The Seven Pillars of Success: Eric Silverstein
I marvel at really successful people. Those who take their dreams and their happiness into their own hands and make a mark on the world. Last month, after spending quite a bit of time determining the common traits of truly successful people in some area of their lives, I featured John Donovan’s story about health. [...]
The Seven Pillars of Success: John Donovan
I often read about highly successful people. They’re successful in a myriad of different ways–professionally, financially, physically, and in terms of popularity, family, networks, etc. For the past few months, I’ve been trying to formulate the common traits that successful people seem to embody regardless of the type of success. I think I have them [...]
Leadership Tactic #67: Thanksgiving
I know, I already did a Thanksgiving entry, but something unexpected happened that is worth sharing. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and the office was quiet. It was around 2:00, and I was looking for something to fill my time before my intended departure of 4:30. A blog entry came to mind that I [...]
The VIP Experience: Young Adult vs. Wasabi
I’ve been thinking a lot about VIP treatment lately. Mostly as a way to get people to RSVP quickly, I told my Festivus guests this year that the first 20 to reply to the Evite would have access to the VIP room, which includes “exclusive access to the VIP lounge, bottle service, a commemorative Festivus [...]
Leadership Tactic #66: The Customer Isn’t Always Right
If you’ve ever waited tables, you know that the customer isn’t always right. If you’ve ever refereed a soccer game, you know that the customer isn’t always right. If you’ve ever had any job anywhere, you know that the customer isn’t always right. So why do we say that the customer is always right? I’d [...]
Leadership Tactic #65: Awesomeness
A quote from over on the Signal vs. Noise blog caught me the other day and has stuck with me ever since: Who is the star of your product? Do you want people to think your product is awesome, or would you rather they felt awesome about themselves because they used your product? This really [...]
Leadership Tactic #64: Create a Line
Every week or so, I’ve been allowing a few food trucks to park at my organization during lunch. They serve great food, they attract a crowd, and they donate some money to our international service trip. Right now there are two food trucks. One of the trucks makes food to order, so there’s always a [...]
Leadership Tactic #63: Group Grunt Work
A few weeks ago, I organized an invitation stuffing party at work. “Party” is a somewhat deceptive word, as it’s actually a finely tuned assembly line of volunteers doing mindless work and chatting while doing so. My goal every year is to stuff the 4,000 invitations faster than the previous year. This year we crushed [...]
Management Tactic #62: Secret Santa
If your company has a Secret Santa program in place, it might have a very real impact on the bottom line. I’m here to argue that companies should actually sponsor their own Secret Santa programs to improve employee satisfaction and performance. At my previous company, we had a great time playing Secret Santa every year [...]
Leadership Tactic #61: Make It About Them
There’s a line in Fight Club that I’ve loved since the first second I heard it: “When people think you’re dying, they really, really just listen to you…instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.” Once I heard that line, I started realizing how often I was just waiting for my turn to speak. [...]
Management Tactic #61: The Worst-Case Scenario Test
I had a great conversation today with one of the higher-ups in HR at a nearby university. He told me a really interesting story that I thought I’d share with you. This will be particularly interesting if you’re in a hiring position or might ever be interested in relocating for a job. The HR guy [...]
Leadership Tactic #60: Happiness Is Underrated
The other day I was talking to a happily employed friend who is being recruited for another job. He said that the recruiting company is known for targeting people who are happy in their current jobs. I thought that was really interesting, that the number one filter the company used was employee happiness. They aren’t [...]
Leadership Tactic #59: Don’t Fix Things Without Asking
A string of circumstances lately has made me think about the value (or lack therein) of fixing things for other people without asking. People’s intentions can be so good, but so counterproductive. Because some things are broken for a reason. Example 1: A few ladies were recently preparing for a wedding reception where I work. [...]
The 15 Workplace Love Languages
A year and a half ago, I wrote about the five love languages. I mostly talked about how they can be applied to improve romantic, familial, and friend relationships, but I briefly touched on how they can be effective at the workplace. Last week, I realized that I could expand upon that idea by polling [...]
Management Tactic #58: A Modest Proposal
I have a proposal for maximizing efficiency and productivity. I would suggest that all workplaces enact this policy, effective immediately. The average American worker spends 27 minutes in the bathroom a day (Stegmaier 2011). Not only are workers moving bowels and excreting liquids, they are washing hands, examining blemishes in the mirror, and adjusting their [...]
Management Tactic #57: The Marshmallow Challenge
About a year ago, I watched a TED talk online about something called “The Marshmallow Challenge.” I was fascinated by this deceptively simple teambuilding exercise and the lessons it provided to groups, companies, and leaders. So today I tried it at my work. My organization isn’t huge, so we had seven participants divided into three [...]
Leadership Tactic #56: The Value of Facetime
Today at work, schedule lunch in the near future with a coworker with whom you’ve never chatted one-on-one for more than a few minutes. You’d be amazed at what a little facetime can do. Two years ago at my full-time job, one of our interns would come into my office about twice a week to [...]
Leadership Tactic #55: Do Something
Have you ever lost someone close to you? Have you ever needed taking care of after an injury or sickness? Have you ever been hit by a major disaster? If you have, you know that you’ll get a lot of people saying this to you: “Is there anything I can do to help?” Which is, [...]
3 Ways to Be Productive When You Don’t Want to Work
We all have those days–perhaps even periods throughout every day–when we’re easily distracted. We know we should be working because we have work to do, but we find every excuse not to do work. Then we end up cramming in the items on our to-do list at the end of the day, or we just [...]
5 Management Lessons from Michael Scott
With his departure from The Office last Thursday, Michael Scott leaves behind a legacy of bad management and good humor. I think the show will be just fine with him gone, yet his final episode episode moved me to tears. In honor of him, I’d like to ignore the myriad of poor leadership tactics he [...]
Leadership Tactic #47: 10,000 Hours
Malcolm Gladwell writes about the concept that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can make you great…at anything. He uses the examples of Bill Gates, who started working with computers for hours each day when he was a boy, and the Beatles, who played long, long sets every night to make ends meet early on. A [...]
Management Tactic #46: The Easter Basket
When I was about 11 years old, my family piled into our minivan and took a trip down to Florida. It was spring break, and we were going to Disney World. We stayed with my aunt and uncle in Florida for a few days over the Easter weekend. I remember being surprised at how little [...]
Leadership Tactic #45: How to Enchant the Pants Off Someone
A few months ago, I saw one of my favorite types of promotions for new books: An author named Guy Kawasaki was giving away copies of his new book, Enchantment, to bloggers if they agreed to review the book. (My publishing company does something similar with advance reader copies of our books.) I signed up [...]
Management Tactic #44: Be Different
A while back, I posted about my love for a website called Kickstarter. It’s a site for raising funds for any project. You ask people to support you, you give them things in exchange for their support, and if you don’t raise as much money as you needed, nobody pays anything. Here’s a really cool [...]
