Most Popular Editorials: 6 Signs It's Time to Leave Your Job

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6 Signs It’s Time to Leave Your Job At some point, all of us experience moments when we must face the difficult decision to let go of something that formerly offered us purpose. But big decisions, like a career change, should be approached thoughtfully. While sometimes this can be done by reinventing your current work, there are times where the right choice is to strike out on a fresh path. Continued here

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The Unintended Consequences of Asking for Employee Input Most managers try to create an environment in which their employees feel comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions. Unfortunately, new research suggests that actively soliciting input can have unintended negative consequences: The more managers solicit input from their employees, the less likely they are to reward employees for speaking up. This can be very demoralizing for employees, who have likely invested time and effort into developing and sharing their thoughts. To address this tension, the authors suggest that managers acknowledge the common tendency to discount the effort employees put into coming up with and expressing ideas just because they were shared in response to a direct request for input, and instead recognize that the best ideas are often co-created by managers and their teams. This means not only rewarding employee proactivity, but also demonstrating that all input is valued — regardless of whether it was solicited or offered without prompting. Continued here

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Isaac Newton's life was one long search for God From physics and alchemy to theology and eschatology, Isaac Newton’s research was rooted in a personal pursuit of the Divine. Continued here

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Gravity Could Solve Clean Energy's One Major Drawback In a Swiss valley, an unusual multi-armed crane lifts two 35-ton concrete blocks high into the air. The blocks delicately inch their way up the blue steel frame of the crane, where they hang suspended from either side of a 66-meter-wide horizontal arm. There are three arms in total, each one housing the cables, winches, and grabbing hooks needed to hoist another pair of blocks into the sky, giving the apparatus the appearance of a giant metallic insect lifting and stacking bricks with steel webs. Although the tower is 75 meters tall, it is easily dwarfed by the forested flanks of southern Switzerland's Lepontine Alps, which rise from the valley floor in all directions. Continued here

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The Authenticity Paradox Authenticity has become the gold standard for leadership. But as INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra argues, a simplistic understanding of what authenticity means can limit leaders’ growth and impact. Continued here

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Research: How Entrepreneurship Can Revitalize Local Communities Much has been written about the potential for entrepreneurship to spur economic growth — and yet time and time again, we’ve seen business-driven revitalization programs fail to make a real, lasting impact on their local communities. What will it take to foster ventures that actually revive the economies in which they’re founded? The authors discuss the results of an eight-year investigation into two organizations that took opposing approaches to supporting entrepreneurs in Detroit. They argue that if the goal is to harness the power of entrepreneurship to revitalize impoverished places, business leaders and policymakers must shift away from a focus on scaling up, and that they must instead encourage founders to “scale deep” — that is, to grow slowly and become strongly embedded into the local economy, rather than growing as quickly and broadly as possible. This means investing not only in ventures that offer strong financial returns, but also in those that lift up their communities to achieve sustained self-reliance. Continued here

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How "super-enzymes" that eat plastics could curb our waste problem Beaches littered with plastic bottles and wrappers. Marine turtles, their stomachs filled with fragments of plastic. Plastic fishing nets dumped at sea where they can throttle unsuspecting animals. And far out in the Pacific Ocean, an expanse of water more than twice the size of France littered with plastic waste weighing at least 79,000 tonnes. Continued here

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These Scientists Say They Can Control Lightning Could we trap lightning using a sky interference device? Scientists think so, and their design for a “tractor beam” could reduce one of the biggest causes of bushfires. Plus, the laser that powers it is far less powerful than in previous designs, meaning it’s a lot less villainous and a lot more possible. Continued here

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Let Your Kids Be Bad at Things Sometimes it feels dangerous to expose your child to the full force of your love. You allow yourself to want something small for them, and it’s like a gateway drug: Suddenly you want more and more for them. In my experience, that’s often when perfectionism wanders in and wrecks everything. Continued here

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To experience Zen-like awakening, try going the headless way | Psyche Ideas A prominent theme in Asian religious traditions such as the Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism is that our everyday human experience is like a dream. The dream is that you are merely a person – a thing in the world bounded by your skin, a self that is separate from things and other people. But you are not separate from things and other people. And when you see through the illusion of separation, you become ‘awakened’. Continued here

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Why Visionary Leadership Fails Visionary leadership is widely seen as key to strategic change. That’s because visionary leadership does not just set the strategic direction — it tells a story about why the change is worth pursuing and inspires people to embrace the change. But research finds that the positive impact of visionary leadership breaks down when middle managers aren’t aligned with top management’s strategic vision. This can cause strategic change efforts to slow down or even fail. When middle managers were aligned with top management’s strategic vision, things played out as the widespread view of visionary leadership would suggest: the more these managers engaged in visionary leadership (by communicating their vision for the future and articulating where they wanted their team to be in five years,) the greater the shared understanding of strategy in their team, and the more the team was committed to strategy execution. For managers that were misaligned with the company strategy, however, there was a dark side of visionary leadership became evident. The more these misaligned managers displayed visionary leadership, the less strategic alignment and commitment were observed among their teams. Continued here

