I'm a visual learner, so I occasionally create PowerPoint slides to provide another way of understanding and communicating the concepts I'm writing about.  I wanted make it easier to reference these slides, so here's a compilation of posts where graphic images have (hopefully) helped to augment...

"Are you personally ready for change? Is your team in serious need of new ways to work together? How can your organization deal with a change project which lacks focus or direction? Do you want to know why change is inevitable but hard to achieve? Do you want to surf on the waves of change? You will...

Author and anthropologist Grant McCracken had a good line a few months ago on the conventional wisdom about the generational divide: The other day I found myself thinking that every time I hear Millennials described: 1.  the tone is that of a smug outsider. 2.  the speaker is not a Millennial. I'm...

Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein's The Power of Resilience includes a chapter titled "Dealing Effectively with Mistakes," and I'm finding it particularly useful at the moment. Tonight I tried to pay a colleague a compliment while discussing our personal working relationship, and I wound up inadverten...

My role often tends to be that of interpreter - helping IT people understand HR/Learning specialists and vice versa. This often means I'm involved in discussions about choosing and using software, particularly social software, often known as web 2.0. HR and Learning & Development see web 2.0 too...

As I wrote earlier this week, I spent Tuesday morning listening to Bill George and his colleagues from the Authentic Leadership Institute, Nick Craig and Tim Dorman, discussing leadership at the Stanford Faculty Club.  In addition to Bill's remarks, Nick and Tim led the audience through an exercise...

What makes us happy?  How can we become happier?  And is happiness sustainable?  These are the fundamental questions Sonja Lyubomirsky addresses in The How of Happiness, subtitled "A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want."  (Note: This is a relatively long post, so if you find it more...

How to improve the perception of IT departments. Brighton, Michigan made the headlines not too long ago when the city council passed an ordinance that you could be ticketed and fined for annoying someone.  I don't intend to get into specifics of what's going on in Brighton, but I couldn't help but...

I learned a hell of a lot in business school, but it wasn't until after I graduated that I fully realized how much I still didn't know.  I'm not blaming Stanford in the least--they did the best they could with me--but one of the reasons I find my current work with MBA students so gratifying is that...

I voted for Barack Obama, but without a great deal of enthusiasm.  I appreciated the symbolic importance of his candidacy, and I ultimately agreed that his message of change was appropriate to the historical moment, but the the fact that so many people seemed to view him as the Second Coming made m...