Love That Dirty Water
The phrase that kept running through my mind was "a rent in the fabric of reality," and the image in my head was a tear in the painted backdrop of one of those light-hearted stage plays, revealing something dark and foreboding.
The day of the Boston Marathon bombings recalled others: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the World Trade Center bombing. Once again, we were glued to the television, listening to the hapless newscasters filling the hours, retelling the same stories because there was nothing more to say.
[ Read more ]Don’t Ever Trust Your Mind
Given the way the brain processes information, we can't trust that our minds are giving us a faithful rendering of our experience. Streams of data from our senses are combined with our memories, expectations, and even desires before we become consciously aware of what's going on in the world.
[ Read more ]What Lady Gaga Can Teach Us About Creating Better Power Points
While I don't think there are any documented cases of people actually experiencing "death by power point," we are all familiar with the experience of being pummeled into unconsciousness by an endless succession of slides dense with data.
And the beauty of the human mind is that even though we have suffered through other's power points, we are perfectly able to deceive ourselves into believing that our succession of slides dense with data is somehow different.
[ Read more ]Why Football Players Pat Each Other on the Butt and Other Lessons of Leadership
(Originally published in "Psychology Today")
What would I say in a talk on leadership to a professional sports team, Kaitlynn Myers, a Yale psychology student, asked me in an email, and all I've been thinking about since is how to answer her question.
It’s usually people from sports that are brought into coach business groups, not the other way around. Lou Holtz, the former head coach of the Notre Dame football team, is a fixture on the business lecture circuit, but I never hear of the steel industry’s turnaround artist Wilbur Ross being brought into address a struggling football team. We hear often of inspiring speeches in the locker room, but they’re a rare occurrence in the conference room.
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