Right Attitudes

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Why You May Be Overlooking Your Best Talent

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Many organizations have a hard time articulating their culture. They can’t explain what they mean when they evoke the phrase “culture fit.” Sometimes it’s just an excuse to engage employees better whom managers feel they can personally relate.

Affinity bias is a common tendency to evaluate people like us more positively than others. This bias often affects who gets hired, promoted, or picked for job opportunities. Employees who look like those already in leadership roles are more likely to be recognized for career development, resulting in a lack of representation in senior positions.

This affinity for people who are like ourselves is hard-wired into our brains. Outlawing bias is doomed to fail.

Idea for Impact: If you want to avoid missing your top talent, become conscious of implicit biases. Don’t overlook any preference for like-minded people.

For any role, create a profile that encompasses which combination of hard and soft skills will matter for the role and on the team. Determine what matters and focus on the traits and skills you need.

Focus on Achieving Your Highest Priorities

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Wriggle yourself out of the mindset that you have to “get through” the day. Adopt the attitude that the coming hours are filled with open-ended potential to do the best work of your life and take action that can change your life forever.

This attitude shift can help you see things differently and focus on making life better. Ruthless prioritization means working on the very best of the ideas—not just the very good ideas, but also the ones that constitute the most important thing you could be doing.

Make a list of people, activities, and things that rate the highest level of importance in your life. Think about what you value most and rank them in order of importance. Then, spend as many waking moments as possible using your best skills on causes you deeply care about.

That’s indeed the best way to live life.

Idea for Impact: The key to performing at your best is freeing up your mind to do your most productive and creative work. Decide your highest priorities and have the discipline to say no to other things.

When it’s time to reflect on the week, day, or hour ahead, ask, “Which of my activities drive the biggest results?”

Refocus and make progress, not react.

Don’t Be Deceived by Others’ Success

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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.

Life Coaching: What You Need To Know And If It Is The Career For You

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Most successful people in the world share something in common. They had a mentor or a life coach that helped them along the way, guiding them as they grew as a person in their career.

Being a coach, you can mentor others in your area of expertise. With your years of experience and expertise, which you have fine-tuned, you can share them with others as you help to train them to succeed.

One of the best aspects of coaching is coaching others in almost all areas of life. There are endless, valuable reasons to become a life coach. The value is not just for others, they are also for you.

The Role Of A Life Coach

Being a life coach is like being a mentor. You coach and help others by encouraging them and showing them areas of their life where they could improve or view things from a different perspective. A life coach helps others do more of what is the most important to them but do them better.

Becoming a life coach will be a rewarding experience. You can help someone improve their lives. Along the way, you will also help yourself. You can guide someone as they work towards achieving their set goals, especially the targets that they believed were impossible. As a life coach, you will help people discover their limiting beliefs and support them as they remove the strains holding them back throughout the years.

Type Of Life Coaching

Similar to the different types of sports coaches, there are various types of life coaches. To decide what type you could be, ask yourself what you are good at doing? What would you like to help others succeed at in their life? After answering those questions, you can help yourself choose the kind of life coach you want to be.

  • Personal Life Coach – Those who seek the guidance of a personal life coach want them to help with their life. Additionally, they want the support to be successful in their career. All of which is what a personal life coach aims to achieve. A personal life coach aims to help others achieve their targets as they work to overcome the setbacks and obstacles that fall on their path. Being able to help people move on from the things that have held them back for so long can be extremely rewarding. There is great satisfaction in being able to help some who might be struggling. They help them to realize things about themselves. In turn, this will help you to learn qualities about yourself. As a personal life coach, you will also be helping yourself to succeed – doubling the reward!
  • Business Life Coach – Businesses coaches will show others how to bring in more income for the business. They will teach others how to improve their ability to make good decisions that will help in the growth of the business. Additionally, business coaches can create owner accountability and build actionable plans. They can help others to succeed in areas of business where they had previously struggled.
  • Career Life Coach – Not to be confused with a business life coach, career life coaches focus on a particular industry. Often it is one where coaching is needed. Since they have experience in a specific industry, career life coaches will have a deep understanding of the language used, the mentality and other factors to help someone succeed in the sector. With their in-depth knowledge and understanding, combined with the experience, career life coaches can identify areas where people have struggled with and help them to breakthrough and succeed.

