This short post is prompted by Dan Rockwell’s great post yesterday on his fine Leadership Freak Blog. In it he proposes that “what’s important to you” is the most powerful question of all (read it, it is less than 300 words  – and the comments are awesome too).  While I’m not not great at “give

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Whitfield and Strong wrote it. Marvin Gaye sang it (and made it famous). Leaders everywhere deal with it – and worry about it all too often. If you know the song, hum along as we talk about how leaders can work with the grapevine and make gossip less daunting and scary. The subtitle gives you

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Every leader I talk with, coach or train tell me the same thing.  They all tell me they have lots to do – more than they did six months or a year ago, with no end in sight.  I could write a post about the factors that lead that to be true, but that isn’t this post.

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This week’s Resource Recommendation: Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managersby Stan Slap. This is fast becoming one of the most talked about business books of the year, and for some very good reasons. It discusses in a new way a very important topic – what are the

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Yesterday I read an article in the online New York Times, titled Digital Device Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime.   While I encourage you to read the article, the title gives you the message.  I couldn’t have cited the research included, but nothing in the piece surprised me at all. Then, last night on the NBC

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Yesterday I read an interesting and practical post by Jo Owen called Seven Leadership Traits that the Gurus Don’t Tell You.  While written from a C-level perspective it contains some useful thoughts for all leaders and I encourage you to read it.  It became the jumping off point for about two pages of notes and

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That’s a great title, isn’t it? I mean who doesn’t like simple and secrets, especially when tied to success? The premise of the book is simple: summarize research around achievement and success then provide an example, lesson or approach that makes the research practical. (Hence the subtitle – “What scientists have learned and how you

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This is the final (for now any way) post in a loose series about the important of place, location and work environment and how it connects with our values, and ultimately how the intersection of these things relates to productivity.  If you missed any of the others, or to provide a context for these thoughts,

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Shinichi Suzuki, the Japanese violinist and teacher responsible for the Suzuki method of teaching young violinists once said, “Man is a child of his environment.” This quotation crossed my mind as I stood outside the boyhood home of Elvis Presley in Tupelo, Mississippi last week.  He lived in this two room house with his parents until

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Yesterday, I wrote about Four Ways Location Influences Results, and last week I wrote about the Five Practical Reasons Values Matter to Leaders.   Consider this a mashup – I’m putting those two sets of ideas together in this post with a personal example. This picture was taken earlier this spring on the farm I grew up

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