March 13, 2020
Shaping the future of work is as much about studying the way real people connect and collaborate today as it is about imagining the new tools we’ll be using tomorrow, especially for those who are members of distributed teams.
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March 06, 2020
At the end of February, early March 2020, the coronavirus (or Covid-19) took a more serious turn in Korea, Italy, Spain, UK and the U.S. with warnings that it could very well impact how, when, and where we work.
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February 28, 2020
As automation and artificial intelligence dramatically change the nature of work, employees must fine-tune the social and emotional abilities machines cannot master. To encourage this behaviour, employers must adjust the ways they assess, educate, train and reward their workforce on soft skills such as collaboration, communication and critical thinking.
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February 14, 2020
“We need to hold people more accountable.” How many times have you said this in the past year? When things aren’t going well — maybe your numbers are down, you haven’t met your goals, or your pipeline is dry — it’s easy to turn to this familiar mantra. But when you say it...
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February 07, 2020
In the past fifteen years, I’ve tried scores of task managers like Todoist and Wunderlist, a couple dozen project management platforms like Asana and Basecamp, and hundreds of other productivity apps that promise to make better use of my time or enhance collaboration with my colleagues or my team.
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January 31, 2020
Great persuaders are irresistible throughout all of history. But at no time in our historical record have interpersonal communication skills been as important as they are today, which is somewhat counterintuitive because today, anyone, anywhere in the world who is better at expressing their ideas can see a sudden massive increase in wealth that is unprecedented in human history.
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January 24, 2020
The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and ...
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January 17, 2020
People face so many pitfalls on their path to making reasonable decisions—whether they’re a consumer making a purchase or an employee meeting performance goals—how do you make it more likely that they’ll land on the most beneficial decision for them and for your organisation?
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January 10, 2020
Our understanding of the unconscious mind has come a long way since Sigmund Freud, grounded in decades of research into what drives ordinary, everyday human behaviour. Today’s behavioural scientists like to say that we are predictably irrational. And what can be predicted can be managed, at least to some degree.
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January 03, 2020
Breaking habits is hard. We all know this, whether we’ve failed our latest diet (again), or felt the pull to refresh our Instagram feed instead of making progress on a work project that is past due.
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December 27, 2019
We often hear tips and tricks for helping us to “control” our emotions, but that’s the wrong idea: strong emotions aren’t bad, and they don’t need to be pushed down or controlled; they are, in fact, data.
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December 20, 2019
The festive spirit is everywhere during the holiday season. For some, each day feels like waking up to a holiday song — “children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile.” But, for others, it can be the loneliest and most stressful time of the year.
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December 13, 2019
Once upon a time, saying “the soft stuff is the hard stuff” was a snappy challenge to business convention. Now, it’s a cliché. Everyone knows that it’s not easy to suddenly make your colleagues more creative, adaptable, or collaborative, however well-intentioned you may be.
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December 06, 2019
Why are so many meetings so unproductive?
Many professionals, fed up with calendars chock-full of long, disorganised, soul-bruising sessions, resort to uncharitable, even cynical explanations
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November 29, 2019
Social technologies are not just giant time sinks that keep your employees from getting their work done. On the contrary, they may become the most powerful tools yet developed to raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers.
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November 22, 2019
As a leader, you’re going to face conflict. It comes with the territory. But before you try to deal with a conflict, you first need to stop and ask yourself the following question:
Is it hot or cold?
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November 15, 2019
If you’re sometimes frustrated about how little you accomplish during your workday, you’re not alone. Research indicates that only 26% of people often leave the office having accomplished the tasks they set out to do.
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November 08, 2019
Although collaboration is at the heart of modern business processes, most companies are still in the dark about how to manage it. Linear, process-based tools such as activity-based costing, business process reengineering, and total quality management have long been effective at measuring and improving the efficiency of people and organisations in accomplishing individual tasks. But ...
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November 01, 2019
Over the past decade, “purpose” has become a management watchword. Since 2010 it has appeared in the titles of more than 400 new business and leadership books and thousands of articles. And no wonder: Many people—not just Millennials—want to work for organisations whose missions and business philosophies resonate with them intellectually and emotionally.
