Sweet Reason with a dose of Common Sense
Editor’s Note: I originally published this Skeptical Guy post on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on King Day in January 2024. It seemed appropriate to republish it again this year. HOLIDAYS ARE GREAT because they give us a chance to take a break. But sometimes, we take that break without thinking about just WHY
Editor’s Note: Here’s one of my most popular holiday classics. This one is from back in December 2018. I’VE HAD TO WORK THROUGH so many holiday seasons that I feel a little like Clark Griswold. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the character should. It’s the role Chevy Chase played numerous times, but most
LOYAL READERS of this blog — I think there are a couple of you out there — may have wondered why I haven’t published for the last few weeks. My apologies for that, but there are a number of reasons for me going radio silent. The big one is that my family has been struggling
IT’S A SAD DAY whenever one of the last remaining Apollo astronauts passes away, especially when it is one of the few who went to the Moon. Bill Anders, who died last week at the age of 90, was one of those guys, even if he never set foot on another celestial body. Although he
A LONG TIME AGO, in a workplace far, far away, I ranted about all the dumb meetings I had attended over the years. The original blog post on that has been lost to institutional idiocy at the publication that made it impossible to find again some 15 years after I wrote it, but the gist
HAVE YOU EVER heard a manager ever say that they DON’T have an open door policy? I haven’t, and I would guess nobody else has either. That’s because it’s one of those platitudes that leaders fall back on because they know that saying you’re always accessible is a lot different than actually BEING accessible. In
Editor’s Note: I’ve been occasionally reposting some popular articles from the past. This one was published back in January 2007. THE HOME DEPOT used to be about people. I was sadly reminded of this during the hullabaloo over the abrupt departure of Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli. The focus of most news coverage was on
LEAVE IT TO Josh Bersin to push an old-school management practice in a AI-focused, 21st Century world. This past week, Josh had an interesting blog post titled The Labor Market Has Totally Changed: Are You Really Ready? As always, he made some great points about how the labor market has changed as Baby Boomers like me
THERE’S A TON of workplace jargon we all have to navigate, but here’s a new term to get your head around — “workplace friction.” This isn’t terribly new. Stanford Professor Bob Sutton — well known for his book The No Asshole Rule — says that workplace friction is “simply putting obstacles in front of people
REWARDING EMPLOYEES can be a tricky business. It’s also hard for many organizations to get right no matter how good their intentions are. The key to it — and this is critically important — is that whatever you give employees to say thank you for their hard work must make them feel like you sincerely
