Category: Jobs and professional relationships

  • Responding to organizational stupidity: To highlight or understand?

    People in organizations make stupid statements all the time. They get the facts wrong in presentations. They make nonsensical statements in meetings. They portray an undoubtedly incorrect conclusion as the Gospel truth. Assuming you want to respond to a stupid statement, you face a choice. Should you highlight the stupidity latent in the statement, or…

  • Capturing the attention of kids and executives alike

    Anyone who works for an organization must at least occasionally negotiate with the people above them in the org chart. And anyone who does that knows that capturing and maintaining an executive’s attention is essential to negotiation success. What you might not know is that interactions with kids can highlight some important lessons about interactions…

  • When the problem is not knowing the problem

    We’ve all worked with someone and felt like nothing was working. No reply to emails, no answer to questions, no consideration of suggestions. What did you do? If you did something, it was probably to highlight the problem and discuss a prospective solution. And kudos to you, because confronting the problem can often make life…