Taming the Dragons: 50 Essays from the Business World

Powerful and seemingly unpredictable forces compel firms and professionals toward failure or success. Here are 50 ideas you can use to get the “dragons” to work on YOUR side.

Mohandas Gandhi

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

The Best Kept Secret of Great Presentations

Steve Kayser offers some thoughts on good presentations and introduces the book, Moving Mountains: Or the Art of Letting Others See Things Your Way by Henry M. Boettinger.

How to Sell an Idea

Every great product or service started out as just a sparkle in someone’s eye. Whether you want to invent the next must-have technology or simply convince your boss to add another coffee machine, the key to turning your idea into reality is to make sure the right people take it seriously.

Paul J. H. Schoemaker

The performance culture really is in deep conflict with the learning culture. It’s an unusual executive who can balance these.

Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking

This ChangeThis manifesto brings our attention to the ‘Seven Sins of Solutions’, the traditional ways of thinking that prevent us from divining the most accurate-and elegant-of solutions to any problem solving situation.

PowerPoint, Warts and All: Relearning to Communicate

PowerPoint recently (and quietly) celebrated its 20th birthday. Why do some people love it while others passionately hate it?

And how can we learn from its strength and its limitations, to be better and more effective communicators?

To Marshall Goldsmith: Thank You for Writing This Book (And We’re Not Sucking Up)

Marshall Goldsmith, the founder of executive coaching firm Marshall Goldsmith Partners, has worked closely with more than 70 CEOs during his career. Forbes has named him one of the five most respected executive coaches. The Wall Street Journal ranks him among the top 10 executive educators. Now Goldsmith has assembled a book that distills the wisdom he and his stable of coaches usually dispense in … [ Read more ]

Jeff Ruby

Fame can be a vapor, money has wings, popularity can be an accident. The only thing lasting in life is character.

Jim Clemmer

True and lasting security comes from constant growth and development. We can’t manage change, but we can be change opportunists. The higher our rate of personal growth and development, the more likely we are to master the opportunities change unexpectedly throws in front of us. To master change and build a life of ever-deeper growth, we need to make learning a way of life rather … [ Read more ]

Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine…it’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.

And … [ Read more ]

Presentation Revolution: Changing the Way the World Does Presentations

Today we live in a business culture that abuses the art and science of public speaking. We power up our PCs and present dull presentations to audiences who want to be inspired but never get fulfilled. Schwertly believes an effective presentation can change the world.

Stumbling on Happiness

Not offering a self-help book, but instead mounting a scientific explanation of the limitations of the human imagination and how it steers us wrong in our search for happiness, Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, draws on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to argue that, just as we err in remembering the past, so we err in imagining the future. “Our desire … [ Read more ]

Russell Ackoff

The principal obstruction to what we want most is ourselves. Our tendency, when we stand where we are and look toward what we want, is to see all kinds of obstructions imposed from without. When we change our point of view and look backward at where we are from where we want to be, in many cases the obstructions disappear.

William Penn

Knowledge is the treasure, but judgement is the treasurer of a wise man.

Outside Looking In: Maximize Project Success Rates with Premortem Strategy

Why do highly intelligent and capable business leaders, backed by an army of talent and a flood of information, make so many extremely expensive mistakes? This article looks at the role of mental models in decision making and forecasting and suggests effective and efficient methods for improving.

Sigal Barsade

Positive people tend to do better in the workplace, and it isn’t just because people like them more than naysayers. Positive people cognitively process more efficiently and more appropriately. If you’re in a negative mood, a fair amount of processing is going to that mood. When you’re in a positive mood, you’re more open to taking in information and handling it effectively.

Make Your Meetings Matter

Long silences. Tapping PDAs. The faint buzz of snoring. Sound like a meeting you led recently? Use these BNET tips to make face-time more focused and productive.

Benjamin Schwarz

Magazine and journal articles are usually the best forum for bold and original arguments…most books…tend to have (at best) a kernel of an important idea, padded with superfluous case studies and second-rate reporting.