Last week, I held office hours for members of my Inner Circle mentorship program. One of my members asked me for a process she could use to “find” her passion. She was having difficulty figuring it out and was looking for help. Some people are fortunate to figure out their passions early in life. My [...]
mentorship
In a corporate strategic plan, it’s often easy to come up with big goals of what the company could or should do. The far more difficult part is allocating resources (people, finances, attention span) because there are never enough resources to do everything you could do. The same is true in your personal life and [...]
At the start of every new year, many people create resolutions or goals for the New Year. At the same time, most people also give up on these goals well before the end of the year. Having worked in industries whose sales are driven by New Year’s Resolutions, I can tell you exactly when people [...]
When you’re in a conflict with someone else, you want to define your goal clearly. Are you trying to “win” the conflict, or to “resolve” it? Although the words seem similar enough to be interchangeable, they couldn’t be more different. When you “win” a conflict, you get the outcome that you want without regard to [...]
When you’re an interesting person, people want to connect with you. They want to work with you, hang out with you, or work for you. Candidly, being interesting is a major advantage in both your personal and professional lives. An interesting person can’t easily be categorized, stereotyped… or ignored. When you meet an interesting person, [...]
In my mentorship program, one of the recurring topics I discuss is how to be more powerful and influential with others at work. Here’s one powerful technique that I’ve taught my Inner Circle members in the past that I’ll share with you today. I call it the “You’re Mostly Right” technique. When you’re arguing with [...]
When I mentor people, they often ask me for my thoughts about specific career choices they are considering. Invariably, the questions fall into two categories. 1) How do I succeed in a pre-structured career path (e.g., making partner in a consulting firm)? 2) How do I succeed in forging my own path that isn’t pre-structured [...]
I teach the people I mentor that leadership means accepting responsibility for things that aren’t your fault. The individual contributor that stays in that role for an entire career does what is asked, but no more. If something goes wrong, she says, “I didn’t make a mistake. You can’t blame me for that one. That’s [...]
A few years before I was born, humankind achieved a remarkable feat. We landed a human being on the moon. The lunar module spacecraft used for the lunar landing mission had a mere 4 kilobytes of memory and weighed 70 lb (32 kg). Today, I have an iPhone in my pocket that has 268,435,456 kilobytes [...]
No organization is perfect. The world changes constantly and it’s impossible to pursue all the right opportunities with all the right resources at the exact right times. Gaps always exist. I’ve made an entire career out of “filling” gaps, and I think you should too. Let me explain. A market gap exists when customers demand [...]