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How Smart People Undermine Their Success

July 1, 2024 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How Smart People Undermine Their Success Intelligence is a double-edged sword: sure, it’s got its perks, but sometimes it trips up even the brainiest of folks. Brainiacs may find themselves falling short of their goals due to inadvertently undermining their own efforts. Making it big in most jobs needs more than just smarts.

Bright minds often view their success as inevitable, sometimes overlooking the importance of other skills. For example, they may dismiss workplace diplomacy as an annoyance rather than recognizing its importance. No matter how tactful they are, their braininess can still put a damper on slower teammates. They get antsy dealing with processes and people who are not on their level. They might choose to work solo, thinking they can get things done faster that way. Additionally, they may be less receptive to feedback, especially when they feel confident in their approach.

Focusing solely on what you’re good at, especially if it’s brains, can backfire big time if you ignore your weak spots. Seek a caring mentor who can clue you in on how people see you, dial down that ego, and adjust your expectations—try to become the respected star of the team, not the reviled know-it-all.

If you find yourself always toning down your smarts to fit in, maybe it’s time to find a workplace where they actually dig your brainpower. Look for employers who value intellect, such as think tanks, universities, investment banking firms, law and consulting companies, and professions where they’re all about flexing those mental muscles.

Filed Under: Effective Communication, Managing People Tagged With: Assertiveness, Confidence, Getting Ahead, Getting Along, Humility, Likeability, Listening, Personality

How Focusing On Communication Skills Can Improve Your Career Prospects

May 26, 2024 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Communication skills are critical to your success at work, regardless of your position or sector.

Every profession necessitates human connection, whether with your boss and coworkers or with clients and customers. Strong communication skills may assist in facilitating these relationships with others, allowing you to work more efficiently and successfully.

How Focusing On Communication Skills Can Improve Your Career Prospects

Do you want to enhance your communication skills? Below, we explain the significance of corporate communication skills and highlight the most significant talents that you should focus on improving.

Why are good communication skills so vital?

You may be asking why communication skills are so crucial. This is because effective communication encourages teamwork and simplifies collaboration. Your strong communication skills are transferable to every field, and they will always help you advance in your career.

Effective communication implies that supervisors and teammates are constantly together, and there are no communication problems at work. When working remotely, effective communication is critical for efficiency.

Why is it vital to improve your communication skills?

One of the most significant benefits is that you will communicate more effectively with others. At work, you must interact with a variety of people. Good communication abilities will benefit you to communicate more effectively with your coworkers and advance in your profession, no matter if you are employed as a specialist of a call center and are keen on improving the metrics that matter or CEO of a giant corporation.

Top communication skills for workplace success

1. Active listening

Listening, particularly active listening, is an important communication ability because it allows you to pay attention to others around you and respond properly. This can help you in practically any situation, whether you’re looking for an entry-level job or the position of CEO.

2. Being presentable

This includes both you and your thoughts. The majority of our communication is through nonverbal clues. Positive and open body language are crucial communication skills that can help you engage your audience during presentations and share ideas or discuss projects.

3. Understanding communication styles

There are four major communication styles that you may meet in the workplace, and professionals should be aware of all of them to support good communication. They are:

  • Passive communicators are quieter and less likely to reveal their actual sentiments. They can be indifferent or pleasant, based on the occasion, to preserve the peace and avoid upsetting anyone.
  • Aggressive communicators are the polar opposite of quiet communicators; they frequently express their feelings without regard for others. They may be threatening or harsh in their relations with others.
  • Passive-aggressive communicators try to look distant, even if they are irritated or annoyed. They are upset, but because they avoid confrontation, it is difficult to know what they are thinking.
  • Assertive communicators are attentive and straightforwardly communicate themselves. They engage respectfully with others.

4. Self-confidence

If you wonder “What are excellent communication abilities?” self-confidence goes out on top. When you are confident in sharing your views and ideas, you create a greater impact on the individuals you engage with.

Self-assurance is one of the most crucial interpersonal abilities you can develop, but there is a narrow line between confidence and overconfidence that you should never cross.

