I’M ALWAYS AMAZED at how so many leaders can get so far without learning one of the very basic tenants of management. It’s this: Good leaders have to give bad news. Patty Azzarello learned this back when she became the youngest general manager in Hewlett-Packard (HP) at the tender age of 33, and she reminded me
Tag: culture
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
ONE OF THE FIRST things you learn about leadership is that there are a lot of ways to be a leader. Years ago, I had a boss who tried to tell me that I wasn’t a leader. My response? “Hey, I AM a leader — I’m just not your kind of leader.” This was my
DESPITE THE FOCUS on improving how we recruit and hire new employees, we also know that we should spend as much, if not more, time on how we can better retain the people who are already on our staff. That’s a great thought, but there’s something to consider: No matter how good a job we do
HERE’S THE BOTTON LINE on the recent anti-racial bias training at Starbucks, and it was captured perfectly in the headline on The New York Times story about the big event. It said: Starbucks’s Tall Order: Tackle Systemic Racism in 4 Hours Yup, the NYT is right; it’s unlikely that Starbucks, or any other company, is going to make much
THE HEADLINE ON A STORY in The Wall Street Journal pretty much said it all: Welcome to the Post-Weinstein Holiday Party. What followed was 1,400 depressing words that basically said, without actually saying it, something that you probably already know — the company Christmas/holiday party as we know it is officially dead and gone. As The Boston Globe dryly noted,
WHY ARE SO MANY people today so into generation bashing? For years, I’ve heard people gripe about the shortcomings of the Millennial generation, as if Gen X and the Baby Boomers (of which I am one) are somehow perfect and didn’t have their own challenges. I’ve written this before, but I’m sick and tired of
NO MATTER HOW you felt about him, the death of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner, who died last week at his famous mansion in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles, was one of those passings that got a lot of people worked up. Since Hefner passed away at the ripe old age of 91, a
IT SHOULDN’T COME as any great surprise, but according to Gallup, Millennials aren’t particularly engaged in their jobs. As Gallup’s How Millennials Want to Work and Live report points out, a whopping “71 percent of employees in the Millennial generation (people born between 1980 and 1996) are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work.” Are Millennials really big job
IT’S BEEN NEARLY 20 years since I’ve been in Hawaii, but the moment I arrived back in Honolulu last January, it felt like I had never left. My connection with the Aloha State goes back a long way. Not only did my wife and I honeymoon on Waikiki, but we lived on Oahu for three years in










