Idea Resources

If you are interested in some tools to help you implement the ideas in this article and associated book by joining our mailing list. I once left a high paying job merely to escape from my direct boss. It was a good job and I was leading a team I loved, but none of that was worth working for this person. Others on the team joined me out the door over the next few months. That’s the impact of poor leadership and my experience is that the impact is heightened when leading technical teams. I enjoy leading teams of smart, capable …

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One of the key ideas tied to Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is that of first figuring out what is most important to you. Ideas like making sure your ladder of success is leaning against the right wall are core to being “effective” as Covey sees it. One of the exercises designed to explore that is imagining you are at your own funeral and seeing who is there and what you desire them to say about you. One of the tools in the 7 Habits Book Tools implementation package helps you do just that. Download it for free …

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We just published a new Book Tools implementation package for The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People … wooohooo! This package is designed to take the fine & timeless ideas in the book and make them work in your life. There is one page with an overview of the 7 Habits model and 8 tool template pages to help apply specific ideas and exercises from the book. We’ll describe the available tools over the next few posts and you can view all posts for 7 Habits here. For now, here’s a quick overview of the habits … Be Proactive: You …

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In the last post I talked about finding out the needs of the other party and how important that is in negotiations large and small. This post is a call to never forget your own goals! If you allow your attention to be pulled off of your own goals and objectives and give up what you need you will be left with a result “less than zero”. Yes! Your goals are of supreme importance and must figure into anything and everything you do. This definitely dips into paradox territory as we seek to know the other’s needs and while still …

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One of the hardest steps to learning successful negotiation is the paradox of knowing and honoring your goals while focusing on the other party’s needs at the same time. Why focus on their needs? Because that’s where successful negotiation begins and ends. If you can discover what they TRULY want and find a way to satisfy that need in the context of your own goals … you’ve got it made. At that point it isn’t really a negotiation as much as a deal finalization. Often, though, their real needs are not apparent to you … or sometimes even them! Somewhat …

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“Baby steps get on the bus, baby steps down the aisle, baby steps …” – Bill Murray as Bob Wiley in “What About Bob?” If you suffer from work paralysis, your problem might be that you don?t know how to take “baby steps”. Just like you can’t eat an entire Thanksgiving dinner in one bite, or weed your yard with a single pull … you also can’t get to where you want to be in a single moment. In “Getting More” the author, Stuart Diamond writes … An analogy: If you are a .280 hitter in baseball, and you get …

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I’m just finishing a skim read of Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice. I’m sure if I read the entire book it would be very good. But appropriately, with everything going on in life right now … I chose not to really dive into this particular book. Instead, I did my usual “skim” method on the book … Speed read the first chapter to get a feel of the writing style and perspective of the author Bold type “skim” until the last chapter (or summary chapter) Read the last chapter As far as I can tell, it was a …

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