5. Respect

This implies that for constructive communication to occur between you and your target group, there should be mutual respect. Being tolerant of other people’s opinions and their rights to speak out their opinions can also be considered as another form of way of showing respect.

6. Emotional response

Emotional intelligence is one form of communication that is essential in the development of healthy working relationships. Communicating distress experiences relieves stress and maintains happiness.

This is a skill that one has to work hard to develop but when one does, he or she will start to notice positive changes in the ways they communicate.

7. Staying current with the latest communication technology

Online communication and collaboration technologies are more common in today’s business. Modern organizations frequently employ chat and video conferencing software to keep team members in touch.

Digital communication is becoming increasingly popular, and staying up to speed on the latest technology is critical for effective communication.

How to improve your communication skills?

If you want to improve your communication abilities, here are some tips.

Being a careful observer of communication dynamics at work is a wonderful method to improve your communication abilities.

Formal schooling may also be a very effective technique for improving your communication abilities. Earning a master’s degree in communications, for example, provides workers with a slew of career perks, including more employment opportunities, greater pay, job stability, and other advantages.

The Power of Communication in Shaping Your Success

Effective communication is an essential component of personal and professional development. It’s a talent that can create or break relationships, sway choices, and alter our world. Understanding the power of body language, harnessing technology, mastering the art of storytelling, and creating trust are all aspects of communication that hold the key to unlocking new prospects.

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

The Arrogance of Success

May 22, 2024 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Arrogance of Success: Contentment Often Leads to Stagnation Don’t look in the rearview mirror and expect that what led to past success can lead to new success. Human nature is such that we don’t like to contemplate letting go of the skills and behaviors that “got us here.” The arrogance of success is to assume that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. Contentment often leads to stagnation.

Have a learning mindset. After every win, be critical—even faultfinding—and try to understand what made you successful in each case with brutal self-honesty. Was it luck? Was it skill?

Idea for Impact: Let success be a brilliant teacher in the areas where weaknesses must be addressed.

Filed Under: Business Stories, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Critical Thinking, Discipline, Innovation, Introspection, Luck, Mental Models, Parables, Thinking Tools, Thought Process, Toyota

Don’t Be Deceived by Others’ Success

November 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Imitating successful competitors is a leading pathway to business innovation. Benchmarking can offer meaningful insights into comparative performance and help discover learnings for improvement. However, adopting others’ best practices can be surprisingly misleading and ineffective.

Four perception biases that come with benchmarking other companies can fail to make yours any better.

Many companies luck into success.

As I’ve noted before, you can’t reproduce others’ luck. Successful companies tend to significantly overvalue the effect of their leaders’ deliberate decisions on their performance and understate the role of chance—being at the right time, at the right place, with the right people. Alas, what worked in their circumstances may not work in yours.

The set-up-to-fail syndrome.

Benchmarking can be remarkably misleading when you make oversimplified comparisons to superstars who may not represent your situation. You could sink your business if you blindly copy celebrity leaders’playbooks in the wrong context, product, strategy, or market.

Companies that benchmark Apple and Steve Jobs and sidestep market research often disappoint themselves when their product launches fail. The leaders of these companies neither have Jobs’s brilliant intuition nor his extraordinarily talented creative team to build what customers want but didn’t know they wanted yet.

In the same way, companies that imitate the 20-70-10 “rank and yank” processes from Jack Welch’s playbook often fail to realize that several factors contributed to their success at General Electric. Welch had a robust organizational culture that insisted on regular and candid employee feedback and robust personnel processes for recognizing and developing the best talent within the company.

Corporate culture is a tricky business.

Your company’s culture—the prevailing way your people feel, think, behave, and relate to one another—cannot be changed easily. One industrial company aborted trying to imitate Google’s culture. This company couldn’t get its managers and employees to be more autonomous and innovative because the company’s and the industry’s ingrained culture did not lend itself to experimentation, risk-taking, and the celebration of fast failure.

Benchmarks look backward, not forwards.

In a competitive, ever so fast-changing world, what has succeeded in the past ten years may not necessarily do so in the next 10. The management guru Tom Peters once warned, “Benchmarking is stupid! Because we pick the current industry leader, and then we launch a five-year program, the goal of which is to be as good as whoever was best five years ago, five years from now.”