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October 25, 2019
Good listeners tend to make better decisions, based on better-informed judgments, than ordinary or poor listeners do—and hence tend to be better leaders. By showing respect to our conversation partners, remaining quiet so they can speak, and actively opening ourselves up to facts that undermine our beliefs, we can all better cultivate this valuable skill.
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October 18, 2019
The biggest challenge to moving forward on anything is the transition to working on it. It almost always represents a shift from doing something comfortable to doing something uncomfortable.
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October 11, 2019
A recent survey of directors, CEOs, and senior executives found that digital transformation (DT) risk is their #1 concern in 2019. Yet 70% of all DT initiatives do not reach their goals. Of the $1.3 trillion that was spent on DT last year, it was estimated that $900 billion went to waste. Why do some DT efforts succeed and others fail?
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October 04, 2019
Although digital investment is almost unquestionably the right course of action for most firms, organisations still struggle to create the desired results. Estimates of digital transformation failures range from 66% to 84%. Such a high failure rate isn’t surprising, as leaders are trying to create entirely new competencies and wedge them into an organisation with strong legacy cultures and operating models.
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September 27, 2019
In today's dynamic markets, leaders need very different mindsets from those used to manage traditional organisations in less-demanding times. We find that three primary mindset shifts are required to lead agile organisations designed for innovation, collaboration and value creation.
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September 20, 2019
One of the best insights on what true productivity means in the 21st century dates back to 1890. In his book The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, William James wrote a simple statement that’s packed with meaning: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
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September 06, 2019
As business landscapes become increasingly networked and distributed, more companies are ditching hierarchical leadership models in favour of collaborative leadership approaches. In fact, 51% of respondents in a 2018 Deloitte survey rated “C-suite collaboration” as very important.
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August 30, 2019
A study out of Virginia Tech University confirms something that just about every knowledge worker already knows: Dealing with after-hours emails produces anxiety which is damaging not only to the worker but to their family, too.
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August 23, 2019
A lip-reading system, more proficient than a professional human lip-reader. An artificial intelligence (AI) system that can diagnose pneumonia from chest X-rays better than expert radiologists. These are just two real examples of how machine intelligence seems primed to substitute work activities that currently only humans can do...
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August 16, 2019
As automation, AI, and new job models reconfigure the business world, lifelong learning has become accepted as an economic imperative. Eighty percent of CEOs now believe the need for new skills is their biggest business challenge.
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August 09, 2019
The consumer packaged goods (CPG) landscape has been going through a significant shake-up. Coca-Cola reshuffled its leadership team to focus on growth, innovation, and digital. Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club, a young startup, for $1 billion in a move to introduce a new...
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August 02, 2019
To learn about teamwork, management gurus tend to study collaboration in companies. Most don’t consider rock ‘n’ roll groups as an appropriate venue for studying teams. After all, what is a life in rock ‘n’ roll, if not a quest to escape the 9-to-5?
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July 26, 2019
The average professional spends
28% of the workday reading and answering email, according to a McKinsey analysis. For the average full-time worker in America, that amounts to a staggering 2.6 hours spent and 120 messages received per day.
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July 19, 2019
Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. The ability to persuade, to change hearts and minds, is perhaps the single greatest skill that will give you a competitive edge in the knowledge economy — an age where ideas matter more than ever.
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July 12, 2019
Nine years into recovery from the Great Recession, labour-productivity-growth rates remain near historic lows across many advanced economies. Productivity growth is crucial to increase wages and living standards and helps raise the purchasing power of consumers to grow demand for goods and services.
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July 05, 2019
Have you ever wondered why two people can say exactly the same thing in a meeting, but only one of them gets credit for it? Many times it’s the way we sound that makes the difference between whether or not we are actually heard.
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June 28, 2019
The agile workplace is becoming increasingly common. The shift is driven by proof that small, multidisciplinary teams of agile organisations can respond swiftly and promptly to rapidly changing market opportunities and customer demands. Indeed, more than 80 per cent of respondents in agile units report that overall performance increased moderately or significantly since their transformations began.
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