So you've studied all the best sellers about how to make yourself into a better manager? Well, you can't believe everything you read.
Every few years, a management book or philosophy emerges to change our thinking about the best ways to lead employees. From The One Minute Manager to Who Moved My Cheese?, new and revived leadership concepts have shaped the way we organize, evaluate, inspire, and reward team members. With so many
competing management theories in the mix, some ill-conceived practices were bound to take hold-and indeed, many have. Here's our list of the 10 most brainless and injurious:...
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The special charm that makes leaders so effective and appealing isn't a birthright. You can work at acquiring it.
Even at a round table, someone sits at the head. And that applies in every occupation. It's not always the brightest in the business specialty or the one who produces measurable results. It's someone who is memorable, impressive, credible, genuine, trusted, liked, cool, calm, collected, comfortable, and confident-er,
charismatic. Executive charisma is the determining factor behind why two people who enter similar careers with comparable intelligence, ambition, education, experience, and competence achieve vastly different levels of success. Armed with executive charisma, you can sit at the head of the round table and have
influence even when you have no power. Executive charisma is...
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Meet public enemy No. 1 in today’s workplace.
If you’re reading this article sitting down-the position we all hold more than any other, for an average of 8.9 hours a day-stop and take stock of how your body feels. Is there an ache in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down? These symptoms are all normal, and they’re
not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you’re doing-sitting. New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion:...
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The recession is no excuse for ignoring, misusing, or demeaning talent. But hey, if that's what you really want to do, follow these suggestions.
The last time I checked, the U.S. led the world in productivity per employee. That's the good news. The bad news is that much, if not all, of that boost in productivity has come on the backs of workers, especially salaried types viewed by too many management teams as infinitely elastic resources. As one management consultant told me: "The
average company takes better care of its copiers than it does its talent." Many chief executives use the tough competitive environment as a handy excuse to put off salary increases, tighten the screws on performance, and generally drop any pretense of creating a human-centered workplace. But the tough-economy picture has two sides. Only
those companies that make the effort to keep their employees productive by treating them decently can expect to see continued productivity gains. Much of the workforce has tuned out, waiting for...
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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war," General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter. The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan. "PowerPoint makes us stupid," ...
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3 Reasons to Fire a Prima Donna You will always get more from your team than you will from one person who shuts down your team.
If you’re a leader who employs a prima donna (one who produces great results but alienates everyone), what should you do?
It’s simple. Bite the bullet and fire that person. Here are three reasons why you should:...
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There's good reason why 40% of executives describe themselves as introverts.
From discount broker Charles Schwab to Avon chief executive Andrea Jung, "innies" possess these traits of quiet leadership:...
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More than 600 CEOs rated states on a wide range of criteria from taxation and regulation to workforce quality and living environment, in our sixth annual special report.
In Chief Executive's annual survey of best and worst states for business, conducted in late January of this year, 651 CEOs across the U.S. again gave Texas top honors, closely followed by North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. They gave the booby prize for worst state to California, with New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts
filling out the bottom five-a line-up virtually unchanged from last year. Florida and Georgia each dropped three places in the ranking, but remain in the top 10. Utah jumped six positions this year to sneak into the top 10 at No. 9. The business leaders were asked to draw upon their direct experience to rate each state in three general
categories: taxation and regulation, quality of workforce and living environment. Within each category respondents graded states in five subcategories, as well as...
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An analysis of some 900 CEOs' results shows they like magenta -- and are less dominant and confident than the rest of the population. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the CEOs are different from you and me. A panel of 900 CEOs organized by USA Today participated in an online 60-second color personality test, and the results were striking: The bosses don't like yellow or red, but they're big fans of magenta - at least compared to the rest of the population.
To most of us, that sounds like fun trivia that may (or may not) suggest a good color for the drapes in the corner office. But psychiatry professor Rense Lange said the CEOs' results - compared with the answers provided by some 750,000 others who've taken the online test - reveal that the CEOs are wired differently than everyone else. How?
Dewey Sadka, who's spent 15 years developing the test, said the color choices paint a picture of...
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Unlocking the brain chemistry of learning new skills.
I was excited as soon as I saw the title of Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How (Bantam, 256 pp., $25). In my own first book, Decide to Lead, I put forward the idea that leadership is not a trait you’re born with but a skill you build, through a series of decisions you make as you
respond to defining moments in your life. I based Decide to Lead on my research into the lives of some 100 great leaders in history. Coyle goes further, providing a scientific basis for the concept. He built The Talent Code on scientific discoveries involving...
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