I saw a great presentation this morning by Andrew Soren, an internal leadership consultant at BMO Financial. His topic was resilience, which—as he admits—is a bit of a loaded term. Unpacking his particular emphasis in usage (which itself draws on a pretty large literature out of the positive psychology movement), resilience explores how we overcome […]
Creativity, Innovation & the Box
We are surrounded by increasingly strident exhortations to “think outside the box.” It’s an interesting expression, and one that has almost become a cliché.
Information Wants To Be Clear: PowerPoint Isn’t Helping
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we communicate over the last few months, and all of the ways we do it badly, particularly in a business context. So I was intrigued—and bemused—when I came a across a blog post entitled Why I Write In PowerPoint.
Meetings, Bloody Meetings
We are notoriously bad at meeting. Which is a fascinating comment, when you get down to it, considering the incredible amount of time that we actually spend in meetings. It’s rarely a case of “another day, another meeting.” It’s a case of, “another day, another fully packed string of appointments.” That said, there are no […]
Ego, Ownership & Happiness
Marnie McBean isn’t your normal, average, every-day Canadian. For starters, she’s won several gold medals at the Olympics. She has a healthy ego. She’s proud that she has a healthy ego. And she thinks more Canadians need to embrace their awesomeness.
The Unbearable Madness of Being: A Conclusion
I started this series as an exploration into why so many of us—theoretically well intentioned and intelligent professionals that we are—seem to manage to maintain a state of being overwhelmed most of the time. As I close out, the inescapable conclusion is the one I suggested at the outset: that, for the most part, this […]