Scott Berkun
To ask a good question requires two things: insight and gumption. The root of all worthy questions is a desire to fill in a gap in your understanding of something. The insight in good questions comes...
M. Mitchell Waldrop
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Back in the 1990s, when U.S. banks started installing automated teller machines in a big way, the human tellers who worked in those banks...
Jeffrey Phillips
It finally came to me last week. For more than a decade I’ve been working with corporations, trying to help them accelerate their ability to generate new, interesting ideas to market as viable...
Mike Richman
One of the highlights on our calendar each year is the first Friday in October, which is Manufacturing Day here in the United States. This event offers us the perfect opportunity to celebrate the...
Jeanita Pritchett
Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) career outreach programs play a pivotal role in shaping the capabilities and makeup of the future workforce. Generally speaking, “STEM outreach”...
Jack Dunigan
Do you know the one thing you can do to light the fire of motivation, energy, creativity, and self-propelled action in your employees?
The discovery of gold in Northern California lit off a tidal...
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Mary Parker Follett, a pioneering business consultant, was asked to help a troubled window shade company. The company’s thinking was narrow and limited. When asked to define their business, they said...
Eryn Brown
Alan Colquitt is a student of the ways people act in the workplace. In a corporate career that spanned more than 30 years, the industrial-organizational psychologist advised senior managers and human...
Jennifer V. Miller
Is your organization built on a culture of trust?
Look around you; there are plenty of clues as to whether trust abounds. How quickly are decisions made? How many people do you copy (or worse, bcc...
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
Does this sound familiar? The keynote speaker is talking a mile a minute as you scramble to take notes on her every word. Your hand cramps, and then it’s over. Speaker bows to a standing ovation...
Kevin Meyer
For the past several years, I’ve been fascinated by how we think—and how that affects us, our leadership, and the organizations we’re a part of. A couple years ago I wrote about the beginner’s mind...
Caroline Preston
Editor’s note: This story is part of Map to the Middle Class, a Hechinger Report series looking at the good middle-class jobs of the future and how schools are preparing young people for them.
The...
Morgan Ryan Frank
How do workers move up the corporate ladder, and how can they maximize their career mobility? Increased wealth disparity, increased job polarization, and decreases in absolute income mobility (i.e.,...
Jeffrey Phillips
Ihave been thinking a lot lately about innovation and how we may have emphasized one component at the expense of another. Here I’m talking about something that should appear obvious—the focus of...
Tara García Mathewson
Some of the most celebrated education reform efforts today serve to make instruction more difficult. Personalized learning, project-based learning, mastery-based learning—they all require more work...
Aiman Sakr
Does your organization benefit from lessons learned? Does it learn from previous quality issues? A vast amount of learning takes place every day in every manufacturing facility. Do global...
Eryn Brown
In ancient times, the story goes, cooks in the city of Sybaris were granted yearlong monopolies for the sale of unique dishes they created. Since then, generations of inventors have relied on patents...
Dick Wooden
Iran across the book, Successful Human Relations: Principles and practice in business, in the home, in government (Harpercollins, 1952) while browsing older books about relationship development...
Jim Benson
Human beings are good at placing roadblocks to success and building plans that can’t be followed. We tend to fall back on our “common sense” or “snap judgement” which often makes us feel like our...
Innovating Service With Chip Bell
The 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 35th Academy Awards. Given the current conflicts in the Middle East, I recently watched the four-hour movie to learn more...