How To Become A Life Coach

After deciding to pursue a career as a life coach, next comes understanding how to become one. Whilst becoming a life coach does sound like a daunting career path, it does not have to be. There are various choices available that you can make, all of which will push you forward towards a career as a life coach. During your time as a life coach, you will have an impact on the lives of so many individuals. You will support them in improving their own life.

Before you set out on your journey, have a clear understanding of what you are aiming to achieve. Know exactly what it is you want to do to help others accomplish their own goals. Take time to decide what it is that you want to accomplish in your career. Understand what you have to offer others and why you are the best qualified to offer it.

With this clear understanding of what it is you want to and the goals you want to achieve, you can begin to look at ways to become a life coach. Here are some of the steps that you can take to help you begin your career.

Online Courses Available

Participating in an online training program is one of the best, most flexible options for those looking to become a life coach. You can coordinate your learning schedule around your current timetable. Due to the course being online only, it sometimes will be cheaper than attending a course in person.

You can undergo an NLP training course, which will provide you with valuable skills that will help you in your pursuit of becoming a life coach. It allows you to harness the power of language, which can help to break down the mental barriers many of us create for ourselves without realizing it. Being a life coach, means harnessing the power of language. The power of language is crucial to succeeding and helping others to also succeed.

Create Memorable Experiences

When giving a lecture, ensure that you create one that is memorable and can help in transforming a person’s mindset. Most lectures often go unforgotten. If nothing is engaging or disciplines offered that are memorable, they will likely be forgotten in the days following the lecture. Those that do not apply any of the lessons that they learned immediately, then they are most likely to forget about them.

The Qualities Of A Great Life Coach

Knowing what type of life coach, you want to become, as well as the ways to become one, is only part of the journey. To be a successful life coach, one that can have a positive impact on the lives of their clients, they need to possess certain qualities. These qualities can make the difference between a good life coach and a great one. Here are a few of the qualities that great life coaches possess.

  • Help To Identify Emotional Blocks – A great life coach can help their audiences to identify their emotional blocks. The obstacles in their life have inhibited them from moving forward to become the best possible version of themselves or achieve their career goals. Having the ability to help your audience identify their emotional blocks, you can support them as they look to move past them. In turn, it will enable them to achieve real and lasting results.
  • Challenges Their Clients – Some of the best coaches in the industry will challenge their clients to gain a deeper understanding of their issues. A great coach will challenge their clients in a manner that will cause them to have to face the reality surrounding them with focus, honesty, and clarity.
  • Hold No Judgments – Everyone has their opinions. There are people in this world who have an opinion you do not agree with. However, in their view of the world, these opinions might be accurate. With every client, a great coach will create a safe space where their client can feel comfortable to speak about their thoughts without feeling judged. In doing so, they can both be transparent and find ways to achieve the targets set.
  • Maintains A Positive Attitude – Life coaches are some of the biggest supporters of their clients. They want to see them succeed. Life coaches have a desire to watch them free themselves of their past limitations and reach their goals. There will be times where both parties will experience setbacks. Moments where you are struggling with finding ways to succeed. In these challenging times, it is crucial to maintain a positive attitude. Having a positive attitude will help to inspire your clients, motivating them to believe in themselves.

The Benefits Of Becoming A Life Coach

You know how to become a life coach. Know about each type of coach you can become, and the qualities needed to be a great coach. The last thing is the benefits of becoming a life coach. Most of the benefits are some of the main reasons why people become life coaches. Some of the reasons you might already know, others might be new. Regardless, here are a few of the benefits you can reap should you choose to move forward and become a life coach.

Develop A New Sense Of Listening

As a life coach, you will tap into a newfound sense of listening. Throughout your career, you will interact with a diverse range of people. You will begin to listen to each of your clients in profounds ways, which over time will grow your ability to listen in an innovative way tremendously. Aside from hearing what they are saying, you will also notice exterior clues. For instance, as your client is speaking, you may see a change in their body language when discussing particular topics.

