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Put on Your 3D Interview Glasses and Hire Three-Dimensional People
You should hire three-dimensional people who have depth, breadth, and length. I am not a fan of the prevailing belief system among hiring managers that you have to make a trade-off between technical depth and breadth of interpersonal competence for example. I cringe when I hear a hiring manager say something like “the guy can’t…
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Give Your Idea to Someone Else to Run With – Sometimes a Horse Needs a Different Rider to Win
First, here’s a little exercise for your mind. An aging monarch decides it is time to name an heir to the throne. The monarch’s two children are identical twins and no one is now sure which one was born first. Both twins are excellent riders and each owns a very fast horse. So the monarch…
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A Learning Opportunity in Flexibility and Determination for You and Your Team
Angela Duckworth’s presentations and research have spawned a lot of discussion over the last year on the dominant importance of sustained hard work in becoming successful. Her central conclusion is that perseverance (what she calls “grit”) is a better indicator of who will be successful than talent. Others have seized on her research as proof that the problem with…
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When Your Service Breaks, Take the Opportunity to Enhance Your Customers’ Satisfaction
One of the odd things about customer satisfaction is that customers actually become more satisfied with a service when they have a positive interaction with the service provider when the service breaks. Maybe we just expect everything to break eventually and it gives us more confidence if we know we can get it fixed. I have…
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But the Problem Actually IS Complicated! Seven Reasons to Build a Model to Solve It
Have you ever had a conversation with a colleague that sounded something like this? You: This is a complicated problem. There are a lot of variables to consider and many of them are interdependent. Colleague: I get that, but you need to simplify it somehow or no one is going to understand it. You: The problem…
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Alternatives to Jargon: Expanding Your Tool Box of Analogies and Adages
All of us find it increasingly difficult to communicate without relying on the ever-expanding jargon of the work place. A friend recently posted this graphic from The Atlantic listing popular office jargon. It’s a good summary of the usual suspects. One alternative to jargon is to dust off some of your favorite analogies and adages. Here…
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Growing a Company Culture: What Kind of Trellis Are You Building?
I have been talking with my advisory board a lot about company culture lately. I recommend Teague’s recent post in which he explains why he thinks you can’t “build” company culture, you have to “grow” it. I like his analogy of training a bonsai tree or cultivating a vine on a trellis. It takes patience and…
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The Proliferation of Undoable Jobs and How To Recognize Them
A friend was recently describing jobs that a head hunter was sending her way. The totally unrealistic scope, scale, and complexity of the jobs reminded me of a trend I observed a number of years ago which I started referring to as the “proliferation of undoable jobs.” What makes a job undoable? 1. Job titles…
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Searching for Alternatives to Death by Powerpoint: The Single Slide Strategy
A friend sent me this link to an NPR story about the mind-numbing effects of powerpoint presentations. NPR interviewed various groups including physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider, CEOs at fortune 500 companies, and generals at the pentagon. Some of those interviewed have put an outright ban on powerpoint presentations at their meetings because they…
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You Should Add “Ego Risk” to the Risks You Are Managing
Most companies have begun to see risk management as a separate and important discipline worthy of dedicated resources and specialized skills. We now recognize a much broader array of risk areas and look beyond financial risk to market risk, technical risk, and key person risk. There has recently also been increased focus on information security…