Paul J.H. Schoemaker

Too many people settle for dumb luck and hope for the best, when they should be orchestrating smart luck. Although success in work and life often appears to be the result of random events, in truth the lucky ones often managed the broader context better. Some people may attribute their success to a few key breaks, such as a professor who helped them or an … [ Read more ]

Ximena Vengoechea

When things feel personal and when our ego is involved, it gets really hard to listen.

Harvey S. Firestone

I notice that when all a man’s information is confined to the field in which he is working, the work is never as good as it ought to be. A man has to get a perspective, and he can get it from books or from people — preferably from both. This thing of sleeping and eating with your business can easily be overdone; it is … [ Read more ]

Shivani Berry

You can’t trust your initial reaction to feedback. Defensive responses are driven by common fears about our own competence, and fear is a powerful distorter of the messages we hear.

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp

In order to disrupt your own frame of reference, you have to be willing to treat your accumulated experience as sunk cost, to be discarded as circumstances require. It’s a psychologically difficult thing to do. Moreover, ordinary daily pressures make it difficult to find the time to really think about, and thoroughly analyze, environmental trends. Many people, managers among them, suffer from cognitive myopia, the … [ Read more ]

Daniel Hulme

The best definition of intelligence — artificial or human — that I’ve found is goal-directed adaptive behavior.

Shivani Berry

“Feedback” is a loaded term. Not only do you tighten up when you ask for “feedback,” so does the feedback giver. Swapping it out for “advice” is more inviting and indicates you value your colleague’s counsel. Instead of saying “Can I have some feedback on what I could have done better?” say “Do you have any advice on how I can improve on X?”

Shivani Berry

Lots of advice centers around getting better at giving feedback to others, but we rarely focus on how to attract useful feedback about ourselves — even though it’s in our own best interest to do so. What’s more is we often unintentionally repel the rare feedback that does come our way by getting defensive or shutting down.

Knowing what other people think about you can be … [ Read more ]

Scott Galloway’s Section 4: Business Education At A Fraction Of The Cost Of An MBA

Section 4, a growing online platform for business education founded by Scott Galloway and working with top business professors and practitioners, distills MBA-quality courses into two- to three-week sprints in topics such as Product Positioning, Brand Strategy, Data & Analytics, Customer-Centered Innovation and more. Sprints are designed to be short, intense, and instantly applicable. They deliver the content at a fraction of the cost of … [ Read more ]

Marshall Goldsmith On The Lost Art Of Asking For Help

We’re all flawed human beings. We all should be asking for help. Reminding yourself and your company’s leadership of this eternal truth is one of the essential tasks for anyone in—or outside—of business today. A guide.

Alisa Cohn

We can think our way into a new way of acting, and we can also act our way into a new way of thinking.

Alisa Cohn

People don’t want to volunteer feedback, but asking “What do I need to get better at?” over and over and over again signals that you’re serious about getting better. You could ask your executive team, or folks one or two levels down. It’s also good to ask people who have been with the company a long time — if they were there when it was … [ Read more ]

Michiel Kruyt

Are you in a situation where the challenge you’re facing requires you to be adaptable, or can you solve it with things that have worked for you before? That distinction is a very important distinction, and it’s very helpful for people to determine if they can solve this situation with old answers or if they need to develop and be open for new things to … [ Read more ]

Russell Ackoff

We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.

Christopher Littlefield

There are limitations to our typical approach to praise. We can only recognize what we see, observe, or learn about from others and our recognition focuses on what we appreciate, which is not always what others want to be appreciated for.

The Problem With Being Too Easy-going

Failure to express your preferences in everyday situations can make you seem less likeable and even slightly less human.

Bill Ackman

I’ve always had the view that how successful you are is really a function of how you deal with failure. If you deal with failure well and you persist, you have a high probability of being successful.

Bruce Craven

The pressures of day-to-day leadership can trigger conflict between colleagues, even if they have been through strong mutual experiences, feel extensive mutual goodwill, trust one another, and have common goals. If we make assumptions about personal values, we can make devastating mistakes. For example, if we assume other people need to prioritize their values in the order we prefer, we can deceive ourselves about other … [ Read more ]

Finding Meaning in Life

Create a compelling self-narrative based on the five pillars that influence the way we experience meaning.