A strong focus on “quick wins” can turn out long-term losers.

Benchmarking can make short-term gains but have adverse long-term effects that may not manifest until many years later. By imitating an industry leader, a capital goods company decided to boost efficiency by outsourcing design to its suppliers. Years later, it discovered the debilitating effects of the loss of vital technical knowledge.

Idea for Impact: Best practices only add value when applied in the proper context

Applying best practices in the wrong context is a sure-fire way to hold your company back.

Pay attention to all ideas, mull them over, test what makes sense, adopt what works, and discard what doesn’t.

Sure, help yourself to great ideas wherever you can get them, but be mindful of the context. Try to understand how the top performers’ circumstances and culture may be causing their success. Think through the long-term consequences of any decision you take or any practice you adopt.

Filed Under: Leadership, Mental Models Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Getting Ahead, Icons, Leadership Lessons, Mentoring, Role Models, Winning on the Job

Five Rules for Leadership Success // Summary of Dave Ulrich’s ‘The Leadership Code’

January 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The key to success in any discipline is to figure out the few things that must be done really well and to get those basics right. But so many leaders fail on the fundamentals—and don’t even realize it.

The real implication of leadership has been buried deep over the years: leadership isn’t about the position but about who you are and the responsibility you can undertake. Leadership consultants Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, and Kate Sweetman’s The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By (2009) argues that everything you ever need to know about leadership comes down to five straightforward rules.

If you understand these rules and put them into practice, you can’t fail to spur others and enrich teams, organizations, or communities.

Rule 1: Be A Strategist. Deliberate leaders answer the question “Where are we going?” and mull over multiple time frames. They institute a great enough sense of urgency and remove impediments to the new vision. They anticipate the future and work with others to determine how to advance from the present to the desired future. Shape the future.

Rule 2: Be an Executor. The “executor” aspect of leadership focuses on the question, “How will we make sure we get to where we are going?” Effective leaders understand how to make change happen, assign accountability, assess plans, coordinate efforts, and share information that should be incorporated into strategies. Make things happen.

Rule 3: Be a Talent Manager. Leaders who engage talent now answer the question, “Who goes with us on our business journey?” They select the right people for the right job and ensure that people have the right tools and autonomy to succeed. Leaders foster an inviting organization, create a high level of performance and passion, and continuously monitor problems that need to be fixed. Engage today’s talent.

Rule 4: Be a Human Capital Developer. Leaders who are talent developers answer the question, “Who stays and sustains the organization for the next generation?” Leaders take the time to become aware of how future trends could affect their organizations. They position their teams to win by bearing in mind the longer-term competencies required for future strategic success. Build the next generation.

Rule 5: Be Proficient. Leadership demands are more daunting than ever, and the pressure to perform is relentless. Create regular timeouts to review where you invest your time and energy to ensure that you remain capable of self-managing your personal strengths and weaknesses and generating new behaviors to deal with new challenges. Invest in yourself.

As with most “rules-for-success” books, the authors tout their assessment of “hundreds of studies, frameworks, and tools.” But their work is no more than a distillation of notable leadership thinkers’ experiences. Nonetheless, the rules sound right. The five rules are simple, but they aren’t easy. They are sensible and practicable. They’re what you can focus your effort on for maximum return.

Recommendation: Quick read The Leadership Code. It makes a great early book choice for new leaders. It provides a grounded approach to the fundamentals.

Never underestimate the power of key leadership principles that can be well executed. Complement The Leadership Code with Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management (1954; my summary) and Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager (2019; my summary.)

Filed Under: Leadership, Managing People, MBA in a Nutshell Tagged With: Books, Great Manager, Leadership Lessons, Management, Mentoring, Skills for Success, Winning on the Job

Crucible Experiences Can Transform Your Leadership Skills

October 18, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

'Geeks and Geezers' by Warren Bennis (ISBN 1578515823) In Geeks and Geezers (2002), renowned leadership academic Warren Bennis and management consultant Robert Thomas interview 40 “geeks” (aged 21–34) and “geezers” (aged 70–82) to evaluate differences in their leadership values and success patterns.