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Don’t Try to Be the “Fun Boss” — and Other Lessons in Ethical Leadership The ethical misconduct of leaders in not a new concern, but it seems to be a more prevalent concern today. So what should today’s leaders do to build trust with their teams and the public? Showing your team that you exercise caution, take calculated risks, and will adhere to organizational principles will go a long way toward gaining their trust. Trying to be liked and known as “the fun boss” can tarnish your reputation in the long run. It’s OK to stay out of the limelight and keep some space between you and your team. It sends signals that you are there for their professional benefit and that they can rely on you when needed. Spending too much time trying to get noticed or having a “win at all costs” mentality to get ahead can put you (and your team) at a higher risk of engaging in unethical behavior. Being a more self-aware leader will help to keep you (and your team) on track. Continued here

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The different lives of fringe and strange scientific ideas | Aeon Essays Believe in the Loch Ness monster and you’re more likely to believe the Apollo missions were fake. How do weird beliefs work? Continued here

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You Need to Practice Being Your Future Self He had come to our coaching session, as usual, prepared to discuss the challenges he was currently facing. This time, it was his plan for conducting compensation conversations with each of his employees. After a few minutes of listening to him talk through his plans, I interrupted him. Continued here

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Cold baths, cherry juice and sleep: the secret to staying fit in your 40s Despite aching backs and stiff joints, a growing number of elite athletes – from Zlatan Ibrahimović to Serena Williams – are pushing the clock back. So why can’t you? We ask the experts how to do it Continued here

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The new rules of succession planning Choosing the right CEO is among the top priorities for board directors. It may also be their most important responsibility. But the approach that most companies and their boards have used to find 21st-century leadership is a relic of the 20th century. Often, the board is simply presented with a short list of candidates assembled by others. “When it comes to CEO succession,” the chief human resources officer (CHRO) of a telecommunications giant told us in 2020, “we seem stuck with the best practices of the 1990s.” Continued here

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4 Things to Do Before a Tough Conversation Difficult conversations are, well, difficult. And we all crave tactical advice about how to handle them, what to say, and what not to. But the primary predictor of success in a crucial conversation has less to do with how you use your mouth, and much more to do with what you do before you open it. There are several things you can do to prepare for any type of tricky conversation, whether it’s delivering tough feedback or negotiating a new role. First, connect with your real motives. Ask yourself: What do I really want for me? For the other person? For the relationship? For other stakeholders? Then, recognize and challenge the stories you tell yourself. Turn yourself from a victim to an actor. Turn the other person from a villain to a human. Also, gather the facts about the situation and don’t by sharing your conclusion. Share the facts and premises that led you to your conclusion. Lay out your data. Explain out the logic you used to arrive where you did. Lastly, be curious. Think through your position enough to have confidence that it has merit. But also muster enough humility to be interested in any facts or logic that might improve your conclusion. Continued here

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Building Resilience Failure is a familiar trauma in life, but its effects on people differ widely. Some reel, recover, and move on with their lives; others get bogged down by anxiety, depression, and fear of the future. Seligman, who is known as the father of positive psychology, has spent three decades researching failure, helplessness, and optimism. He created a program at the University of Pennsylvania to help young adults and children overcome anxiety and depression, and has worked with colleagues from around the world to develop a program for teaching resilience. That program is being tested by the U.S. Army, an organization of 1.1 million people where trauma is more common and more severe than in any corporate setting. Nevertheless, businesspeople can draw lessons from resilience training, particularly in times of failure and stagnation. Continued here

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How to solve complex problems (by not focusing on them) Simple decisions are best made using cold, hard logic. This way, we can work through the incremental steps that lead to an answer. But the same isn’t true for complex decisions, ones that require more creativity in meshing together a web of interconnected ideas. These decisions can be impossible to work through with logic and reason alone. That’s why we need to tap into the proven power of our subconscious mind. Continued here

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3 Strategies for Holding Yourself Accountable As you progress in your career, it often gets harder to ask for help in reaching your goals and staying accountable to yourself to achieve them. If you’ve reached a career plateau, the author recommends three strategies to hold yourself accountable to your goals: 1) Enlist an accountability partner. 2) Go public in declaring and sharing goals. 3) Change your environment. Continued here

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How past pandemics may have caused Parkinson's In the 1960s, epidemiologists studying the long-term prognosis of survivors of the 1918 Spanish Influenza began to notice an unusual trend. Those who were born between 1888 and 1924 – meaning they were either infants or in young adulthood at the time of the pandemic – appeared to have been two or three times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease at some point in their life than those born at different times. Continued here

