In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.
Life’s tricky for women because they have to make more choices than men. And yes, choice is good, but boy, you better be an expert choice-maker.
Most of my work has been in corporations, studying how you build an organization that helps people to identify and work to their strengths.
I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.
Every company wants to know how to find and keep highly talented women in the workplace.
Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.
Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn.
I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I’ll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I’m afraid that I’ll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.
In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.
You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure.
When you feel as though you can’t do something, the simple antidote is action: Begin doing it. Start the process, even if it’s just a simple step, and don’t stop at the beginning.
Americans just love convening. They are a convention-happy country and they love to get together to talk.
True individuality can be lonely.
American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important.
Everyone can probably do at least one thing better than ten thousand other people.
There has to be a way to redirect employee’s driving ambition and to channel it more productively. There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession.
Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.
We need to say goodbye to the traditional methodologies of corporate universities.
Women have lives that become increasingly empty. They’re doing more and feeling less.
You will learn and grow the least in your areas of weakness.
The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.