Early in my career, I was subjected to the so-called “bring me a rock” phenomenon and the experience left me with a sense of frustration which has stuck with me ever since. This phenomenon happens when a manager cannot or will not communicate their goals clearly and succinctly. Subordinates repeatedly try to fulfill their manager’s…
“We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are.” ― Tobias Wolff Earlier in my career, I preached the Silicon Valley mantra of “fail fast, fail often” as a way of encouraging incumbents to take more risk. I even catalogued motivational quotes about failure. Over time, I realized that failure was…
Have you ever done something completely embarrassing and assumed that everyone is staring at you, only to later discover that no one really noticed? The reality is that other people pay much less attention to you than you think. This is called the Spotlight Effect. The spotlight effect is the tendency for people to overestimate…
The phrase “bring home the bacon” is commonly understood to mean to earn money. But where did the phrase come from? The answer might be surprising. Most on-line sources claim the phrase originated in 1104 in a small town in Essex, England. A local Lord and his wife dressed themselves as common folk and asked…
If you want someone to achieve a goal, you should give them a head start – even if that head start is really just an illusion. Loyalty programs are based on the idea that consumers are more likely to repeat purchase if they are given incentives to reach specific goals with well-defined rewards. A classic…
The shelter-in-place / stay-at-home orders have triggered new words and phrases in our collective vocabularies. Some of them existed before but have become more commonly used: coronavirus, pandemic, and virtual happy hour. But others are newly created to describe our COVID-19 mandated world. They are descriptive portmanteaus which aren’t likely to stay in our vocabularies…
For many years, my routine was a Sunday hike followed by a Sunday blog. For a variety of reasons, both my hiking and blogging have become erratic. After skipping yet another Sunday hike, I was surprised to find that I still had exceeded 10,000 steps per day for the past week. 10,000 is the number…
If you’ve listened to a talk from a tech company over the last few years, you’ve almost certainly heard someone proclaim that data is the new oil. The phrase is widely attributed to British mathematician Clive Humby way back in 2006 who explained: Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot…
It’s been a little more than a week since (mostly) everyone in Silicon Valley started sheltering in place and, surprisingly (to me, at least), I haven’t made a dent in my antilibrary. Truth be told, I’ve only read about 100 pages of a single book during that time. Part of the reason is that I’ve…
I’m a big proponent of using scorecards to monitor progress to well-defined objectives. Earlier in my career, I ran a software company that used scorecards to help dozens of companies around the world ensure their execution was in line with their strategy. When using scorecards, I’ve cautioned that unless you compare yourself against an external…