Five Important Lessons From A Trip To The Apple Store

Five Important Lessons From A Trip To The Apple Store: Want to sell more stuff? Take some tips from the folks who do it best.

Becoming A Great Leader Is A Lifelong Quest, But One Well Worth Pursuing

Becoming A Great Leader Is A Lifelong Quest, But One Well Worth Pursuing: I have spent many years as the leader of several companies. I hope that during that time I have learned a bit about what it takes to become a great leader. Many of the lessons I am still learning, but I wanted to share a few of the things I have come to learn thus far.

12 Ways to Be the Leader Everyone Wants to Work For

12 Ways to Be the Leader Everyone Wants to Work For: It’s not easy being a manager these days. You’re responsible for recruiting, hiring, training, coaching, modeling, engaging, monitoring, motivating, anticipating, prioritizing, planning, evaluating, clarifying, adapting, envisioning, directing, disciplining, reinforcing, reporting, recognizing, budgeting, and building alliances. And that’s all before lunch. And if you struggle with just one, your reports will say you’re over your head.

Nine Practices to Help You Say No

Nine Practices to Help You Say No: Irene* is a great colleague. A senior manager in a large consulting firm, she pitches in when the workload gets heavy, covers for people when they're sick, and stays late when needed, which is often.

How To Deal With Jerks And Idiots

How To Deal With Jerks And Idiots: Have you ever noticed that your co-workers tend to fall into two categories? First, you have the idiots – those lovely, well-intentioned people that don’t seem to have a clue what they’re doing. Second, you have the jerks – the people who are difficult to deal with, stubborn and always wrong. And they’re not just in your office! On the highway, the idiots are the people driving more slowly than you, while the jerks are the people whizzing by you in the left lane. At the grocery store, the idiots are blocking the ice cream aisle, while the jerks are pushing your cart aside to reach the soup. It feels like they’re following you around, doesn’t it? In fact, toward the end of a bad day, it can start to feel downright personal!

The Three Basic Secrets of All Successful Presentations

The Three Basic Secrets of All Successful Presentations: I was recently invited to speak to MBA students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as part of a unique program called the Mastery in Communication Initiative. In its expert speaker’s series, Stanford invites “pioneers in the field of communication” to share their insights and to coach business students in the art and science of persuasion, pitching, communication, and presentation skills.

Do You Know the Difference Between Delegating and Abdicating?

Do You Know the Difference Between Delegating and Abdicating?:

Directing others involves delegation. It’s just that abdication and delegation can look pretty similar at the beginning.
How can you tell them apart? Let the saga continue.

The Most Successful Leaders Do 15 Things Automatically, Every Day

The Most Successful Leaders Do 15 Things Automatically, Every Day: Leadership is learned behavior that becomes unconscious and automatic over time.  For example, leaders can make several important decisions about an issue in the time it takes others to understand the question.   Many people wonder how leaders know how to make the best decisions, often under immense pressure.  The process of making these decisions comes from an accumulation of experiences and encounters with a multitude of difference circumstances, personality types and unforeseen failures.   More so, the decision making process is an acute understanding of being familiar with the cause and effect of behavioral and circumstantial patterns;  knowing the intelligence and interconnection points of the variables involved in these patterns allows a leader to confidently make decisions and project the probability of their desired outcomes.   The most successful leaders are instinctual decision makers.  Having done it so many times throughout their careers, they become immune to the pressure associated with decision making and extremely intuitive about the process of making the most strategic and best decisions. This is why most senior executives will tell you they depend strongly upon their “gut-feel” when making difficult decisions at a moment’s notice.

How to Communicate Effectively at Work

How to Communicate Effectively at Work

#1 Be crisp, clear and concise.
Edit yourself, include specifics and keep your speech short...

Leader, Manager, Operator - Which Are You?

Leader, Manager, Operator - Which Are You?: One of the great things about having grown-up kids is that you get to find out who they are.  For instance, my older daughter, who was always extremely artsy and dramatic as a kid (acted and sang throughout high school and college; dyed her hair blue and begged for piercings and tattoos as a teenager) has ended up being an extraordinarily organized and motivated grownup. She's now finishing graduate school, on her way to being a teacher, while she works part-time doing social media marketing online - while being a wife and mom of a 2-year-old, with their second child on the way.

