Fast-paced, funny, and smart. This novel puts you into the world of a young MBA striving to succeed at a famous high-tech company. Brash and confident yet comically inept, Tony clashes with colleagues, clients, and even his biggest supporters. He fires his most loyal employee, derails the career of his only friend, and nearly destroys his young marriage before transforming from chilly corporate collaborator to empathetic executive coach. Laugh and learn as his clients turn criminal, corporations collapse, and compassion triumphs.
It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social-betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.
–Theodore Roosevelt, 1901
A veteran executive coach draws on his years inside Arthur Andersen, Wall Street, and MCI to share a moving story that explains why your 401k shrank, your house is underwater, and your job stinks. The comedy and conflict illustrate management methods and personal practices that can improve your career and deepen your personal relationships.
It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social-betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.
—Theodore Roosevelt
Annual Message to Congress
December 31, 1901
The focus of the book was the importance of compassion and authenticity, while this new chapter is all about implementation, with specific advice on how to be compassionate and authentic in your day-to-day life. The twenty-minute podcast is a simple, practical guide to building better relationships at work and at home, with answers to these reader questions:
What can I do to deepen relationships?
How can I feel comfortable with people of different backgrounds, tastes, and values?
How do I help others feel safe to share their lives with me?
What habits might I establish to reduce loneliness and build community?
Tony recommends these resources for further study and practice.
Whose responsibility is it to cause significant genuine conversations
The boss’s job is to create an environment where people can be effective
The CEO Conversation
Unleash creativity by exchanging certainty for confidence
Just click here and either listen through your computer or subscribe through iTunes to have this and all new episodes placed on your device as they become available.
Fast-paced, funny, and smart. This novel puts you into the world of a young MBA striving to succeed at a famous high-tech company. Brash and confident yet comically inept, Tony clashes with colleagues, clients, and even his biggest supporters.
He fires his most loyal employee, derails the career of his only friend, and nearly destroys his young marriage before transforming from chilly corporate collaborator to empathetic executive coach. Laugh and learn as his clients turn criminal, corporations collapse, and compassion triumphs.
It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social-betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.
–Theodore Roosevelt, 1901
A veteran executive coach draws on his years inside Arthur Andersen, Wall Street, and MCI to share a moving story that explains why your 401k shrank, your house is underwater, and your job stinks. The comedy and conflict illustrate management methods and personal practices that can improve your career and deepen your personal relationships.
Effective conversation with an employee or vendor who is late with a deliverable or deadline
Just click here and either listen through your computer or subscribe through iTunes to have this and all new episodes placed on your device as they become available.
Tony has an uncanny ability to leverage his vast experience in order to provide great value to his clients. He is an outstanding workshop and group facilitator who leaves participants with action-oriented takeaways they can’t get anywhere else.
—Hector Velez
Chief Development Officer | Chief Sales Officer
Just click here and either listen on your computer or subscribe through iTunes to have this and all new podcast episodes placed on your device as they become available. You may also set up an automatic “feed” to non-Apple devices by using this link: click here for other devices.
A measure of a child’s maturity is progress from selfish self-justification toward compassionate empathy; from “I didn’t do it,” through “It’s not my fault!” and the teenager’s favorite, “I’m sorry you think it is my fault,” up to “I’m sorry you are hurt. What can I do to help?” Even experienced business people often revert to the most childish responses when stressed, threatened, or distracted (meaning, much of the time!). Each rung up this ladder makes our relationships stronger and our results better. Let’s explore each step and learn some even higher ones.
First, consider for a moment the results you want most. Review the outcomes you dearly wish to create, the aspects of life that deeply matter to you. Whether it is wealth, health, love, respect, ease, impact, or whatever else you yearn for, whichever measures of success you prefer, chances are that most if not all of your heart’s desires require the actions of other people.
You cannot achieve your most important results by yourself.
The quality of your interactions largely determines the quality of your life. This is particularly true in business, a game of producing specific, measurable results with and through the actions of other people.
The good news is, although our goals require help from others, most of us also try to contribute to the success of other people. We want to matter, to mentor, to nurture, to contribute, to belong, to be safe and appreciated. Much of human energy and attention is directed toward helping and getting help. To cooperate is human. It may be fundamental to all life on earth; it certainly is for mammals.
I believe that community matters. … Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs:
Talent is rare.
Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur….we don’t second-guess or micromanage.
It must be safe to tell the truth. …get honest feedback from everyone.
We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture. …Nobody pulls any punches to be polite.
Pixar’s Operating Principles
1.Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone.
2.It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas.
3.We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community.
… if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job.
Everyone loves to hate performance evaluations, and with good reason: Research has shown them to be ineffective, unreliable and unsatisfactory for seemingly everyone involved. They consume way too much time, leave most workers deflated and feel increasingly out of step with reality.
…more than half the executives questioned (58%) believe that their current performance management approach drives neither employee engagement nor high performance. [Click here to see the survey.]
…conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance.
Three items correlated best with high performance for a team:
I have the chance to use my strengths every day
My coworkers are committed to doing quality work
The mission of our company inspires me
It’s not the particular number we assign to a person that’s the problem; rather, it’s the fact that there is a single number. … we want our organizations to know us, and we want to know ourselves at work, and that can’t be compressed into a single number.
The new approach focuses, alternatively, on how to develop employees in the future given their current performance.
–What if you could replace performance evaluations with four simple questions? Deloitte has come up with them (and two only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer). By Jena McGregor in the Washington Post
It’s always been the major belief of our company, take good care of your people, they’ll take good care of the customer and the customer will come back.
And we celebrate them. We train them. We teach them. We provide opportunity for them. You’ve got to make your employees happy.
If the employees are happy, they are going to make the customers happy.
–J. W. Marriott, Jr. speaking of his father, the founder of Marriott Hotels
I was very pleased to see an international expert on software development express the following clear insights into the types of workplaces my executive coaching seeks to foster.
Visionaries are designing organizations for collaboration. These firms remove the bottlenecks imposed by the strict hierarchies of the past. [In hierarchical firms] no one was being rewarded for taking the kind of risks that lead to innovation or other breakthroughs in performance which thrive in a climate of collaboration.
Knowledge workers spend a large proportion of their time seeking information, much of the rest making sense of what they’ve found, and relatively little time in applying what they now know.
Transitioning from a hierarchical way of working … requires letting go of habitual behaviors that may have worked well in the hierarchy, but no longer serve anyone when collaboration becomes a critical part of the work process. …
[The result is] … humanized work with an emphasis on mastery of our craft, a focus on rapid learning and feedback, delivery of business value (sooner not faster), and close connection to customer needs (even ones the customers’ haven’t noticed yet). …
— Diana Larsen on Agile Fluency, Barriers to Agility & the value of Open Space Technology in InfoQ
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