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#84 The Young Are Restless—Once More

March 3, 2009

“Young people and the manager” Hello everyone! Is it a bad rap? Last week I wrote “The Young Are Restless” and I received a number of emails commenting on my evaluation of the situation. All were positive and in agreement with what I had written, and yet, there two sides to the story. In this [...]

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#83 The Young Are Restless

February 10, 2009

“Young People Want Everything Now!” Hello everyone! Is it a bad rap? I often hear managers and training departments in corporations complain about how young people don’t want to wait for their career advancement. They want to get pay raises after 6 months. They want to be managers 1 year after graduating from college. They [...]

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#82 Buy-In Once More

February 10, 2009

“Buy-In, Once More With Feeling!” Hello everyone! Buy-in is everywhere… it’s everywhere! Most of us involved in business, technical organizations, and teams think of buy-in as a common requirement for our success. Buy-in isn’t just something that managers attempt to secure from their direct reports. Buy-in is a requirement for all human endeavors that require [...]

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#81 Building Buy-In Is Easy

January 29, 2009

“When you know what to do” Hello everyone! The big question is… I often get asked these questions: “Steven, how do you get buy-in from people?” or “In this difficult business environment, how do you get people to buy-in instead of worrying about other things that take them away from what they need to be [...]

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#80 First Rule of Leadership

January 20, 2009

The #1 leadership rule you need to know!” Hello everyone! If you were to pick one and only one leadership rule, I’ve put it in this blog. Everything else about leadership pales in comparison to this rule. I’ve devoted this blog and this week’s ezine/newsletter to just this topic. We often hear the following definition [...]

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#79 Trust Your Experiences

January 12, 2009

“How do you recognize good management advice?” Hello everyone! “Who do you trust and what is the truth in management?” This last week I was reading some of the blogs on the people skills necessary for successful management. One blog, in particular, caught my eye. It had to do with “behaviors” that are necessary for [...]

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#78 Choice Is A Myth!

January 5, 2009

“Do you really choose anything?” Hello everyone! As an engineer or engineering manager, how much of what you do is your choice? As an engineer or engineering manager how much of what your colleagues do is their choice? As an engineering manager, how much of the behavior of your direct reports is their choice? Most [...]

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#77 New Year Future

January 1, 2009

“What future pulls you to it?” Happy New Year everyone! In point of fact, we are pattern recognition machines. All we do is recognize for patterns. Here’s an example. The only reason you can read these words is because your eyes notice where the pattern of black (of each letter) begins and ends and where [...]

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#76 Context and Communication

October 14, 2008

“Context-Static questionnaires don’t work.” Hello everyone! I was teaching a management class at the University of California, Santa Barbara, this last Friday. I was talking to the class about the way in which each of us is “programmed” to behave in certain ways. I gave the students a questionnaire and one of the categories surveyed [...]

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#75 Good Work Won’t Get You Influence

October 6, 2008

“It takes more than exceptional work to get you there.” Hello everyone! I recently read another article in BusinessWeek. It was in their special issue called Business@Work, dated August 25-September 1, 2008. I often use BusinessWeek as fodder for my blogs because it is filled with what I consider to be weak management information. It [...]

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#74 I Have A Solution!

September 29, 2008

“Updating in real time.” Hello everyone! I received a comment from Dorothy McKinney regarding my last blog in which I didn’t say a lot of nice things about Myers-Briggs, DiSC, Enneagram, and other “systems” that purport to tell us who we are and how to manage others. (By the way, I really appreciate it when [...]

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#73 Generational Profiling

September 22, 2008

“Forget generations X, Y, and Z.” Hello everyone! There is no doubt that we can put “groups” of people into certain “groups”. The simplest group, of course, is Homo sapiens. We are all part of that group. Then there are the groups of men and women. We can go further, such as male child, female [...]

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#72 Drop the Schedule!

September 15, 2008

“Working in today’s environment.” Hello everyone! I just read an article in the August 25-September 1, 2008 issue of BusinessWeek, that summarizes the next wave of work environments as follows: 1. People want more flexibility in their work processes. 2. People don’t want to come in to work as often to save gas. 3. People [...]

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