The Secret Behind Why Things Catch On

The Secret Behind Why Things Catch On: An anger-evoking true story that’s spreading today, “Exec loses job after allegedly slapping toddler on plane,” quickly moved Dan Schawbel to write on Facebook, “The headline should read ‘Exec gets deported from America after being a complete A@& on a plane.’" That response wouldn’t surprise Jonah Berger, author of Contagious, out March 5th, who discovered that “high arousal” negative emotions like anger or anxiety spur us to share messages with others.

Top 10 Career Lessons From Powerful Women

Top 10 Career Lessons From Powerful Women

From interviews with the past, present and potential members of the FORBES list of the world's most powerful women, these are the 10 top tips for women's career success.

The Secret To Making Better Hires

The Secret To Making Better Hires:

Q: Why do so many companies struggle when it comes to making great hires? A: They overlook the obvious. In other words, the people doing the hiring fail to understand, look for, and qualify the one characteristic that indicates the certainty of a good hire. While companies screen for many

How To Communicate In The New Multigenerational Office

How To Communicate In The New Multigenerational Office: At a recent professional development retreat led by corporate trainer Dana Brownlee, a woman in her mid-50s stood up and starting citing a laundry list of communication conflicts on her mixed-age team. Chiefly, she was angry that the younger members rarely returned her phone calls by phone. Instead, seeing the issue as non-pressing, they typically would text or email back a response. The woman worked herself into such a frenzy that she suddenly spouted, “We need to stop emailing and pick up the %^$# phone!”

Six Business Mistakes You Should Never Make Twice

Six Business Mistakes You Should Never Make Twice: Failure. It’s a word no marketer, business owner, entrepreneur wants to hear, but it can be a valuable lesson. Earlier this year, I wrote about the one mistake retail brands make when it comes to Twitter: not engaging with customers on a regular basis.
That’s one big failure.
Alan E. Hall has seen many related mistakes during his 40+ years as a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and venture capitalist.  Like most of us, he’s made his fair share of foolish business mistakes along the way. Some even caused the end of a venture.

Why Company Culture is Key in Building Customer Relationships

Why Company Culture is Key in Building Customer Relationships:
Company culture, not technology, is key to successfully building customer relationships. At least that’s what Jeremy Epstein, Vice President of Marketing at Sprinklr, believes.

Leaders Ask Great Questions

Leaders Ask Great Questions: A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for LinkedIn's new Influencers section, looking at seven distinctive ways that great leaders communicate. One of the most important points involved the ways that true visionaries concentrate on asking the right questions, rather than always trying to come up with the cleverest answer themselves.

How To Be Happy At Work

How To Be Happy At Work: "Most of us want a better way of and working,” an anguished colleague wrote recently, “but most of us do not know what a better way of living or working is."  He is not alone, given that over half a million people have come to read my article, “The Ten Happiest Jobs” along with “Think Your Job Is Bad? Try One Of These!”

How to Deliver Results That Others Never Could

How to Deliver Results That Others Never Could: This article is by Saj-Nicole Joni and Don Arnoudse. Saj-Nicole Joni is chief executive of Cambridge International Group and coauthor of The Right Fight. Don Arnoudse is senior partner of Praemia Group.

4 Mistakes Not To Make When Managing Older Employees

4 Mistakes Not To Make When Managing Older Employees: My first couple management gigs were very similar—both were at small businesses in college towns, where the majority of my employees were undergrads who only worked part-time. I was just a couple years out of college, too, and the fact that I was so close in age to my workforce made it easy to relate to them and get to know them personally and professionally.

Six Ways To Get Things Done When You're Not The Boss

Six Ways To Get Things Done When You're Not The Boss: This is a guest post by Nan S. Russell, author of the book, The Titleless Leader: How to Get Things Done When You’re Not in Charge (Career Press, 2012). You can follow her on Twitter.

3 Necessary Ingredients for Corporate Changemaking

3 Necessary Ingredients for Corporate Changemaking: Social innovation is the unwritten bullet-point in everyone's job description, explains Marzena Zukowska (@MarzenaZukowska), a media manager and strategist with Ashoka Changemakers.

How to Be Extremely Productive

How to Be Extremely Productive: In his book, Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Robert Pozen shares performance-enhancing tips on everything from better sleep on overnight business flights to dealing with employees' mistakes.  Pozen tackles the topic of productivity in this interview with Deborah Blagg, which first appeared in the HBS Alumni Bulletin.  Read on for the answers to some tough questions such as, "What if your boss's style is interfering with your productivity?"

