, average pair of jeans, average relationship, average conference room, average everything. When I stop to think about it, I am simply overwhelmed by the amount of mediocrity I see everywhere I go. The most frustrating part has nothing to do with the fact that the service, experience or item was less-than-stellar; rather it’s the notion that the ordinary, ho-hum version could swiftly be improved, to become extraordinary.

16 Quick Tips To Become A Better Networker

16 Quick Tips To Become A Better Networker: Six degrees of separation are allegedly all that stand between you and anyone on the planet.  Or, according to my father, “There are not six degrees of separation, there are two; you just have to think hard enough.”

5 Habits of Highly Effective Communicators

5 Habits of Highly Effective Communicators: It's no secret that good leaders are also good communicators.  And the best leaders have learned that effective communication is as much about authenticity as the words they speak and write.

3 Questions That Will Make You Better In Business And Your Career

3 Questions That Will Make You Better In Business And Your Career: After helping a client prepare for a major presentation in front of a large crowd at an industry meeting, we sat down to discuss how it went. She immediately turned to me and said, “How did I do? Is there anything I could have done better?”

3 Ways Employers Can Get More By Demanding Less

3 Ways Employers Can Get More By Demanding Less:
Sound impossible? Below are three ways changing workplaces are becoming more productive and less stressful, all at the same time.

Empower Your Employees

Empower Your Employees: Learn how WestJet increases customer loyalty by making every employee the “CEO of the Moment”

5 Ways to Identify Prospective Leaders

5 Ways to Identify Prospective Leaders: As organizations assess their talent requirements to lead and execute their 2013 plans, many factors contribute to the evaluation process of an employee?s capabilities and know-how.   Corporations use a variety of different metrics to define an employee?s potential and succession plans to project ones future contributions and impact.  Beyond standardized tools that are used to identify and discover an organization?s ?bench strength? and future leaders, there exist a set of critical behaviors and disciplines that one must possess to advance as a leader.  Unfortunately, too many times scorecards are evaluated rather than the person themselves.

How to Communicate Effectively at Work

How to Communicate Effectively at Work
First, be crisp, clear and concise...

5 Mentors Everyone Should Have

5 Mentors Everyone Should Have: Having these types of people around to ask advice of and bounce ideas off can be essential to business owner's success.

How to Expect the Unexpected

How to Expect the Unexpected: Have you ever worked on a project that produced unexpected results? Unintended consequences are common in business. For example, sometimes when a senior manager makes a request, it causes a cascade of activity that is far beyond what she intended. The classic story (which may be an urban legend) involves a former Chairman of General Motors who casually commented to a staff member that he didn't like the color of the buildings on campus — and inadvertently triggered an expensive (and totally unnecessary) repainting program.

Cultivating Leaders at All Levels of an Organization - A Field Report

Cultivating Leaders at All Levels of an Organization - A Field Report: At Kotter International, our guiding mission is “millions leading, billions benefiting.”

How Do You Measure Your Own Performance?

How Do You Measure Your Own Performance?: Award-winning business owners reveal how they keep themselves on track ...

Personal Branding in the Future Workplace: A Crucial Skill for Employees and Recruiters Alike

Personal Branding in the Future Workplace: A Crucial Skill for Employees and Recruiters Alike: If you are planning to interview applicants next year at your company, here’s an important question: Would you rather hire someone with a high IQ or a high Klout score?

How Do I Go From Being An Idea/Vision Person To An Idea And Execution Person?

How Do I Go From Being An Idea/Vision Person To An Idea And Execution Person?:
Take out your list or little black notebook of ideas. You don't have one? And you're (supposedly) an ideas/vision guy? Fine, start one. Choose the smallest one...

The Art of Taking Advice: It Isn't What You Ask, It's Whom You Ask

The Art of Taking Advice: It Isn't What You Ask, It's Whom You Ask: When considering who to seek advice from, consider the expertise, timing and motivation behind the words of wisdom.

5 Ways to Cut Communications Blunders

5 Ways to Cut Communications Blunders: Does everyone you work with in your start-up do the right thing all the time? I didn’t think so. I would like to interview 50 start-ups and ask them to describe how often people do the wrong thing and how much that costs their start-ups.