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Why does experiencing "flow" feel so good? A communication scientist explains Flow occurs when a task’s challenge is balanced with one’s skill. In fact, both the task challenge and skill level have to be high. Continued here

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The Physics of the N95 Face Mask It’s 2022, and by now we’ve all been wearing masks for nearly two years. And unless you are a surgeon or a construction worker who was already wearing them daily, in those two years you’ve probably learned a lot about them—which ones you like best, where to get them, and whether you have any extras stashed in a coat pocket or somewhere in your car. Continued here

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To Find Creative Solutions, Look Outside Your Industry The chaos and crises of the last two years have created all kinds of questions for leaders and organizations. One of the biggest questions is: Do we have new ideas about where to look for new ideas? When it comes to innovation and problem-solving, there will always be a place for old-fashioned, time-consuming R&D — research & development. Today, though, there is also a place for a different kind of R&D — rip off and duplicate. The fastest way for organizations to make sense of challenges they are seeing for the first time is to survey unrelated fields for ideas that have been working for a long time. Why gamble on untested strategies and insights if you can quickly apply strategies and insights that are already proven elsewhere? That’s how leaders can help their colleagues keep learning as fast as the world is changing. Continued here

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How to age in reverse, according to a generation of super-athletes It's a fact of life that our bodies slowly decline as we get older—Father Time is undefeated. But a new wave of aging pros competing and winning at the highest level is showing how you can age not just gracefully but masterfully. I'm thinking of Tom Brady (44), LeBron James (37), Chris Paul (36), Serena Williams (40), Sue Bird (41), Cristiano Ronaldo (36), Lionel Messi (34), Phil Mickelson (51), and Roger Federer (40). And I could go on: It's not just one sport, or a few outliers, or veterans transitioning into supporting roles. It's a sports-wide revolution. Continued here

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Want to Be More Innovative and Creative? Science Says Avoid the Dreaded Einstellung Effect In a study published in Cognition, researchers gave expert chess players game problems to solve and then tracked their eye movement as they sought a solution. Once the experts found a possible solution, their eyes kept drifting back to it -- even though they claimed to be searching for better options. Continued here

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When a Major Life Change Upends Your Sense of Self Whether we like it or not, change is a fact of life. Unfortunately, especially when a major change feels like it’s been forced on us, it can be easy to fall into identity paralysis: a feeling of stuck-ness in which your sense of self fails to keep up with your new role or situation. The authors conducted hundreds of interviews with people who had gone through various kinds of positive or negative identity shifts to explore why people experience identity paralysis and what can help to overcome it. Based on this research, they offer five tactical strategies to help anyone let go of the past, embrace a new identity, and move forward on a path towards growth. Continued here

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Why some Asian schools are going wild In Sai Kung, a leafy neighbourhood on the east side of Hong Kong, a group of school children clad in neon-yellow striped vests and rain boots are running up and down a tree-covered slope, singing a song about forests in English: "I love the mountains, I love the sun so bright." Continued here

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A Respected MIT Professor Had a Simple 4-Word Rule for His Classroom, and Every Company Should Follow It Earlier this year, I came across a lecture by former MIT professor Patrick Winston called “How to Speak.” The lecture was posted on YouTube a few months after Winston’s death in 2019, and has since been viewed over 4.7 million times. Continued here

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The ‘untranslatable’ emotions you never knew you had Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind? Continued here

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Don't let your web browser save your passwords — here's what to do instead Browsers just aren't safe enough to hold that kind of information Continued here

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How to Fix the Most Soul-Crushing Meetings Too many standing meetings are a waste of time. Better meeting techniques, such as distributing agendas, won’t fix a meeting that shouldn’t be happening at all. When it’s not clear who owns a meeting, why people are convening, and how a group’s work contributes to the company’s strategy, more-drastic measures are needed. First, make sure each meeting has a clearly articulated mandate with defined decision rights. Second, design a synchronized meeting cadence. It may seem obvious, but a meeting’s frequency and allotted time must be commensurate with its charter and decision rights. Finally, figure out the right composition. Too often leaders let hierarchy define who comes to a meeting. Instead, only those who have something specific to contribute should be included. Continued here

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How Bombay deeply moved a Nobel-winning Swedish writer in the 1920s Author-sailor Harry Martinson wrote a vivid and detailed account of his encounters with the poor in the Indian metropolis. Continued here

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Leading Disruption in a Legacy Business Articulating an emotionally engaging higher purpose for their companies helps leaders drive innovation. Continued here

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Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete Long the elusive objective of virtually every B2B commercial team, the time for sales and marketing “integration,” has passed. Instead, the most progressive B2B commercial organizations are completely reconfiguring commercial operations to better address today’s deep misalignment between how suppliers sell and how buyers buy. Continued here