The two groups vary in backgrounds, ambitions, and their role models. The geeks are more concerned with work-life balance than the geezers. The geezers formed their characters during the Great Depression and World War II and hence hold Franklin Roosevelt, Gandhi, Lincoln, Mandela, Kennedy, and Churchill as leadership role models. In contrast, the geeks tend to model themselves after their parents, friends, bosses, and co-workers.

Leadership “Crucibles”: Pivotal life-changing experiences that alter your thinking and actions

The statistics and analyses of geeks and geezers are a gross distraction from the book’s central idea: that all potential leaders must pass through a “leadership crucible” that provides an intense, transformational experience. Only after they “organize the meaning” of and draw significant lessons from their crucible experiences can they become leaders. They must also cultivate complementary leadership skills such as adaptive capacity and the ability to engage others by creating shared meaning, voice, and integrity.

All geeks and geezers interviewed by the authors had one thing in common: each had at least one leadership crucible. The authors explain that each experience was “a test and a decision point, where existing values were examined and strengthened or replaced, where alternative identities were considered and sometimes chosen, where judgment and other abilities were honed.”

The best leaders excel in their ability to create meaning out of adversity

Geeks and Geezers lays monolithic emphasis on the role of transformational crucible experiences in building leadership skills. The authors conclude that such experiences shape a leader; therefore, “great leaders are not born but made—often by tough, bitter experience.” The book implies that most leadership development initiatives (selection, training, mentoring, job rotation, etc.) are not as effective as they are touted to be. The book advises would-be leaders to develop themselves by seeking out crucible experiences at work, school, or in their communities to maximize their leadership potential.

One meaningful takeaway from Geeks and Geezers is a contemplative exercise: to reflect on some crucible experiences in the reader’s life and examine what he/she has learned from them. The reader may be able to create his/her own story and find his/her “leadership voice.”

Recommendation: Skim. Read the final chapter. Beyond the authors’ anecdote-heavy “research,” Geeks and Geezers will engage readers in interesting case studies of successful men and women who moved beyond the constraints imposed by trying circumstances and reshaped themselves. However, most of Geeks and Geezers lacks substance and practical application, especially in comparison to co-author Bennis’s bestseller On Becoming a Leader.

Filed Under: Leadership Reading, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Books, Skills for Success

Ten Rules of Management Success from Sam Walton

February 2, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Sam Walton (1918–1992,) the iconic founder of Walmart and Sam’s Club, was arguably the most successful entrepreneur of his generation. He was passionate about retailing, loved his work, and built and ran Walmart with boundless energy.

'Sam Walton: Made In America' by Sam Walton (ISBN 0553562835) “Made in America” is Walton’s very educational, insightful, and stimulating autobiography. It’s teeming with Walton’s relentless search for better ideas, learning from competitors, managing costs and prices to gain competitive advantage, asking incessant questions of day-to-day operations, listening to employees at all levels of Walmart, and inventing creative ways to foster an idea-driven culture. “Made in America” is also filled with anecdotes from Walton’s associates and family members—in fact, some of their opinions are less than flattering.

Former CEO of General Electric Jack Welch once said, “Walton understood people the way Thomas Edison understood innovation and Henry Ford, production. He brought out the very best in his employees, gave his very best to his customers, and taught something of value to everyone he touched.”

Here are ten insightful management ideas from “Made in America” with the relevant anecdotes from Walton or his associates.