How to Coach Yourself to Improve Your Presentations

How to Coach Yourself to Improve Your Presentations: How do you improve as a public speaker without a coach like me?  I get that query from people who don’t have the budget to work with a coach, or who perhaps are inveterate do-it-yourselfers and can’t take anyone else’s advice.

Five Things Top Sales Leaders Do Differently -- and What You Can Learn From Them

Five Things Top Sales Leaders Do Differently -- and What You Can Learn From Them: Why are sales falling short? Too many companies have a fundamental misunderstanding of the sales process, says Lisa Earle McLeod, author of Selling with Noble Purpose. Her research shows that top sales leaders have a dramatically different view than the rest of us – and we can profit from that knowledge. Here are five things you can start doing differently today.

The Hidden Habits Of Ineffective People

The Hidden Habits Of Ineffective People: No one sets out to be ineffective, but it's easy to pick up these habits. Too easy.

Values Drive Success and Innovation

Values Drive Success and Innovation: A series of profiles of Thought Leaders changing the business landscape: Aron Ain, CEO, Kronos...

6 Lessons Hardship Can Teach Us About Leadership

6 Lessons the Los Angeles Lakers' Recent Hardship Can Teach Us About Leadership: Last week I wrote about what the NFL can teach corporations about diversity management. The sports theme got me thinking about the Los Angeles Lakers and how they provide one of the most unique leadership case studies in recent professional sports history. Touted as a pre-season favorite to represent the Western Conference in the NBA Finals after acquiring Steve Nash and Dwight Howard in the off-season, the Lakers have embarrassed themselves and their fans by displaying poor leadership, resulting in a record of 18-25 (winning percentage of .419). Whether you are a Lakers fan or not, observe their recent catastrophic collapse and you will see lessons in leadership, team management and how the best laid plans can backfire.

How To Be More Creative At Work

How To Be More Creative At Work: In January 2012, in the journal of Consciousness and Cognition, scientists from the University of Chicago published a strange study on creativity...

The Essential Dos and Don'ts of Selling

The Essential Dos and Don'ts of Selling: Making a sale can be a tricky and trying task—but if you know the essential do’s and don’ts of selling, you should have an easier time closing deals.

Beginner Steps to Effective Business Networking

Beginner Steps to Effective Business Networking:
The following are four beginner steps for networking:

12 Simple Things A Leader Can Do To Build A Phenomenal Team

12 Simple Things A Leader Can Do To Build A Phenomenal Team: Whether you’re just starting to hire or expanding your existing team, attracting and encouraging top talent can be difficult. You want to find the best of the best – and find ways to help them thrive in your company.

Why You're Not Resolving Your Conflicts in the Workplace

Why You're Not Resolving Your Conflicts in the Workplace:

Cognitive biases

Below is just a partial list of the universal tendencies of thought that cloud our judgment, create conflict among our fellow workers and lead professionals, business people and Congress to impasse.

How and why these cognitive biases stand in the way of the resolution of workplace conflict can be found in this terrific Lynda.com video...

Five Guideposts For The Future Of Leadership and Management

Five Guideposts For The Future Of Leadership and Management:

Steve Denning is on fire today. Claudio Perrone via Alexander Fürstenau In fact, lots of us were on fire yesterday for the global event, Stoos Connect, aka World Stoos Day. With a sold-out gathering in Amsterdam, twenty-two satellite sites around the world, and around twenty speakers, including Dan Pink, Roger Martin,

How Leadership Diversity Sparks Innovation

Think Like Zuck: How Leadership Diversity Sparks Innovation: Wow. I just finished Ekaterina Walter’s fascinating book, Think Like Zuck.

3 Ways to Develop Your People Without Overwhelming Yourself

3 Ways to Develop Your People Without Overwhelming Yourself:

When it comes to developing people, your job is to ensure that you have the talent to meet current and future challenges. An efficient and effective way to do this is to take a network approach to development.

5 Tips for Getting Complacent Employees Urgent

5 Tips for Getting Complacent Employees Urgent: My colleague Dennis Goin is exceptional at getting stagnant organizations innovating again. Dennis has worked with organizations in that smug, apathetic position that follows continued success, and companies in the erratic, frantic state caused by the constant rise of new threats and the continual shift of focus. Here he shares tips to help leaders move their organizations from complacency or false urgency, back to true urgency.