Dan Roam visited eBay on Thursday to give a workshop on Visual Thinking. I thought I might learn how to produce better charts and diagrams but instead I got a whole new way to think about problems and visualizations. He gave countless examples of how you can discover great data often buried within a 40…
Category: business
Berkeley MBA now ranked #5
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business moved up to the top 5 of the WSJ’s annual ranking of MBA programs for 2006. The annual ranking results from polls of corporate recruiters rating M.B.A. programs on 21 criteria, including things like students’ problem-solving skills, the likelihood of finding “stars” at the schools, content of the school’s…
Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Reflecting on Daniel Goleman’s writings on Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and how self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills impact leadership.
Active Inertia in Business
How strategic frames, organizational processes, and existing values held by the organization get in the way of needed changes.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
In reading What Makes a Leader? (Goleman) I learned that while technical skills and IQ are important for senior managers to succeed it is emotional intelligence that is actually the most critical. As a long-time believer in soft skills I did not have any difficulty believing this assertion. Emotional Intelligence’s Five Components: Self-Awareness: The ability…
Evidence-Based Management
I recently read the article Evidence-Based Management (HBR Jan 06) which outlines an emerging movement which applies the scientific approach long used in medicine to the practice of management. A number of factors inhibit managers’ ability to make good decisions including: specialty bias (e.g. marketers tend to recommend marketing as a solution) hype (e.g. managers…
How to Play to Your Strengths
In the article How to Play to Your Strengths I learned about a career planning technique that focuses on 100% positive feedback—that’s right no “constructive feedback”. The article outlines that it’s human nature to focus on the negatives (when asked people remember four negative memories for every single positive one). And yet far too often,…
Managing Oneself
Peter Drucker is a firm believer in “feedback analysis”, the process of comparing your past expectations with the actual results. In his article Managing Oneself I learned that this approach was actually popularized by John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola in the 16th Century and helped contributed to the success of the Calvinist and Jesuit movements….
Learning about Bain & Company…
This morning I’m preparing for my marketing class on Saturday and decided I’d look into eBay’s new Marketplace president, John Donahoe’s background. So I started with Bain & Company where he was their Worldwide Managing Director. Here are some articles that jumped out at me… The decision driven organization (Paul Rogers, Bain & Company) Several…