In addition to this, you will be more attuned to their passions and hear their wants and desires in life. By listening to all of these hidden factors, you can provide them with more personalized support. The tailored support is what you know could work well for them.

Impact Your Own Life

The purpose of a life coach is to help others. You will listen to their desires and wants. Then you will work in collaboration to support them as they work towards achieving these targets. Alongside their growth, you will also be part of this journey. You will be a co-writer in their life story, watching their adventures unfold before your eyes. Additionally, you will provide a safe space where they can identify their challenges. When they reach their goals, you will be on the side-line cheering on them.

As you support people in their journey, you will become an expert in your own life. You will share stories and experiences that you have had, which could be beneficial in helping your client reaching their next set goal.

Be Your Boss

By being a life coach, you can become your boss. A boss that you have always wanted to work for and once dreamed of becoming. Transitioning into a role of a life coach, you will become an entrepreneur. You will start to promote yourself, share your passions and strengths with your clients.

The additional perk of being your boss is that you can set your schedule. You can schedule more time to spend with loved ones. If you have the travel bug, you may consider offering your services regionally or nationally, compared to just staying local. It will provide you with the chance of exploring new avenues whilst widening your client base.

The Bottom Line

Undoubtedly, becoming a life coach will be a transformative experience. There will be an abundance of opportunities to interact with a diverse range of people. Your skills will become more refined. Your experiences and knowledge will expand tremendously in a short period.

A career as a life coach is a rewarding role. If you are someone who possesses the willingness and courage to take on a unique position and move in this direction, you can anticipate that your life will change forever. Throughout your career, you will have opportunities to help clients navigate their way through their optimal levels of functioning. You will accelerate holding their vision for the future. In addition to this, you will work collaboratively to develop new strategies for achievement. Ultimately, you will be changing the lives of others and also your own.

The Difference between Directive and Non-Directive Coaching

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When coaching, many managers’first impulse is to jump into solution mode and fix problems by recommending solutions. The advice is often framed as, “I’ve seen this condition before, and you should do X. That’s what worked for me when I was working at company Y.”

The Directive Coaching Style is suitable when your employee doesn’t have the time, skills, temperament, or patience to resolve her problem.

The Non-Directive Coaching Style, in contrast, encourages the employee to think through her problem and develop her own solution. This coaching style takes more time but is usually more effective, especially if the situation is complicated.

Suppose the problem presents a skill or competence that the employee can learn. In that case, a good coach nurtures the employee by challenging her to mull over the situation objectively. Merely supplying the right solution is wasted if she doesn’t understand it or internalize it well enough.

The most effective coaches I know tend to dwell less on the “what’s to be done” and more on instilling the “how to think about.”

Idea for Impact: When offering advice, steer the thought process. Don’t dictate the outcome. Employees are more likely to be invested in the solutions they come up with.

How to Turn Your Fears into Fuel

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Self-doubt is an Important Motivator

It doesn’t matter how successful creative people actually achieve. Feeling inadequate is a common malady in showbiz.

Barbra Streisand avoided live performance for 27 years.

Adele has said, “I’m scared of audiences. My nerves don’t really settle until I’m off stage.” Her concerts mean so much that she fears letting her audience down.

Kate Winslet has admitted, “Sometimes I wake up in the morning before going off to a shoot, and I think, I can’t do this; I’m a fraud. They’re going to fire me—all these things. I’m fat; I’m ugly.”

Otis Skinner, one of the great 19th-century matinee idols, once told his daughter Cornelia “Any actor who claims he is immune to stage fright is either lying or else he’s no actor.”

These superstars are not alone. Michael Gambon, Meryl Streep, Kenneth Branagh, Richard Burton, Fredric March, Andrea Bocelli, Ewan McGregor, Steven Osborne, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Fry, Eileen Atkins, Maureen Stapleton, Ian Holm, Renee Fleming, Carly Simon, Marilyn Monroe, Ellen Terry, Rod Stewart, and Peter Eyre—even actor-trainers such as Lee Strasberg and Konstantin Stanislavsky—have suffered from varying degrees of stage fear.

Fear is a universal problem.

