Sweet Reason with a dose of Common Sense
BACK IN 1994, I showed up for a job interview in Honolulu wearing a suit and tie. It was the hottest, sweatiest interview I ever had. Fortunately for me, that didn’t matter. I got the job but I never dressed that way again during my three plus years as a newspaper editor in the Aloha
EVERYBODY SEEMS TO HAVE their favorite book by the late, great Dr. Seuss. But picking the “best” Dr. Seuss book isn’t easy. According to The Washington Post, Dr. Seuss’s 45 plus published books have been translated into 17 languages and have sold 650 million copies in 95 countries. A number of them have also been turned into
REMEMBER THE OLD military concept of “shock and awe“? It got a lot of attention during the Iraq War, and is defined as rapidly dominating an opponent “by the initial imposition of overwhelming force and firepower.” But “shock and awe” isn’t just for the military; it’s useful whenever you want to overwhelm someone quickly and
HERE’S A HIRING TREND we could really live without – job candidates who are “ghosting” (aka, blowing off ) scheduled job interviews, or, failing to show up to work for new positions they had accepted. Last month, USA Today published a story that indicated that this new phenomenon was due to the strength of the job market and our near-record
If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a hundred times while listening to managers give performance reviews to their employees – “Here are the areas you need to work to improve on.” It sounds like a really smart thing to do, doesn’t it? After all, don’t we all want to improve on our weaknesses? Well
ONE OF THE FIRST things you learn about leadership is that there are a lot of ways to be a leader and demonstrate leadership. Years ago I had a boss who tried to tell me that I wasn’t a leader. Want to know my response? “Hey, I AM a leader — I’m just not your
RAISING CHILDREN, and leading people, isn’t easy. In many ways, leadership is similar to raising a child. The goal is to have people who are self-reliant and self-sufficient, but the trick is knowing just how much help to give along the way — and when you might actually be giving too much. Although it seems to
I LOVE IT WHEN a long-time workplace practice suddenly gets re-defined and is referred to by some silly new terminology. Yes, I was excited when I discovered what The New York Times is now calling that time you get off in-between jobs. Although I have a lot of problems with America’s Newspaper of Record – it’s
HERE’S A MANAGEMENT TRUISM you can’t avoid: You learn more from a bad boss than you do from a good one. I was struck by this when I came across an old Corner Office” column in The New York Times. It was a Q&A with Dawn Lepore, the now-former chairwoman and CEO of Drugstore.com, and
LOTS OF NEW IDEAS come out of California, and although some are revolutionary and game-changing, a lot of them are just stupid and dumb. This idea easily qualifies as one of the latter. Here it is, as reported by the Los Angeles Times: California’s 168-year run as a single entity, hugging the continent’s edge for
