This may surprise you, but prior to the early 1970s the word “parenting” didn’t exist. The word parent was a noun, not a verb. A parent was something you are, not something you do. In the same way that we don’t child our parents, and we don’t husband our wives. According to Alison Gopnick, a […]
You are trying to finish a project. It requires time and care. It requires focus and attention. It requires formatting slides, or writing a proposal, or completing a spreadsheet. It’s important. And if everyone would just pipe down, you could get it done. But now the people meeting in the conference room next door are […]
Whatever you love to do, aspire to be, or dream of creating, keep at it. Keep at it every day. Even if for just a bit. Think of it as your craft, something you need to stay close to, something that requires nurturing, like gardening or singing or cooking. If you don’t attend to it, […]
Do you ever feel like you don’t really connect with anyone at work? Do you feel as if your relationships at work are superficial? Do you feel as if people at work don’t really understand you? You’re not alone. “It was an average morning. I was up at seven, helped get the kids their breakfast […]
Talking in front of lots of people can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to be. Before I go on stage, I don’t think I’m nervous. Instead I think, I’m excited. It’s a subtle change of attitude that makes a big difference. The problem in our lives isn’t stress, but instead chronic, unabated stress. A […]
Diane Vaughan is a social scientist who coined the term “normalization of deviance” to describe the way organizational cultures can begin to drift morally and then rationalize that drift over such a slow time horizon that they aren’t even aware of it themselves. As she wrote about in her book The Challenger Launch Decision, Vaughan […]
HCL Technologies is a big company, with 117,000 employees and 7.4 billion in annual revenue, it’s big. And as a big company you might think it’s also slow to react, slow to innovate. Not quite. HCL has built innovation into the mindset of the people in the company and created a culture that can sometimes […]
Our poor dog. Penny found a bone out on her morning walk. Perhaps it was in the neighbors yard, perhaps she unearthed it. But now the bone is hers – hers to carry, and own, and jealously protect. There she is. I can see her from the window, walking intently through the backyard with her […]
It’s a straightforward question, “What do you want?” And depending on the situation, time of day, who we are with, etc. the answer can also be pretty straightforward. “I want to go for a run,” or “I want to talk to my brother,” or “I want you to speak to our boss about our concerns […]
Last summer a couple friends and I took our teenage kids and cycled across the United States from Seattle to Portland, Maine, and I can tell you the hardest part wasn’t doing it. The hardest part was getting to the starting line. The adventure of cycling every day for two months in strange, beautiful places […]