Give voice to your fear self-doubt & take action

Many icons suffer from stage fear, often from the weight of expectation that their reputations place upon them. They throw up, feel paralyzed, or break into cold sweats. Adele once got so unnerved that she escaped from the fire exit at an Amsterdam concert venue.

Consider actor Laurence Olivier, who suffered stage fright even in his sixties when he was the world’s most revered stage performer. Even at the pinnacle of his fame, the National Theatre’s stage manager had to prod Olivier onstage every night.

Laurence Olivier suffered five years of agonizing dread following a press night in 1964, when he found his voice diminishing and the audience “beginning to go giddily round.” He developed strategies. When delivering his Othello soliloquies, he asked his Iago to stay in sight, fearing, “I might not be able to stay there in front of the audience by myself.” He asked actors not to look him in the eye: “For some reason, this made me feel that there was not quite so much loaded against me.” The venerable Sybil Thorndike gave him trenchant counsel: “Take drugs, darling, we do.”

As a sidebar, when Olivier made his stage debut playing Brutus at a choir school in London, Thorndike was in the audience. After seeing Olivier on stage for just five minutes, she turned to her husband. She declared, “But this is an actor—absolutely an actor. Born to it.”

Focus on what needs to be done & break the shell of fear and self-doubt

Some of our most admired icons experienced self-doubt—even Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi. What distinguishes most successful people is that they engage their fear. They accept that diffidence and adrenalin rush are something that they must deal with.

Interestingly enough, it’s often the mature performer, not the novice, who’s most likely to succumb to a seizure of nerves. However, superstars know in their heart of hearts that fear of inadequacy isn’t shameful. It’s normal. It’s part of the profession. It’s human.

Successful people know how to turn anxiety into energy. They take steps to minimize adverse effects. Through action, they transform their fear into vitality. Fear becomes fuel. They refuse to let their fears get in the way of their goals and success. They overcome fear through the love of the work and channel the sense of the audience’s or constituency’s expectation and goodwill into their best performance.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Fear it, Embrace it.

It’s natural to feel apprehensive when embarking on any venture. Don’t drown in a sea of self-doubt.

Overconfidence can take the edge off the feeling that you need to work hard. It’s ironic that high self-confidence, so often advised as the cure for low achievement, can cause it.

Fear invites you to work harder on your methods, strategies, and skills. It’s undoubtedly more preferable than the alternative. High self-esteem and overconfidence can lead to complacency and no growth. As Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro reminds in The Remains of the Day (1989,) “If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.”

Focus on turning your fears into positive motivators to improve your work. Action transforms anxiety into energy. The “angels” want you to succeed.

General Electric Blame Must Be Shared: Summary of Ex-CEO Jeff Immelt’s ‘Hot Seat’

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Leadership is tough. Some things work out, and some don’t. Other things end up epic failures. But no company gets anywhere without trying.

In the fullness of time, when the company does well, as suggested by its stock price, such leadership attributes as optimism and foresight are heralded as brilliant. But when things go wrong, these very attributes are the first to get the blame.

“More complete telling of the truth”

Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company (2021) is former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt’s response to the allegations that his ineffectiveness led to the collapse of the once-mighty company. It’s an engaging book that must be studied after Wall Street Journal reporters Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann’s worthwhile postmortem, Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric (2020; my summary.)

My legacy was, at best, controversial. GE won in the marketplace but not in the stock market. I made thousands of decisions impacting millions of people, often in the midst of blinding uncertainty and second-guessed by countless critics. I was proud of my team and what we’d accomplished, but as CEO, I’d been about as brilliant as I was lucky, by which I mean: too often I was neither.

Confluence of bad luck, bad timing, leadership mistakes

I’ve previously written a dissertation on what happened at General Electric (GE.) Immelt had a tough act to follow. Under the previous CEO, the exceptional Jack Welch, GE got spoiled by greed and got away with a lack of transparency.

Over the years Jack Welch had collected a group of idol worshippers and sycophants around and outside the company who fostered an unrealistic view of GE and of Jack himself.

Immelt was saddled with Welch’s doomed legacy, but Immelt failed to right-track it in his 16 years at the helm.

