For the last three years, I’ve taught a class at a local university called The Changing Workplace. A reasonable chunk of the student’s grades are determined by group projects, and I give all students in each workgroup the same grade for the project they are on. Which freaks the students out, and I understand why….
How Do You Know When It’s Time to Go?
Photo by Rupert Baynes-Williams on Unsplash I’ve spent a good chunk of my career wondering if I should stay at the place that I am working or leave. I often fretted and worried about this. With a bit of hindsight, I can say with confidence that it was all a waste of time. I would have been far better off…
Book Review: Deep Work by Cal Newport
Dear Blog Subscribers: Welcome to the Sort of Book Club of the Month. Sort Of … because I am only going to post a book review when I have actually read one that I like a lot. No matter how often that is. Which could turn out to be more or less once a month,…
Create Your Own Dignity of Work Tour
This might be too close to a political statement, but I’ve been struck by Senator Sherrod Brown’s Dignity of Work Tour. Of course, for the political cynics among us – myself included – it seems to be no accident that his tour involves visiting four particular states, aside from his home state of Ohio, that…
10 Ways that You Can Be More Creative
Back in 2013, Adobe did a survey of 5000 working adults in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France and Japan and found that only 25% of these folks believed they were living up to their creative potential. This is consistent with my anecdotal experience from thirty years of work in high tech, much of it spent…
Want to Make a Difference? Find Your Zone of Indifference
Early in my career I went and got an MBA at Stanford. It wasn’t exactly like I knew where I was going professionally, although I didn’t really say that on my program application. But I did know that I didn’t want to be a software development manager my whole career, not that there is anything…
Big Ideas 2019
Meaningful Work Movement. People want work that matters to them. Even with the recent decline of the stock market, labor markets are very tight and wages are rising. Millennials aren’t instinctively inclined, for good reason, to give over their loyalty to large companies. Attracting and retaining talent will be harder than ever. Opting-Out of the Grind. Increasingly,…
Do the Thing That Makes You Feel Most Alive
There are lots of ways to make career decisions, and in today’s world there are more forks in the road than ever before. Yesterday I talked to someone who upon graduating from college went to work for a Fortune 500 company and figured he would be there for quite a while. Six weeks after he…
How Do You Get More Energy?
These days I teach a class called The Changing Workplace to graduate students at a local university in Cincinnati. It’s a class on leadership and how to drive organizational change and innovation in the workplace. Much of what we cover is standard material that one would expect in a masters level business school program. As…
Work is Sacred. Treat it as Such.
Things go better when you realize that work is a sacred thing. We’ve all had times when we are mailing it in, and while the paychecks keep coming the worst part of mailing it is this- what it does to you. But work – of all kinds – really matters to people. I’ve never met…