Article Archive

Consider this: If you spend the majority of your work life in meetings and the majority of those meetings suck, according to the transitive property, your life sucks. While many executives would agree this is true, convincing…

2020 was a horror movie with an implausible number of plot twists. Remember when the big story was the devastating Australian bushfires? While January 1 won’t be a light switch, it is increasingly likely that we’ll take steps…

Gratitude comes to the forefront every November and many of us are familiar with personal rituals like a gratitude journal, which are indeed beneficial any time of year. However, the origins of this emotion we call gratitude…

The whole point of a hybrid is to combine the best attributes of two good things into a single even better thing. Think Myer lemons and the Apple Watch. Sometimes, however, they end up being the worst of both, such as the…

Multiple priorities are a necessity in today’s complex organizations. Coupled objectives keep a system in balance. If the only goal is getting a product to market quickly, for example, you might sacrifice quality or employee…

We’ve always been reinventing work.  In the 1990s, I was in technology sales for GE based in Dallas, Texas. Back in the time of Dilbertian cubicles, a typical workday looked like this: To learn about a prospective customer,…

With fall school schedules uncertain and people working from home for longer than we imagined, it’s clear that the temporary fix of transferring in-person office habits to a virtual environment isn't going to work long-term.…

The pandemic is changing long-held beliefs about work, and specifically beliefs about working from home. In an informal survey of knowledge workers conducted in early May, we found that 42% of respondents had shifted their…

Meetings are a microcosm of your organization. They are where culture gets shaped, true values are revealed, and belonging cues are sent and received. If you espouse a culture of innovation, but shut down contrarian ideas…

In a physical work environment, ambient information helps us stay oriented. For example: a colleague’s expression as she leaves a conference room signals she’s overloaded despite cheerfully accepting another assignment a…