From the category archives:

Performance

[Life Back West] August 2010 – “Great Expectations”

August 26, 2010

When you love your child as much as I do my 8 year-old son Traylor, serious discipline seldom seems simple or easy. But when you start from a point of promise, it also helps to start with the values to support and nurture those hopes. The failure to follow our family’s values got my son [...]

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[Life Back West] July 2010 – “Risky Business”

July 22, 2010

Life is full of risks, and as a subset, business and the managing of organizations is perhaps even riskier. Managing those risks better is what separates proverbial losers from winners. “Risk taking,” football player Jim McMahon once noted, “is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise it would be sure-thing-taking.” That hot product that sold like wildfire last month [...]

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The Problem with Assholes – and Why They Won’t Go Away

July 6, 2010

Stanford University professor Bob Sutton, whose work I admire, authored the book “The No Assholes Rule.“ Good book, great topic, and some wonderful thoughts about how to work with and / or avoid workplace assholes. Unfortunately the “rule” doesn’t work in most firms. And even while asshole behavior is corrosive and cancerous to the effectiveness of [...]

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Your Career: How to Make a Comeback

June 15, 2010

Comebacks, from Carly Fiorina (and Jerry Brown), to Mickey Drexler, Henry Blodget, Martha Stewart, and even Steve Jobs, are in full form and fashion these days. What do all these people tell us? They tell us that you can make mistakes, get sacked, and like the nine-lived cat still return to center stage another day. [...]

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How to Ask a Question: It’s More than Who, What, When, Where, Why and How

June 6, 2010

The title seems either simplistic or insulting: “How to Ask a Question?” Who needs to know that? Turns out, plenty of people do, and the post below will walk you through some ways to make your questions, and your time, both more valued to others and valuable for you. While we all learned (or should [...]

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Big Grain of Salt: Does Education Make You “Smarter?”

May 31, 2010

Richard Florida, author of the must-read books The Creative Class and Who’s Your City? has a new post titled The Density of Smart People. It’s based on his review of analysis done by Rob Pitingolo that looked at something called “educational attainment density.” Richard begins his post with a simple statement: “Clusters of smart people of [...]

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