Before I became an executive coach I used to be fascinated by the insights of an acquaintance who acted as sounding board/father confessor to some of the top names in British industry. As director of a corporate intelligence firm, he became privy to the fears and concerns of CEOs and senior directors, usually men over [...]

A decade ago, I remember laughing out loud at Tom Peters’ Brand You 50, one of the first of a stream of books on how to develop your personal brand. I filed it in the ‘crazy management fads’ box, something that might work in the U.S. but would never be taken seriously in the rest [...]

When you’re stuck on a problem, it often helps to step back and look at the bigger picture. You see things differently and discover new solutions. What I ask participants in my Total Leadership program to do is take the “four-way view” – the interaction among work, home, community, and self – and come up [...]

Times change and markets transform themselves overnight. The half-life of common wisdom is shorter than ever. But top private equity firms have distilled a set of institutional habits that boost the likelihood of their success. What’s critical to this success? Attitude.
PE leaders take pains to foster a “results-oriented mind-set”. In short, that means creating [...]

Even as the economy continues to show signsof softening in many sectors, competition for top talent remains intense. And, as I’ve discussed before, just as in consumer marketing, one of the keys to attracting talent is to offer elements of the employee experience that match the values and priorities of the individual being recruited.
What are [...]

This item also appears in the April, 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review.
The internet is widely considered the most measurable of advertising media, but those easily tracked click-throughs and e-commerce sales don’t tell the whole story. Far from it. Internet advertising stimulates off-line sales, too — in most cases, our firm finds that online campaigns [...]

Like most people managing other human beings for the first time, I got there without benefit of actual training, academic or otherwise. I was made “chief copy editor” of a weekly technology rag not because I had the right chiefdom stuff (well, I wasn’t widely detested), but because I was a really good copy [...]

My Babson colleague Bala Iyer and I have written an article on Google in the current issue of Harvard Business Review. While there is no shortage of words written about GOOG, I hope this piece says some unique things. To me, what is truly distinctive about Google is that it is the prototypical 21st century [...]

My friend Julia Kirby at Harvard Business Review alerted me to the kerfluffle at South-by-Southwest in Austin involving an interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Apparently the crowd didn’t like the interview that BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy was conducting, so they: a) started Twittering about it; and b) realizing that their individual objections were held [...]