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

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

The most fundamental principle of learning theory is that behavior is a function of its consequences. When behavior is rewarded, that behavior gets repeated with even greater frequency. When behavior is ignored or punished, the frequency of the behavior diminishes.37 In the world of leadership, and particularly the world of senior leadership, what

Fully 35 percent of U.S. employees reported that they would willingly forgo a substantial pay raise in exchange for seeing their direct supervisor fired.

there are many ways to redesign governance that would reduce the dependence of employee well-being on the vagaries of people’s doing a better job of selecting and training all-powerful leaders. Such solutions mostly entail building work systems that are less leader-dependent, and instead devolve more power to a wider set of organizational constitue

In the case of leadership, if you project confidence and claim competence with enough conviction to be credible, observers will tend to assimilate any information about you in ways consistent with the idea that you know what you are doing and are deserving of a position of leadership.

Keith Ferrazzi, a consultant and management speaker, related that a talk on how companies can accomplish cultural change prompted a manager in the audience to note the similarities in Ferrazzi’s prescriptions to elements of addiction programs.30 For good reason: Successful efforts at change at the individual or the organizational level have many el

Cognitive dissonance runs rampant inside workplaces. The idea that I have joined and voluntarily remain in a place, and the idea that the place I am in is run by some incompetent, venal, mean individual, are two highly discordant thoughts. It is often difficult to change the reality of my joining and remaining in my present place of employment. It

The point of agency theory is that with the right measurements and incentives, many of the problems entailed in aligning otherwise conflicting interests can be solved.

When three McKinsey consultants sought to understand why leadership-development programs failed, one of the four causes they uncovered was the failure to measure results. They noted that companies paid only lip service to developing leadership skills and did not invest in measurement to track actual changes. They commented, “Too often, any evaluati