Leadership, competitiveness and best practices on business management
Workplace Survey, Findings 1.Workers are struggling to work effectively. When focus is compromised in pursuit of Collaboration, neither works well. 2. Effective workplaces balance focus and collaboration. Workplaces designed to enable collaboration without sacrificing employees’ ability to focus are more successful. 3. Choice drives performance and innovation. Employers who provide a spectrum of choices for when and where to work are seen as more innovative and have higher-performing employees.
Hiring isn’t easy. Employers might get hundreds — sometimes thousands — of resumes for a single open position and still, somehow, hire the wrong person.
Companies working in emerging fields like artificial intelligence or robotics have far more job openings than talented people to fill them. There’s been a shortage of software engineers and health care workers for more than a decade.
Read more...To achieve continued success, you must open yourself up to new learning experiences that may make you feel uncertain at best and incompetent at worst. Remember that those feelings are temporary and a prelude to greater professional ability.
Leaders within organizations bear some of the blame for this mind-set. They don’t always want to hear that somebody’s struggling, nor do they necessarily reward new ways of doing things, despite the lip service they might pay to innovation and prudent risk taking. As one executive pointed out, “My boss wants innovation as long as it’s done perfectly the first time.”
Read more...There are quite a number of motivational speakers and self-improvement books out there with a surprisingly simple message: believe that success will come easily to you, and it will.
There is one small problem in this argument, however, which unfortunately doesn't seem to stop anyone from making it: it is utterly false.
In fact, not only is visualizing "effortless success" unhelpful, it is disastrous. This is good advice to give only if you are trying to sabotage the recipient. It is a recipe for failure.
Read more...Bad is stronger than good. Psychologically speaking, bad parents, bad days, and bad feedback have bigger and longer-lasting impacts than good ones. In fact, it’s estimated that negative events weigh nearly 5 times more than positive ones .
This psychological phenomenon is called negativity bias. It holds that “people are much more likely to choose things based on their need to avoid negative experiences, rather than on their desire to get positive things.” Now, if all this is true, will someone tell me why companies have become obsessed with “delighting their customers” and “designing for delight?” Isn’t our time better spent preventing negative emotions, than trying to bring about positive ones?
Read more...In 1976, Chinese soldiers dug the earth with their hands to free victims of the Tangshan Earthquake when their only tool, a small shovel, was destroyed in the day-and-night digging. They were part of an army of 240,000 soldiers trying to rescue 100,000 people buried underground.
In 1998, when a dyke breach in Jiujiang City led to an uncontrollable flood into which cars and trucks disappeared, members of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) jumped into the water and formed a wall of people arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder. In 2008, in the wake of the Wenchuan Earthquake, paratroopers landed at high altitude in difficult terrain in extremely bad weather with neither meteorological nor ground information.
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