It doesn’t take fire and brimstone to be a leader. As my friend Jennifer Kahnweiler says in her new book, Quiet Influence, sometimes the quietest leaders can have the greatest influence!
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In the current (May 2013) issue of Harvard Business Review, there’s an article called Creating the Best Workplace on Earth. In it the authors talk about what employees really need to be their most productive. Among the six factors they identify is this one: employees need an environment where they can discover and magnify their strengths. In other ...
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Every now and then, we motivational speakers get what we in the trade call “a really good gig.” I just returned from one of these. For most of the past week, I was on a luxury cruise to Bermuda with the top dealers for Clopay Garage Doors. I did a
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I am a seasoned show business professional and you’re not, so this may be an unfair question. But I’m going to ask it anyway. Ready? (That wasn’t the question.)
When they get on the set to produce an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, do you think the director just tells the cast, “Go…do doctor stuff!”? (Full disclosure: I’ve ...
As I’m writing this, I’m listening to the 60s channel on SiriusXM. It’s a channel I listen to a lot. That particular era is kind of my musical “home base.” It’s the music I tend to gravitate to — it’s my default. (I’ve heard it said that the music we tend to gravitate ...
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When I tell people that, as a motivational speaker, I work with, and speak for, organizations that want their people to play a bigger game and produce unreasonable results, the first question I get is, “What do you mean by unreasonable? Isn’t that kind of negative?”
To answer that, let’s first take a look at what reasonable results might look like. When I look up the word “reasonable” ...
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I’ve noticed two interesting things about average achievers; perhaps you’ve noticed them too. What I’ve noticed is this:
Their success are something that they achieved.
Their failures are something that happened to them.
You can always pick these people out of a crowd. They’re the ones saying:
“It’s the election.”
“It’s the economy.”
“It’s the market.”
“It’s the workforce.”
“It’s my unreliable suppliers.”
Are these things all factors? Sure they are. But given these exact same factors, there are some who succeed wildly and ...
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Since my job is to help leaders produce seriously award-winning teams, I’m exceedingly (some would say irritatingly) interested in what makes great teams tick. Turns out I’m in good company! The folks at MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory have been working on this question for some time now, and they’ve come up with an answer. A single ...
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I was at an event recently where one business speaker asserted that there were four words you should never tell a customer: “I can’t do that.” And he had some very good reasons for this assertion:
Your competitors love it when you tell a customer, “I can’t do that.”
It’s music to their ears.
When you tell a customer, “I can’t do that,” you’re giving them an excuse to look elsewhere, and you’re opening a window of ...
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