Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Option B, is about building resilience. I don’t think there could be a hotter topic in the world of federal agency leadership development these days. I haven’t read the book yet, but there’s an article on Linkedin that gives a great introduction to the concept of “option B.” To quote Grant: “I always thought there were two parties in every relationship. Sheryl said there are three: you, the other person, and the relationship itself… Most of the time, when someone fails, it’s not because there’s a bad apple spoiling the barrel. It’s because the barrel is a bad relationship. In other words: It’s not me. It’s not you. It’s us.” And working on the “us” is option B. Grant and Sandberg aren’t just talking about personal or professional relationships; they’re talking about organizational relationships too. I’m reminded of my worst career failure, back…
February, 2002 Namaste! Put this one aside for a rainy weekend, folks, because India was a deeply affecting experience for me and I have a lot to say…
January, 2002 Greetings from Africa! The Africa story starts with the six-day ordeal it took to get here. I had planned a three-day stop in Singapore on my…
After reading a great article in Fortune Magazine by Geoff Colvin last winter, I finally read Colvin’s book, Humans Are Underrated. He makes the case for the importance…
Simon Sinek’s 2009 TED talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action has made lists of top leadership talks for years. The essence of his talk is that people are…
March, 2002 Greetings from Thailand! My Thailand visit began on February 26th when I arrived in Bangkok to meet my friend Bob, who was flying in from Colorado…
February, 2002 Greetings from Bhutan! I had originally intended to cover Bhutan as part of my Nepal newsletter, but this place is too special not to have its…
I was reading a Fast Company Magazine interview with Sam Altman the other day, in which he was describing the founding of Y Combinator. He said, “With VCs,…
The other night, I was re-watching my favorite show, Breaking Bad, and one of Jesse Pinkman’s lines struck me. In case you’re not familiar with the show, Jesse…
This is certainly not a new rant, not even for me, and certainly not for leadership consultants in general. I’ve been writing about the misconceptions and unintended consequences…
Back in the days when I volunteered for a Colorado mountain rescue team as both a rescuer and the team’s public information officer, my teammates often commented that…
Managing virtual teams is an increasingly hot topic for supervisors, as telecommuting and flex time programs become more widespread and globalization increases. Tsedal Neeley recently published a great…
In July I flew to Europe with my friend Pam to hike the famous Haute Route, which starts in Chamonix, France and finishes in Zermatt, Switzerland. The route…
This week my two colleagues and I began delivering a “soft skills” class to employees of the federal agency supervisors we’ve been working with for the past two…
Reading Tim Kreider’s NY Times article The Busy Trap, I could not decide whether to log a protest, applaud him for his insights about our national cult of…
One of the most important things you can teach workers who travel internationally is the importance of understanding the cultural norms of another country. I don’t just mean…
Back in 2011 I wrote a post titled Single white female seeking a tribe, and it was about how I’ve been part of work teams that had a…
I’ve been blogging about MIT’s fascinating research on team effectiveness for years, including about: a study by the Human Dynamics Laboratory on team communication patterns correlated with performance…
Showtime’s new television series The Affair offers an interesting illustration of the fiction of memory. It’s a topic that many psychologies and organizational development theorists have written about,…
For the past year, I’ve been traveling around the country delivering a soft skills course to the field office supervisors of a federal agency. The course includes a…