  1. When hiring employees, look for passion and desire to grow. Having the right skills and qualifications is no doubt essential in a potential employee, but a better predictor of long-term success and career advancement is his/her passion for learning new things, commitment to a task, and a drive to get things done. A former Walmart executive recalls, “Sam would take people with hardly any retail experience, give them six months with us, and if he thought they showed any real potential to merchandise a store and manage people, he’d give them a chance. He’d make them an assistant manager. They were the ones who would go around and open all the new stores and they would be next in line to manage their own store. In my opinion, most of them weren’t anywhere near ready to run stores, but Sam proved me wrong there. He finally convinced me. If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks.”
  2. Delegate and follow up. Delegation is indispensable; yet it remains one of the most underutilized and underdeveloped managerial skills. One element of effective delegation is consistent follow-up. Far too often, managers will delegate a task and then fail to follow up to see how things are going. Such failure to follow-up is tantamount to abdication of accountability for results, which still lies with the manager. Former Walmart CEO David Glass recalls, “As famous as Sam is for being a great motivator … he is equally good at checking on the people he has motivated. You might call his style: management by looking over your shoulder.”
  1. Persist and rally people to the cause. Passionate managers demonstrate the energy and drive needed to rally their teams around a shared vision. They engage their employees with the same messages over and over, escalate their sense of urgency, and get their vision implemented quickly. Former Walmart CEO David Glass recalls, “When Sam feels a certain way, he is relentless. He will just wear you out. He will bring up an idea, we’ll all discuss it and then decide maybe that it’s not something we should be doing right now—or ever. Fine. Case closed. But as long as he is convinced that it is the right thing, it just keeps coming up—week after week after week—until finally everybody capitulates and says, well, it’s easier to do it than to keep fighting this fight. I guess it could be called management by wearing you down.”
  2. Mentor, critique, and inspire employees. Mentoring employees is an effective way to improve employee performance and build trust and loyalty. Effective mentoring is not merely telling employees what to do. It is helping them broaden and deepen their thinking by clarifying their goals and asking the right questions. Effective mentoring is also about supporting employees as they learn and practice new skills and habits. Walton writes, “I’ve been asked if I was a hands-on manager or an arm’s-length type. I think really I’m more of a manager by walking and flying around, and in the process I stick my fingers into everything I can to see how it’s coming along. I’ve let our executives make their decisions—and their mistakes—but I’ve critiqued and advised them.”
  3. Invest in frontline employees for better customer relationships. Much of customers’ opinions about a business come from the myriad interactions they have with customer-interfacing frontline employees, who are the face of any business. If a business doesn’t get these customer experiences right, nothing else matters. Walton writes, “The way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers. And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies, not in trying to drag strangers into your stores for one-time purchases based on splashy sales or expensive advertising. Satisfied, loyal, repeat customers … are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do. So, in the whole Wal-Mart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associate in the store and the customer.”
  4. Treat employees like business partners and empower them by sharing information. Effective managers foster open communication by treating employees as co-owners of the business and sharing operational data regularly. Managers empower employees by helping them understand how their contribution makes a difference, discussing opportunities and challenges, and encouraging them to contribute to solutions. Walton writes, “Our very unusual willingness to share most of the numbers of our business with all the associates … It’s the only way they can possibly do their jobs to the best of their abilities—to know what’s going on in their business. … Sharing information and responsibility is a key to any partnership. It makes people feel responsible and involved …. In our individual stores, we show them their store’s profits, their store’s purchases, their store’s sales, and their store’s markdowns.
  5. Never be satisfied. There’s always room for improvement. Effective managers never rest on their laurels and are persistently dissatisfied with the status quo. They possess a pervasive obsession for discovering problems and improving products, services, and people. Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus recalls, “If you ask Sam how’s business, he’s never satisfied. He says, ‘Bernie, things are really lousy. Our lines are too long at the cash registers. Our people aren’t being helpful enough. I don’t know what we’re gonna do to get them motivated.’ Then you ask some of these CEOs from other retail organizations who you know are on the verge of going out of business, and they brag and tell you how great everything is. Really putting on airs. Not Sam. He is down to earth and knows who he is.”
  1. Appreciate employees and give honest feedback. A key determinant of employee engagement is whether employees feel their managers genuinely care. Do the managers provide regular, direct feedback, both appreciative and corrective? Do they coach employees in their learning and career growth? Walton writes, “Keeping so many people motivated to do the best job possible involves … appreciation. All of us like praise. So what we try to practice in our company is to look for things to praise. … We want to let our folks know when they are doing something outstanding, and let them know they are important to us. You can’t praise something that’s not done well. You can’t be insincere. You have to follow up on things that aren’t done well. There is no substitute for being honest with someone and letting them know they didn’t do a good job. All of us profit from being corrected—if we’re corrected in a positive way.”
  2. Listening to employee’s complaints and concerns could be a positive force for change. Effective managers provide their employees the opportunity to not only contribute their ideas, but also air concerns and complaints. By fostering an environment of open communication, managers who handle employee opinions effectively not only boost employee motivation, performance, and morale, but also benefit from learning directly about problems with teams, organizations, and businesses. Walton writes, “Executives who hold themselves aloof from their associates, who won’t listen to their associates when they have a problem, can never be true partners with them. … Folks who stand on their feet all day stocking shelves or pushing carts of merchandise out of the back room get exhausted and frustrated too, and occasionally they dwell on problems that they just can’t let go of until they’ve shared it with somebody who they feel is in a position to find a solution. … We have really tried to maintain an open-door policy at Wal-Mart. … If the associate happens to be right, it’s important to overrule their manager, or whoever they’re having the problem … . The associates would know pretty soon that it was just something we paid lip service to, but didn’t really believe.”
  3. Learn from the competition. Effective managers understand that keeping tabs on competitors, copying their innovations as much as possible, and reaching out to customers the way competitors do is a great strategy for growing business. Sam Walton’s brother Bud recalls, “There may not be anything (Walton) enjoys more than going into a competitor’s store trying to learn something from it.” A former K-Mart board member recalls, “(Walton) had adopted almost all of the original Kmart ideas. I always had great admiration for the way he implemented—and later enlarged those ideas. Much later on, when I was retired still a K-Mart board member, I tried to advise (K-Mart) management of just what a serious threat I thought he was. But it wasn’t until recently that they took him seriously.”

