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Organizations

Solve Problems Before They Happen by Developing an “Inner Sense of Captaincy”

Too often we reward people who solve problems while ignoring those who prevent them in the first place. This incentivizes creating problems. According to poet David Whyte, the key to taking initiative …

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Mental Models for Career Changes

Career changes are some of the biggest moves we will ever make, but they don’t have to be daunting. Using mental models to make decisions we determine where we want to go and how to get there. The …

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How Performance Reviews Can Kill Your Culture

Performance reviews are designed to motivate and bring the best out of our teams, but they often do the opposite. Here’s how to bring out the best in your people. *** If you ask people what’s wrong …

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The Reasons We Work

Why do you go to work? Chances are it’s got something to do with money. But as most of us know, it’s more complicated than that. “There is a spectrum of reasons why people do their …

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The Wisdom of Crowds and The Expert Squeeze

As networks harness the wisdom of crowds, the ability of experts to add value in their predictions is steadily declining. This is the expert squeeze. *** In Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of …

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A Successful Businessperson Has to Learn to Say No

“The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It’s very easy to say yes.” — Tony Blair Tony Blair isn’t the only one who thinks that. So does Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. …

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The Last Thing We Need Right Now is a Vision Statement

In this excerpt from Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, Louis V. Gerstner Jr. says something I wish tech companies would heed. I said something at the press conference that turned out to be the …

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Seymour Schulich on Deals, Business, Decisions and Life

Seymour Schulich, one of Canada’s most successful businessmen and author of Get Smarter: Life and Business Lessons offers some indispensable business wisdom. Business is a means to an end not an …

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When Things Go Wrong: The Warren Buffett Way to Handle Problems

“Get it right, get it fast, get it out, get it over.” *** In an interview with Jeff Cunningham, Warren Buffett hits on two principles that elude most of us. Interviewer: I was reading a …

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Produce More by Removing More: The Disciplined Pursuit of Essentialism

Aristotle talked about three kinds of work: theoretical, practical, and poetical. The first searches for truth. The second is practical with an objective around action. The third, however, is lost in …

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The Tension Created By Stretch Goals

It’s one thing to set big stretch goals. It’s another thing entirely to acknowledge the tension and incentives they create within an organization. Charlie Munger, speaking at the 2000 …

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A Simple Way to Improve the Pro-Con List to Make Better Decisions

The first chapter in Seymour Schulich‘s book, Get Smarter: Life and Business Lessons, offers a decision tool that adds to the simple pro-and-con list that many of us have used to make decisions. …

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The Difference Between Good And Bad Organizations

I’ll elaborate on this below but here are the contrasts between good organizations and bad ones. Which one do you work for? In good organizations people can focus on the work and not office …

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The Relationship Between Design and Planning

While I’m not all that interested in military doctrine and tactics in and of themselves, I am interested in complex systems, how the weak win wars, and the lessons military leaders offer (for …

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Ideas Are Not Singular

In isolation, good ideas alone are not enough to produce something great. The right people are what make ideas work. Read on to learn about how Pixar used that principle as the basis of its amazing …

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Work in Pulses

We’re not designed for multitasking and we’re certainly not designed to work continuously without a break. We’re designed to pulse, that is alternate between expending energy and …

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