How stuck are you in your head? Are you a 1 or 10? I’m not a scientist, yet I wonder if the nocebo effect can be the way to sabotage success. Unlike placebo – when you feel positive change from a candy pill, nocebo can create negative symptoms by imagining them in your head. I […]
Archive | Riffs & Ideas
According to wiki, “In jazz and R&B, riffs are often used as the starting point for longer compositions”. In our case, we’d like to think of them as the starting point for random stories. This could be the random section where even whining is allowed. Heck, it could eventually turn into a song.
When Solutions are Bandaids
The other night I went to hear Jeffrey Hayzlett speak. When I read his bio (he calls himself a business celebrity), I was a little put off. But when I heard him speak, I was completely enamored by his style of storytelling and the stories he told. Sure he had a schtick. He’s a maverick. […]
The Joy of Office Ex-Patriotism
I once spent eighteen months away from my home country. That’s not enough time to become a real ex-patriot, but long enough to gain some perspective on my own culture — to see its flaws and appreciate its good side. The same concept holds true for being out of a workplace for a while — […]
The Dave Matthews Effect
Remember the Butterfly Effect? The butterfly effect is a common trope in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and with hypotheses where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes. I’ve renamed and redefined it the Dave Matthews Effect. The Dave Matthews effect is a […]
Deprogramming our Genetic Make-Up
I want to test a hypothesis: Can professionals who care too much at work, learn to care less and still succeed? I was having lunch with a friend and we were talking about my recent “a-ha” which I shared in a previous blog: Being Essential at Work. She had a similar story. She had two […]
Being Essential
Have I mentioned How I met your Mother? I suppose it’s easy to refer to that show when it’s a masterpiece, as far as the writing is concerned. I LOVE the dialogue, and yes the characters are endearing. I just (today) realized that Barney, the ficticious character played by Neil Patrick Harris, has a Barney blog […]
Why it Takes Cojones to Use Boobies Out of Context
Did he just say “boobies” in an article posted to LinkedIn? (double meaning – it’s a sea bird. Yep, he was being IRONIC). I wonder, would I ever use that word in or out of context or would I need some cojones? A friend was asking me why I thought women’s equality was getting more media […]
Adapting to Work Environments
Did you ever watch Gorillas in the Mist? It’s based on the story of Dian Fossey and how she learned to behave like mountain gorillas (in the Congo and in Rwanda), in order to be accepted enough to live with them and study them. Although Fossey was renamed in How I Met Your Mother, Marshall […]
Job Sharing: Redefining Job Titles and Roles
How can we redefine job titles and roles in our current status quo at work? Org charts are a necessary artifact on a wall, but do they mean anything other than so-and-so probably makes more money than you do? Or in the case of CEO, they definitely make more money than you. 380 times more, […]
Focus and Clarity
If I can apply the same focus and clarity to my business that I felt when I tried on those EVERYBODY boots at a boutique for $290 (only to find them later on Amazon for $130), then I would be launching this puppy with my partners in less than 2 months. But, alas, when it […]