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Teams, Managing People, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Employee Development, Entrepreneurs, Great Manager, Hiring & Firing, Mental Models, Mentoring

Looking for Important Skills to Develop?

November 26, 2014 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Whether you need to take on a new challenge, prepare yourself to become promotable, or enhance your performance at work, undertaking learning and development can help. You must continually be on the lookout for new talents to add to the vast fund of knowledge you’ve accumulated over the years and add to the reservoir of experiences from which to draw.

Some skills are critical to your success throughout your career and life. Chris Anderson recently suggested a set of vital topics that must be taught in school. Anderson is the founder and curator of the Ideas-Worth-Spreading TED conferences.

TED’s Chris Anderson propunds a “Syllabus of the Future”

  • How to nurture your curiosity.
  • How to Google intelligently and skeptically.
  • How to manage your money.
  • How to manage your time.
  • How to present your ideas.
  • How to make a compelling online video.
  • The secret life of a girl.
  • The secret life of a boy.
  • How to build a healthy relationship.
  • How to listen.
  • How to calm an argument.
  • Who do you want to be?
  • How to train your brain to be what you want to be.
  • 100 role models for the career you hadn’t thought of.
  • How to think like a scientist.
  • Why history matters.
  • Books that changed the world.
  • Why personal discipline is key to future success.
  • How your reflective self can manage your instinctual self.
  • How to defend the rights of people you care about.
  • 10 hours with a kid on the other side of the world.
  • The keys to a healthy diet.
  • Why exercise matters.
  • How generosity creates happiness.
  • How immersion in nature eases stress.
  • What are the questions no one knows the answer to?

Use his “Syllabus of the Future” list to evaluate your needs in development and educate yourself in a few selected topics. Design a development plan involving regular discussions, reading articles and books, watching instructional videos, attending courses offered by a professional association, and observing and apprenticing with a mentor proficient in the skill you seek.

Filed Under: Career Development, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Employee Development, Getting Ahead, Skills for Success, Thinking Tools, Winning on the Job

Book Summary of Maria Bartiromo’s ‘The 10 Laws of Enduring Success’

November 28, 2010 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The 10 Laws of Enduring Success » Maria Bartiromo Success consists of recognizing opportunity, being optimistic, following our passions, keeping good relations, and making the best of circumstances that life presents us. The elements of accomplishment have been widely written about since the dawn of publishing. Each year, several authors attempt to repackage the familiar skills for success in new contexts. Such is the effort of CNBC anchor and journalist Maria Bartiromo (with Catherine Whitney) in “The 10 Laws of Enduring Success.” Maria presents the longstanding blueprint of success as ten attitudes: self-awareness, foresight, ingenuity, audacity, integrity, flexibility, modesty, fortitude, tenacity of purpose, and resilience.

