My dishwasher died this week. It was installed 8.5 years ago and, according to the repairman, dishwashers now last 8 to 12 years. Eight to 12 years?? I’m thinking, Whatever happened to QUALITY!! My lawnmower was made in ’82 and is STILL plugging along!
“Planned obsolescence,” he said, reading my mind. “It’s alive and well.”
So I went online to do some comparison shopping, figuring if I’m going to spend
As a follow-up to the “Quiet” post, this is an acronym I heard years ago. A client reminded me of it recently. “When I learned the WAIT acronym,” he said, “that was a learning moment burned into my head!”
WAIT stands for Why Am I Talking?
That’s the title of a great new book by Susan Cain. It’s subtitled “The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking” and it profiles the many ways in which we undervalue introversion. It also points up what we lose in the process.
She talks about introversion in both personal and professional domains. I was especially drawn to her debunking of some of our most sacred leadership cows, like the myth of charismatic leadership. Introverts
A few days ago, I listed 10 big mistakes that people make in trying to change behavior. Here’s #2: attempting big leaps instead of baby steps.
The antidote? Seek tiny wins, one after another, according to the folks at B. J. Fogg’s Persuasive Technology Lab.
They’re right, in more ways than one.
We’ve heard for years about the power of big audacious goals, sweeping visions, and ‘breakthrough’ leaps. But we live life in moments, one after another. Only in retrospect, when we string those moments and events together, do we see patterns and create narratives to explain what happened.
What if we could capture and study all those little moments? What might we learn that’s different?
I’ve reached the point that when someone asks, “What are you reading?” I sometimes have the good fortune to say, “Dan Pink.” Whatever this man writes, I want to read. He is a thinker who is at least 1.5 standard deviations beyond the bell curve. And he knows how to blend storytelling and research in ways that produce remarkably engaging and insightful writings.
In Drive, he “exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life.” He takes on some of our most sacred workplace cows: the “carrot-and-stick” mentality of getting others to do what we want, the blind reliance on external motivators, the whole premise of management.