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We have two young kids — Lanye is three, Anyi is one — and we try to keep them off screens. They spend a lot of time with books, and we spend a lot of time taking photos of them doing the things they love. A little while ago,
A few weeks ago Elmo pinged me after noticing I was sitting on an unbroken Last.fm music history going back to 2005 — 32,236 unique tracks — and pitched me on doing something with it. We talked through it for a bit. The output ended up at rivers.
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about my life, health, and priorities. I came across this post again https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html which I've read and internalized a few times before, but something seems to have changed with my mindset over the
Tricky Situations. As a capstone to the course, we will tackle a diverse bundle of tricky management situations that are drawn from real life. The tricky situations will deal with managing people, setting goals, measuring performance, designing organizations, and communication. We will have fun applying the ideas we’ve
Executive Communication. Your ability to manage depends on your ability to communicate. Whether writing, storytelling, or speaking, great general managers communicate the right content in a way that influences the thoughts and actions of others. Great communication skills amplify your talents and poor communication skills stunt your growth. It’
Organization Design. Whether you are a traditionalist or a progressive, creating an organization requires dividing responsibility and work among group members. In this session, let’s focus on how to divide work and create an organization design where your team can succeed and maximize output. Slides from today Assignment
Engineers and Artists. Values, ambitions, thoughts, and beliefs vary significantly among people you work with. Understanding how their brains work helps you and your team get more done. To explore this further, we will look inside the heads and hearts of the Artist and the Engineer. We will talk about
Setting Objectives and Measuring Performance. Whether you are a CEO or a “micro-CEO” — to borrow Grove’s phrasing — setting goals for yourself and your team will play a large role in your success as a manager. If you do this part of the job
Defining Management Using historical documents and some first-hand accounts from managers, we will try to agree on a definition of “management.” In this session, we will also discuss some wildly different management situations – a textile mill, a railroad, a semiconductor maker among them – to see
Perennial favorites, Charlotte Kasl’s If the Buddha Dated, If the Buddha Married and If the Buddha Had Kids have inspired readers with their empowering balance of spiritual and psychological wisdom. This wise yet lighthearted book extends on Dr. Kasl's trademark
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with
Turn the Ship Around! is the true story of how the USS Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy's traditional leader-follower approach. No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet's radical guidelines to turn
We attempt or avoid difficult conversations every day – whether dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with a spouse, or negotiating with a client. Douglas Stone and the Harvard Negotiation Project provide us a step-by-step approach to having those tough conversations with less stress and more success. These
This is a user-friendly guide to the art and science of management from Andrew S. Grove, the president of America's leading manufacturer of computer chips. Combining conceptual elegance with a practical understanding of the real-life scenarios that managers encounter every day, High Output Management is one
These are my takeaways from the  McKinsey Global Institute report  on the Internet of Things. The authors hypothesized that the hype may actually understate the full potential — but that capturing it will require an understanding of where real economic value can be created and a successful effort