“The 10 Laws of Enduring Success” falls short on one key characteristic. Advice on success can inspire only when the narrator connects his/her advice to personal anecdotes of hopes and despairs, achievements and disappointments, and meaningfully reflects on how certain attitudes contributed to his/her eventual success. Remember my recent article about commencement addresses by Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and J K Rowling? These speakers are stimulating for the very reason that their timeless advices consist of thought-provoking personal contemplations.

“The 10 Laws of Enduring Success” is lacking in deep reflections of what contributed to the author’s success. As the host of one of the most popular shows in business TV, Maria Bartiromo has an extensive access to distinguished people. She does include insights from many successful people from the world of politics, business, sports, and entertainment. However, these narratives are typically short, often wander off the point, and do not necessarily connect to individual themes in a memorable way.

The conversational writing style is unassuming and quite engaging, and thus makes the book a quick read.

Leadership Reader’s Bottom-line

  • “The 10 Laws of Enduring Success” by Maria Bartiromo with Catherine Whitney
  • Subject: Skills for success
  • Suggested reading for fans of CNBC and the financial news media. Optional reading for others.
  • Read this book as a reiteration of the first principles of success. Be not amazed if this book does not prompt new thoughts.
  • 3 out of 5 Stars

Filed Under: Career Development, Leadership Reading, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Books for Impact, Wisdom

Systems-Thinking as a Trait for Career Success

February 12, 2009 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In this Fast Company article, Gary Flake, Director of Live Labs at Microsoft identifies Systems Thinking as an important trait for career success.

There are three traits that will serve anyone wanting any role at any company, not just ours: systems thinking, passion, and clear communication. Systems thinking is a way of looking at the world that allows you to see how many small pieces come together to make a more complex whole. System thinkers see the hidden interconnections that bind together the parts and know how to make the best use of ambiguity and uncertainty as a result.

Gary’s reflection reiterates the importance of understanding context and perspective in our jobs. A previous blog article and a podcast discussed this indispensable trait for success.

Systems Thinking for a Big Picture Approach

From an early age, we’re taught to break apart problems in order to make complex tasks and subjects easier to deal with. But this creates a bigger problem . . . we lose the ability to see the consequences of our actions, and we lose a sense of connection to a larger whole.
* Peter Senge

Traditional methods of problem analysis concentrate on dividing problems into smaller, more comprehensible components. The drawback of understanding isolated or unrelated elements, functions, and events is that the effects of changes to one element on other elements of the whole are rarely considered.

In contrast, the discipline of Systems Thinking emphasizes analyzing the whole in terms of interrelationships of its elements. Examining structures, relationships, and outcomes facilitates taking into account any secondary consequences of decisions and actions pertaining individual elements.

We work in increasingly connected organizations where an event that affects one part of an organization is likely to have a meaningful effect–in the short-term or the long-term–on another part of the organization. The discipline of Systems Thinking enables us to develop a broader, holistic perspective of problems and opportunities in businesses and make effective decisions.

Resources, References

Over the last couple of decades, System Thinking has evolved into a formal discipline and has incorporated several rigorous analysis techniques. Here are two excellent resources to help you gain more knowledge of these methods.

  • The ‘Thinking’ in Systems Thinking: Seven Essential Skills, Barry Richmond
  • The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge

Filed Under: Career Development, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Mental Models, Thinking Tools, Thought Process, Winning on the Job

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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RECOMMENDED BOOK:
The Story of My Experiments with Truth

The Story of My Experiments with Truth: Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi's transparent glimpse into the mind of a truly great soul who demonstrated that an individual dedicated to conscious living, honesty, and love can overcome any violence or hatred.

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Unless otherwise stated in the individual document, the works above are © Nagesh Belludi under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. You may quote, copy and share them freely, as long as you link back to RightAttitudes.com, don't make money with them, and don't modify the content. Enjoy!