Early in his tenure as CEO, Immelt realized the scope of a potential disaster in GE Capital but couldn’t break its bad habits swiftly. In fact, Immelt went about pivoting the company around slow-growth industrial products. Still, as he did so, his strategy entailed relying on GE Capital to deliver easy profits. It was a hard addiction to break, and Immelt couldn’t discard GE Capital easily.

In the short term, GE Capital was our strategy. We had no other engines of growth. We had to keep our heads down and weather the scrutiny. … We would let the rest of GE Capital grow so that we could keep earnings on a steady path, while the industrial businesses could catch up.

On top, Immelt overpaid for acquisitions, most prominently for the French power generating equipment company Alstom. At the same time, his bet on fossil-fuel-based power equipment was spectacularly mistimed because market conditions deteriorated quickly.

In the final years, Immelt’s misfortunes, even in such previously thriving businesses as healthcare and transportation, piled on. When Immelt called Jack Welch after stepping down, Welch told him supportively, “We both know you never caught a break.”

Jeff Immelt Admits He Let Everybody Down.

Immelt’s Hot Seat is a fascinating account of what it takes to lead a significant global business in times of rapid change.

Immelt owns up his many mistakes with a certain self-awareness. He rebukes a few people while acknowledging he should have been more accountable for everything that happened under his watch. But Hot Seat is primarily a then-in-time rationale of his significant decisions.

Interestingly enough, Immelt doesn’t offer insightful misgivings for the lack of transparency in GE’s financial statements, his outsized compensation, and the mischaracterization of insurance charges and pension liabilities.

Be advised, though, there’re so many details in Hot Seat that are unknowable without a first-rate knowledge of GE’s people and business model, starting with the Welch era.

“Every job looks easy (until you’re the one doing it)”

Read Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company (2021.) General Electric’s fall is a complicated story. It deserves to be heard from insiders such as Immelt as it does from journalists and stockholders.

Hot Seat should leave you with a fair-minded assessment of General Electric, Jack Welch, Jeff Immelt, financial engineering, the conglomerate business model, and Wall Street-oriented capitalism itself. These, sadly, many people don’t understand or know completely.

The Data Never “Says”

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Data doesn’t say anything. Indeed, data can’t say anything for itself about an issue any more than a saw can form furniture, or a sauce can simmer a stew.

Data is inert and inanimate. Data doesn’t know why it was created. Data doesn’t have a mind of its own, and, therefore, it can’t infer anything.

Data is a necessary ingredient in judgment. It’s people who select and interpret data. People can turn it into insight or torture it to bring their agenda to bear. Data is therefore only as useful as its quality and the skills of the people wielding it.

Far more than we admit, subjectivity and intuition play a significant role in deciding how we collect, choose, process, explain, interpret, and apply the data. As entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan warns in Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (2012,) “We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs.”

In the hands of careless users, data can end up having the opposite effect its creators intended. All data is good or bad depending on how it’s employed in a compelling story and what end it’s serving—neither of which the data itself can control.

  • Don’t let data drive your conclusions. Let data inform your conclusions.
  • Don’t declare, “The data says,” (as in, “the stock market thinks.”) Data by itself cannot have a particular interpretation.
  • When you find data that seems to support the case you wish to make, don’t swoop on it without caution and suspicion. Data can be very deceptive when used carelessly.
  • Be familiar with the limitations of your data. Investigate if your data informs any other equally valid hypothesis that could propose an alternative conclusion.

Idea for Impact: Beware of the risk of invoking data in ways that end up undermining your message.

Negotiating Without Giving In

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Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement Without Giving In (1981) by Roger Fisher et al. is a best-selling manual used in everything from marriage counseling to international negotiations.

Citing examples of all sorts of conflicts, the authors build the case that there’s a far greater chance of agreeable resolutions when parties aren’t bogged down in intractable positions. The tome helps highlight how the commerce of relationships is rarely ever simple and hardly ever so fair.

Behind opposed positions lie shared and compatible interests, as well as conflicting ones. We tend to assume that because the other side’s positions are opposed to ours, their interests must also be opposed. If we have an interest in defending ourselves, then they must want to attack us. If we have an interest in minimizing the rent, then their interest must be to maximize it. In many negotiations, however, a close examination of the underlying interests will reveal the existence of many more interests that are shared or compatible than ones that are opposed.

