Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

Measure and Hold People Accountable for Workplace Outcomes

In the desire to learn only from success, people miss the opportunity to learn from failure, which is often a more promising and interesting teacher.

The improvement mostly occurred because Rubin built a robust operating model around a performance management system and installed a leadership team with a performance-improvement orientation.

Most of the drugs currently used to treat cancer are toxic poisons. Radiation, also used to treat cancer, kills if the dose is too high. Many therapeutic advances entail trying to get the chemical substances or the radiation focused more precisely on the cancerous cells, sparing the healthy tissue, in the recognition that you need the poison but wa

confidence as much as competence determines success, and successful people are not bashful about promoting themselves and eschewing any feelings of modesty in the process.

Goldsmith’s and Godtfredsen’s programs require a daily question process whereby at the same time each day (in the morning or evening, for example), individuals rate themselves on how well they have progressed on the five or six questions that have the greatest impact on their personal and professional objectives. Systematically and regularly reflec

the employment relationship engenders similar moral obligations. Yes, employees may have worked hard for their employers, investing their careers for years in helping to build the organization’s success. But the employees got paid for that work, and so it would seem that the act of being paid for one’s labor means that the employer owes its people

If you put a chicken in a cage with a python, you know what is going to happen.

Leaders who have come up through the ranks and have done many if not most of the organization’s jobs are much more likely to look out for the interests of those they lead because they have been there themselves. That is one plausible explanation for why, in general, leadership in the military is not just better but why senior military officers typi