Rumors at work can be surprisingly destructive. Rumors undermine the confidence of an organization, both within and without; encourage infighting, backbiting, and other HR department fever dreams; deep six morale; make strategic hiring like extracting wisdom teeth; scare off would-be investors; and tank stock prices. What start as whispers can build to whirlwind force. Because […]

Drama queens (and kings!) are bad for business. They disrupt your workplace by gossiping, backbiting, exaggerating every situation, justifying their bad behavior, and blaming others for their failures. Their behavior and their very presence compromises the teamwork that you and your colleagues need to succeed. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said that they spend 3-to-6 hours […]

A chain of command, or command hierarchy, is the relationship between personnel in terms of responsibility and authority. It’s a ready-made structure for delegation of authority to accomplish the organization’s mission. That’s true in most large organizations and broadly applicable, though examples here will be drawn from my experience in the military. In the military’s […]

We’ve all been there: a project manager or supervisor asks you to do something you disagree with for some reason. Perhaps the assignment in question takes up too much time or maybe the proposed strategy doesn’t work with the overall mission. In any scenario where employee and supervisor are in disagreement, the situation is ripe […]

In 2016, I left the office work-setting to embark on a completely different career in a new field. I was no longer an employee with supervisors assessing my performance and productivity, but rather working from home as my own boss. It was great, but I didn’t foresee how much I relied on the rhythm of […]

When George Washington was a teenager, he both copied out by hand and tweaked 110 “rules of civility and decent behavior.” These rules had been compiled by Jesuits in late 16th century France and made the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Manners were up in the air in this new world when Washington put quill […]

A surprising number of people are not primarily motivated by money. In fact, some studies have found that there is only a weak connection between job satisfaction and salary level. And yet, the primary way that we attempt to motivate employees in the white-collar world is through extrinsic means: bonuses, stock awards, and benefits packages. […]

Think back to the last decision you made. What were your options? How did you choose what to do? Most importantly, was the outcome of this decision instrumental in building your life, productivity, or happiness? Unless I caught you at a particularly productive or essential moment, probably not. Most of the decisions we make are […]

Decision making is a big part of leadership. As a leader, one is expected to take decisions all the time. Some of these are of a routine nature, while others have the power to change the course of a business. A lot rides on a leader’s decisions. They can impact the livelihood of the staff, […]

Back in 2014, Barack Obama declared that he only focused on making the most-important decisions.  “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make,” he explained. This is understandable. Sometimes we find ourselves beset by the decisions, big and small, that we think have […]

We are a society of list-makers. We gather groups of to-dos and to-don’ts, would-bes and should-bes, and we slap them down on legal pads and post-it notes, fancy journal pages, and stained napkins. Far too often those lists fail to translate to measurable success. It doesn’t have to be this way. When making lists, a little […]

The Coca-Cola Company’s own website admits that it was probably “a day that will live in marketing infamy.” On April 23, 1985, Coke Chairman and CEO Roberto Goizueta announced to 200 reporters that the company would be changing its formula. It would be still be called Coca-Cola, but this “New Coke” would taste better and […]

One of the bigger problems when it comes to rational discussion today is that we don’t quite know what we are comparing. Everybody has heard the cliché that “you cannot compare apples and oranges.” But guess what: We do compare apple and oranges all the time. This usually happens when we go grocery shopping. We […]

The road sign in my home state of Washington read: “Litter and it will hurt.” I didn’t think twice about it, but our guests from nearby Vancouver, British Columbia, mouthed the slogan out loud and could hardly believe their ears. They were traveling with us to a birthday party of a mutual friend. “Of all […]

“Don’t rush me, sonny! You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles,” warned Billy Crystal, costumed up as Miracle Max in the 1987 classic The Princess Bride. In the movie, that was a laugh line, but it’s not a bad way to think about the decisions you make as a leader. For every decision that […]

The Wharton-educated bank executive quits weekend bird-watching excursions after missing a prothonotary warbler (rare orange and yellow-headed songbird) sighting. The tenured physics professor storms out of the kitchen because her batch of gazpacho soup turned out a tad too peppery. First-world problems, to be sure. But they’re also the type of increasingly common complaints hyper-accomplished professionals […]

As a kid who wasn’t allowed to watch television, the focus of my childhood was play. The games are too many to count. There was, for example, a little girl who lived in mirrorland and would possess me if I accidentally touched that shiny, reflective surface at night. She scared the heck out of my […]

Winston Churchill once wrote that “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance”. He knew this well. Even as he warned the world about the threat of totalitarian regimes and led Britain during the Second World War, the statesman crafted many of his more than 500 […]

You already know that busywork does nothing more than create the perception that people are working harder than they really are. In fact, 65 percent of your colleagues surveyed by Havas Worldwide felt that people were simply pretending to be busy. Nor does busywork make you or your company more productive. What you get instead […]

Hi, my name is Larry, and I’m an addict. I’ve been clean and sober for three years, two months, and eight days. My drug of choice was not alcohol, narcotics, or even nicotine. For decades, I was addicted to fake work. I spent hours formatting spreadsheets. I immersed myself in fact finding excursions, spending huge […]

Timothy Wiedman was once a top regional manager for a national retail photofinishing company. He worked hard. Thanks to the company’s “use it or lose it” vacation policy, he made sure to play hard as well. Wiedman’s only requirements before jetting off to some faraway locale? Delegate critical tasks to subordinates, make his boss aware […]

The long-running debate on the value of working remotely has been rendered moot, at least for now, by the coronavirus. Pundits and consultants have debated whether it’s good or bad for productivity and morale. Regardless, the need to have teams work from home has been thrust upon many businesses by the current health crisis. The […]

Emily wanted to work in marketing. She was young and had no experience. She’d skipped college and used a portfolio of work and a Praxis apprenticeship to win a spot on the Customer Success team of a growing startup. But her goal was still marketing. She aimed right at it and started asking people in […]

One of the critical differences between military and civilian organizations is that most military organizations can only simulate their wartime missions in peacetime, and must therefore conduct training which seeks to mimic combat conditions as closely as possible. This is not something that most civilian organizations do with their more high-pressure tasks. The thinking behind […]