The book has its roots in the Harvard Negotiation Project. This interdisciplinary consortium started when Harvard realized that students from such faculties as law and business were ill-equipped to tackle conflicts effectively.

Negotiation Need Not Be a Zero-Sum Game

At its core, Getting to Yes focuses on what the authors call “principled negotiation”—it’s emphasizing what’s essential to you and why. In contrast, “position negotiation” is merely making demands and offering concessions until a compromise is reached. When you clarify why something is important to you and heed why things are essential to the other party, myriad solutions in your interests and theirs present themselves.

In traditional position-versus-position bargaining, the other must lose if you have to win and vice versa. With principled negotiation, you cultivate a supportive approach, “work side by side, and attack the problem, not each other.” Rather than stake out unwavering positions, you explore all possible “options for mutual gain” and present the other side with “yesable” propositions.

Separate the People from the Problem

To focus on underlying interests, the parties should try to get inside each other’s heads and consider the emotions involved—the desire for security or a fear of losing status, for example. “The ability to see the situation as the other side sees it, as difficult as that may be, is one of the most important skills a negotiator can possess.”

An illustrative anecdote cites President Nasser of Egypt being interviewed in 1970. His negotiating position was that Israel must pull its troops out “from every inch of Arab territory,” with no Arab obligation in return. The interviewer switches from positions to interests by prompting Nasser to consider what would happen to Prime Minister Golda Meir if she went on Israeli TV to reveal such a capitulation. Nasser bursts out laughing: “Oh, would she have trouble at home!” His compassion for Meir’s public perception transcends one of the most intractable geopolitical crises of our times.

Recommendation: The Best Little Book on Win-Win Negotiations

Must-read Getting to Yes (1981; reissued 2011.) It’ll change your general conception of negotiation by showing you how to benefit by seeing the world in terms of mutually beneficial transactions. This simple-but-practical guide to negotiations is full of useful tips on negotiating effectively without giving in or jeopardizing your relationship with the other party.

Any method of negotiation may be fairly judged by three criteria: It should produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible. It should be efficient. And it should improve or at least not damage the relationship between the parties.

Some of the book’s techniques seem naive, and the authors tend to oversimplify bargaining positions. Moreover, not all conflicts can be solved as discrete judgment-based conciliations without having one party benefit only at significant cost to the other. Nonetheless, Getting to Yes teaches helpful lessons on understanding oneself and others, compromising, and searching for “win-win-win” solutions.

Idea for Impact: To persuade, focus on fairness and mutual interest, not on insisting on bargaining positions and winning the contest of will.

How Can You Contribute?

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The celebrated management guru Peter Drucker urged folks to replace the pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution. To him, the existential question was not, “How can I achieve what’s been asked of me?” but “What can I contribute?”

Drucker wrote in his bestselling The Effective Executive (1967; my summary,)

The great majority of executives tend to focus downward. They are occupied with efforts rather than with results. They worry over what the organization and their superiors “owe” them and should do for them. And they are conscious above all of the authority they “should have.” As a result, they render themselves ineffectual. The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward goals. He asks: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.

The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness: in a person’s own work—its content, its level, its standards, and its impacts; in his relations with others—his superiors, his associates, his subordinates; in his use of the tools of the executive such as meetings or reports. The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results.

Peter Drucker: Focus on Contribution - How Can You Contribute? Focusing on contribution versus (or as well as) typical metrics of success pivots you away from self-focus and helps engage in meaningful relationships with your employees, peers, and managers.

In his celebrated article on “Managing Oneself” in the January 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review, Drucker clarified,

Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, What should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself—as it was for the peasant or artisan—or by a master or a mistress—as it was for domestic servants.

There is no return to the old answer of doing what you are told or assigned to do. Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Idea for Impact: Take Responsibility for Your Contribution

Focusing on contribution instead of efforts is empowering because it compels you to think through the results you need to deliver to make a difference and identify new skills to develop. “People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves,” as Drucker remarked in The Effective Executive.