In the climactic scene of the movie A Few Good Men, Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise) demands the truth from a testifying Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson). Jack’s response is a cinema classic: You can’t handle the truth! It’s a mesmerizing scene which contains an interesting psychological tidbit. People often rate honesty as the most important value…
For reasons not worth getting into, this past week I was reminded of a decade-old HBS discussion entitled “How Much of Leadership Is About Control, Delegation, or Theater?” The original discussion was prompted by a claim from Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer that leaders only explain 10% of a company’s performance. Instead, a company’s current performance…
Why do people make decisions that don’t seem to make sense? Game theory provides a potential answer called the prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma explains why people make decisions which are good for themselves but not for the team. Even if you didn’t learn about it in economics class, you probably recognize the prisoners’ dilemma…
No, this isn’t some new comic from Scott Adams about Dilbert interacting with Donald Trump – although I’m laughing about the possibilities. Instead it’s a central tenet of Adams’ most recent book titled How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Adams relies on his trademark humor to describe “the strategies he has…
Over the holiday break, I read ‘The Demon-Haunted Book: Science as a Candle in the Dark’ by Carl Sagan. The book is not nearly as well-known as ‘Cosmos‘ but should be. It introduces the scientific method to non-scientists and provides advice on how to apply critical thinking. In Sagan’s words: What skeptical thinking boils down…
Even though I’m an avid reader, I don’t make a dent in my reading backlog because new books arrive faster than I can read existing ones. I often ask people for recommendations or informal reviews when trying to decide what to read next. For that reason, I’ve never read ‘Mastery‘ by Robert Greene – too many…
A mentee of mine recently asked how she should confront a co-worker about a delicate situation. Her intentions were good but she was worried the conversation would quickly escalate – to the point the co-worker might lash out at her. What should she do? As the situation could have had legal ramifications, I encouraged her to…
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities – brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems. February 16 is the anniversary of the death of John William Gardner, the author of that quote. Gardner was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the late 1960’s, founder of two influential U.S. organizations (Common Cause and Independent…
A few weeks ago I read “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done” by Peter Bregman. 18 Minutes is a business self-help entertaining book based on his blog and weekly Harvard Business Review columns. The book suggests a process for prioritizing your day in 18 minutes over a nine-hour…
What you don’t do determines what you can do. Tim Ferriss, author of the cult hit and international best-seller ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’, makes that observation in a podcast last month. I completely agree. In my 2009 post on Prioritization, I note: Prioritization is as much about what we choose not to do as what we…