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Is having a favourite child really a bad thing? Joanna knew she had a favourite child from the moment her second son was born. The Kent, UK-based mum says she loves both of her children, but her youngest child just “gets” her in a way that her first-born doesn’t. Continued here

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What Internet Search Patterns Can Teach Us About Coping Fifty years ago, renowned psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a book that would change the way the medical community cared for the terminally ill. “On Death and Dying” shattered the American taboo of talking about death and laid the foundation for a five-stage grieving model that is still widely accepted today. Continued here

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Naval Ravikant: The Angel Philosopher It’s difficult to nail down exactly what we discuss in our conversation because I had so many questions to ask him. Naval is an incredibly deep thinker who challenges the status quo on so many things. This is an interview you’ll want to listen to, think a bit, and then listen to again. Continued here

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Why Companies Do “Innovation Theater” Instead of Actual Innovation The type of disruption most companies and government agencies are facing right now is a once-in-every-few-centuries event. Disruption today is more than just changes in technology, or channel, or competitors — it’s all of them, all at once. And these forces are completely reshaping both commerce and defense. Continued here

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When Lower Intensity Leads to Higher Results Many professionals spend most workdays laboring at medium intensity. In contrast, elite endurance athletes spend most of their time working at low intensity — running so slowly it almost appears lazy — and a little time training at high intensity. They reject medium-intensity work, because it has limited payoff. Professionals can learn from this training regimen. This article offers examples from investing, sales, R&D, and M&A to ask the question: Will a polarized routine of low-high intensity lead to better outcomes than working at medium intensity most of the time? Continued here

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What fast fashion costs the world Many clothing donations end up in an unexpected place — African landfills. Continued here

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We Finally Know The True Extent of Space Destroying Astronauts' Red Blood Cells The phenomenon is called 'space anemia', and until recently, its cause was a mystery. Some experts have argued space anemia is only a short-term phenomenon – a brief compensation for the fluid changes in our bodies under microgravity. Continued here

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The Time Trap of Productivity - More To That In a culture so focused on managing time, we have become subservient to it. Continued here

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"I understand my kid more": how the pandemic changed parenting In mid-June 2020 in Melbourne, Asher's next door neighbour complained about the plants their 12-year-old son was growing in an empty car space in the apartment complex. The body corporate threatened to fine them. In the midst of solo parenting their son through lockdown number two, it was the last straw. Continued here

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Where Do Salespeople Fit in the Digital World? In-person meetings between customers and salespeople were once at the heart of B2B buying and selling. Now digital communication is embedding itself in every aspect of business. This had led some organizations to look at the future and ask a simple question: Will we still need salespeople? Continued here

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The Best Mentorships Help Both People Grow A transformational mentorship is a relationship that offers something powerful to both the mentee and the mentor. As a mentee, the trick to fully engaging your mentor lies in finding the right person: someone with whom you can build a relaxed, inspiring camaraderie, driven by curiosity as opposed to the binary instructor-student exchange we normally teach. How do you find this person? Try following these steps: Continued here

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The IT specialist who automated his job for a year without getting caught The IT specialist's script, scanned the on-site drive for any new files, generated hash values for them, and transferred them to the Cloud. Continued here

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How to Improve Your Sales Skills, Even If You’re Not a Salesperson At some point in your career, even if you’re not in sales, you’re going to have to sell something — whether it’s your idea, your team, or yourself. Here are some strategies for improving your sales skills. Do your homework. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Ask: What business problem does he need solved? Plan and practice. Enlist a trusted colleague to role-play a sales call with you. Ask for feedback and advice on how can you improve your pitch. Listen more than you talk. And don’t let your ego get in the way. Focus on how you can help your prospective customer. Close the deal. At the end of the meeting, ask permission to move forward with the customer by saying: Are you ready to take the next step? Think long term. Sales is rarely a one and done deal. Stay in touch with prospective customers. Continued here

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How Nike turned its brand into a $35 billion cognitive ‘shortcut’ In a world with more than 500,000 brands competing for attention, where humans are exposed to 5,000 brand messages per day, where the human brain consumes 11 million bits of information every second, a brand is a shortcut that helps people process and understand the meaning behind logos. That cognitive shortcut is a business’s most important asset. It can be worth billions of dollars. How those brands are valued has gone through revolutionary change in recent years. Continued here

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This Is Why You Keep Missing Deadlines Think about the last task you completed. Did it take you around the time you’d estimated? Probably not. Our perceptions of our available time, our abilities, and any roadblocks we may hit are greatly skewed. This is a phenomenon called the planning fallacy and it happens to professionals at all levels and in every occupation. What can we do along the way to keep us on target and help us meet our goals? Continued here