MOR Insight

For today’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to an Adam Bryant interview of Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons which appeared in the December 3, 2011 NYTimes.  IT Leaders Coach Greg Anderson called this interview – which can be found at <http://nyti.ms/tw4lR0> – to my attention.  It seemed to be a particularly fitting way to begin the New Year.  

Fundamentally, the column is President Simmons’ leadership journey.  Some of the key lessons I found in the piece are:

Today’s Tuesday Reading “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently”was posted by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and originally from the Harvard Business Review blogs.  The author is Hiedi Grant Halvorson, motivational psychologist and author of Succeed:  How We Can Reach Our Goals.

Today’s reading is “3 Paradoxes of a Well-lived Life” and comes from the blog of Box of Crayons, a Toronto, Canada, consulting company that helps organizations, teams, and people do less “good work” and more “great work.”  I learned about this piece from Kika Barr, an IT Leaders Program alum from the University of Wisconsin.

This week’s Tuesday Reading, “Three Questions for Effective Feedback”, comes from the pen of Thomas J. DeLong, the Phillip J. Stomberg Professor of Management Practice in the Organizational Behavior area at the Harvard Business School.  His research focus is on the challenges facing individuals and organizations in the process of change.

Today’s reading “The Secret of Dealing with Difficult People:  It’s About You” comes from Tony Schwartz’s blog at the Harvard Business Review.  Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent At Anything. 

Almost everyone of us has someone who routinely triggers us.  It may be the cynic in your group.  It could be someone who doesn’t listen.  Or, someone who takes credit for your work.  And the list is endless.

Today’s reading “You are what you learn”comes from Scott Adam’s blog at dilbert.com and was drawn to my attention by my oldest son.

The key point in Adam’s short essay is simply:

A person changes in a fundamental way as he or she engages with a particular field of knowledge, i.e., when he or she learns something.

You think differently, the way you “show-up” is different, what you look for is different, your expectations are different, etc.

It’s easy for me to imagine that I don’t procrastinate.  But that would really be stretching the truth, stretching it a lot.  The reality is that no one of us is immune to procratination.

Today’s reading is “Stop Procrastinating...Now”by Amy Gallo, a contributing editor at the Harvard Business Review.

There are lots of reasons why we procrastinate:

   – because we have too much to do

   – because we fear the difficulty and drudgery of the task

This week’s reading “3 Ways to Improve Your Relationship with Staff”comes from the pen of John Baldoni, executive coach, author, and speaker.

Today’s Tuesday Reading “Transforming Your Organization with the Three-Box Approach”reports on a conversation with Vijay Govindarajan and Brian Goldner.  Govindarajan is a professor of internation business and founding director of the Center for Global Leadership at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmath.  Goldner is president and CEO of Hasbro, Inc.

This week’s reading is a piece “What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Growth” by Nilofer Merchant.  Merchant is a writer for the Harvard Business Review.  This piece is part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.