Transparency Is The Key To Leadership

Transparency Is The Key To Leadership: I love mornings. The world is quiet, my coffee is hot, and optimism is in the air.

If Walls Could Talk at TechStars

If Walls Could Talk at TechStars: Sometimes mentors can feel like a broken record at business accelerators, doling out the same advice over and over...

3 Steps To Cure Job Stress In Time For Your Next Coffee Break

3 Steps To Cure Job Stress In Time For Your Next Coffee Break: When it comes to their working life, the level of on-the-job stress is the aspect that Americans are most dissatisfied with, according to a recent Gallup poll. Another survey from Harris Interactive found that three-quarters of us are feeling tense about our jobs, with factors such as bad bosses, annoying colleagues and inadequate salaries leading the list of woes.

Dealing with a Problem Employee? 3 Questions to Ask Yourself

Dealing with a Problem Employee? 3 Questions to Ask Yourself: If you are a manager, you have a problem child. You know who I’m talking about—she makes you roll your eyes when someone asks how work is going. You should just fire her already. You could get so much more done if she wasn’t there. Right?

5 ways to keep employees excited

5 ways to keep employees excited: Get employees invested in your firm, then eliminate bad bosses and red tape.

How to Give Feedback

How to Give Feedback: Not all criticism is constructive—and your opinions won’t be taken seriously if you’re more insulting than you are instructive. Here’s how to make changes without making enemies or scenes.

9 Things A Boss Should Never Say To An Employee

9 Things A Boss Should Never Say To An Employee:

There’s been a fair amount of discussion recently in the media on the worst communication mistakes employees make, and the negative comments employees should never say to a boss. This week, I’d like to turn the tables. There are likewise expressions a manager should never proclaim to an employee.

Getting Your Employees To Show Up

Getting Your Employees To Show Up: Curbing employee absenteeism begins with a smart policy approach. Here are 5 keys to get you started

Don't Innovate. Create a Culture of Innovation

Create a Culture of Innovation: While many organizations focus on addressing problems, the most successful focus on raising the bar. One of the ways they do this is by creating a culture where innovation thrives. When this organizational strength is magnified, it can become a source of competitive advantage.

How To Correlate The Skills You NEED With The Skills Your Company VALUES Most

How To Correlate The Skills You NEED With The Skills Your Company VALUES Most: What are the critical issues? If the answers were clear, every organization would likely change.  There are literally thousands of variables that leave leaders baffled as they sift through the clutter of needs and options to decide what is crucial. Most organizations are not able to fix everything; therefore, they need to prioritize the capabilities that if changed, would have the greatest impact on the organization’s results.

The Best Way To Start Your Day

The Best Way To Start Your Day: Get your workday off to a productive start by modelling the habits of three proven entrepreneurs in Part 13 of Lessons From Leaders video series

How To Communicate Effectively At Work

How To Communicate Effectively At Work: The title of Karen Friedman’s latest book isn’t exactly subtle. Shut Up And Say Something: Business Communication Strategies to Overcome Challenges and Influence Listeners lays out her no-nonsense philosophy about how to best get your point across, drawn from her 37 years of experience as a professional communicator.

3 Leadership Tips for Creating Organic Change

3 Leadership Tips for Creating Organic Change: My colleagues and I have spoken at length on this blog about how hierarchy-driven change can create barriers to success.  Today, Dennis Goin explains how a light touch from leadership can yield outstanding results.

10 Free Tech Tools to Boost Your Productivity

10 Free Tech Tools to Boost Your Productivity: The best tech tools and software that won't cost a cent

Overcoming Fear: The 3 Step Process

Overcoming Fear: The 3 Step Process: Can you name the biggest impediment to innovation? One of our Fishbowl “Captains” – John Erickson– hit the nail on the head in a team discussion this week.

Six Simple Rules For Doing Better With Less

Six Simple Rules For Doing Better With Less: In 1997, when Steve Jobs came back to rescue Apple , he removed several thousand middle managers. He couldn’t see that they were doing anything useful for customers. Without those middle managers, Apple went from the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable company on the planet. Apple demonstrated a central principle of radical management: by focusing energy on only those that added value to customers, and stopping doing things that didn’t, Apple did much, much better with less.

3 No-Fail Ways To Build Trust

3 No-Fail Ways To Build Trust: Try these confidence-building tips to engage your workforce