Most Popular Editorials: Cultivating Everyday Courage

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Cultivating Everyday Courage The right way to speak truth to powerIn many stories we hear about workplace courage, the people who fight for positive change end up being ostracized - and sometimes even lose their jobs. What I've seen in the course of my research, though, tells a more nuanced story. Most acts of courage don't come from whistleblowers or organizational martyrs. Instead, they come from respected insiders at all levels who take action - be it campaigning for a risky strategic move, pushing to change an unfair policy, or speaking out against unethical behavior - because they believe it's the right thing to do. Their reputations and track records enable them to make more headway than those on the margins or outside the organization could. And when they manage the process well, they don't necessarily pay a high price for their actions; indeed, they may see their status rise as they create positive change. Continued here

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If You Only Had 15 Minutes to Sharpen Your Mind Every Day, This Is What You Can Do How to sharpen your mind and tune up your brainMental exercises are not just good for improving your mind, they are also great for protecting your brain, retrieving information, recalling what we learn quickly and sharpening your focus. Numerous studies reveal the importance of mental activities as we age. The good news is, you don't even have to spend a lot of time sharpening your mind every day. 15 minutes may seem like a short amount of time to improve an important organ in your body but doing it consistently can have a significant effect for a very long-term. Learning how to get your mind active can improve your cognition skills in the long-term especially as you get older. "Regular mental challenges force you to think. Use it, or you'll lose it," says Constantine Lyketsos, PhD, professor at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Switch up what you read, watch or listen Continued here

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How to Successfully Market a 'First-of-Its-Kind' Product With Confidence Customers are often willing to forgive a few bumps along the way when your product is brand new as long as they know you are working on improving the user experience.When it comes to launching a product, finding ways to stand out from the competition is essential. For many e-commerce platforms, differentiation comes from finding elements that make your product unique from others that are similar to it -- such as creating a "minimalist" wallet, for example. But what if you are introducing a product that is truly new? That nobody else in your industry has attempted? In this case, the challenge isn't proving that your product is better than or different from your competitors'. Instead, you have to give customers a compelling reason to try out something they've never considered before. By homing in on some marketing fundamentals, you can get your product off to a quality start. Some tips: Continued here

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The Habit Loop: How Your Environment Encourages Bad Habits Every year, my friend Joe (not his real name) decides to quit smoking. How do I know? He makes a Facebook proclamation around New Years', declaring he's done with cigarettes. There are weekly progress updates for a month or so while he white-knuckles his way through his first smoke-free days. But eventually, Joe backslides. Why? He goes out to a bar with a friend who smokes. Why does being in a bar overpower Joe's best intentions? Well, Joe's surrounded by cues to light up - a glass of whiskey, a warm spring night, and good company who's also smoking. Joe walks into the bar with good intentions and a few smoke-free months behind him, but before he knows it, there's a lit cigarette in his hand. It makes sense that being in a bar persuades my friend to smoke. Everywhere he looks, there are triggers for old habits - and habits are compelling. Studies show that up to 43% of our daily actions are habits - actions performed without conscious thought. If habits are so pervasive, how can we hope to overcome them? We first have to understand the science behind habits and what triggers them. The answer is a behavioral science framework known as the Habit Loop. Continued here

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How to Be Creative on Demand Creativity is learnable providence. It feels like an inexplicable miracle when it arrives, and we may never be able to isolate all the variables that generate it. But, in my experience, we can reliably create the conditions to invite it. Twenty years ago, I was involved in a terrifyingly inspiring project, working with some of Kenya's poorest citizens in one of Nairobi's most blighted areas. Our goal was to generate self-help strategies that would enable this group to climb a few rungs up the economic ladder. The audacity of this effort hit me in the middle of a flight from Brussels to Nairobi. I had fallen asleep briefly just long enough to become immersed in a nightmare. I dreamed I had somehow become the president of Kenya, and this filled me with overwhelming despair. When an announcement about approaching turbulence jarred me into consciousness I've never been happier. But the dream had hammered home the weight of the task I was heading toward. I was to lead a two-day meeting with hundreds of people for whom the stakes could not be higher. We had a clear goal but no concrete plan. I knew the work was worth pursuing, but I had never done what we were trying to do and felt inadequate to the task. I hoped and prayed that worthwhile ideas would come.And they did. The trip was successful in ways that exceeded my competence. This was a welcome surprise, but one I had done my best make happen. Here are some of the ways I've learned to be more predictably creative. Continued here

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A Checklist for Boards in the New Normal Covid-19 has spurred corporate boards to improvise new practices while keeping those that have served them well. Here's a run-down. Boards make decisions that have a long-term impact on companies. In a survey of 266 chairs, directors and CEOs in 23 countries between May and June to assess how boards have adapted to the coronavirus pandemic, we found that the pandemic had cemented some long-existing best practices and also birthed a few innovative approaches. We crunched through the responses using a model of effective boards we had developed based on previous research. This model, which we call "3PSC", defines five factors critical for board effectiveness: purpose, people, process, stakeholder relationships and chair. The following explains in detail our analysis, which we hope might serve as a checklist for better boards in the new normal. Continued here

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Leadership Is Like Engineering: You Need to Start with Why To address user challenges, they must first be understood. These principles of why, what and how also apply to management, especially in turbulent times.In times of uncertainty, it is crucial for leaders to rally around the why behind their mission. There is a tendency to overlook the why when decisive action is needed, but it is essential to steering the course of the business. The why illuminates what needs to be done and how it can be accomplished. The why gives the whole team a sense of purpose. As Friedrich Nietzsche is quoted as saying, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Over the past decade, my perspective on leadership has been guided by one simple mantra: Start with why, inspired by the book of the same title by Simon Sinek. In my time as an engineer, starting with why was fundamental to tackling every new product or feature. Starting with why meant understanding the pain points of the user and defining the success criteria for addressing the pain points. From there, we could specify the functionality needed (the what) and set a plan for developing the product (the how). As I became a leader, I found that these same principles apply to management - always, but especially in turbulent times. Continued here

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The Year 2020 in Physics Featuring paradoxical black holes, room-temperature superconductors and a new escape from the prison of time.By now you've probably heard the original quarantine-genius story: Isaac Newton, having fled the plague, revolutionized mathematics and reinvented physics. In a pandemic-afflicted year like 2020, it's natural to hope for some parallel silver lining. Maybe another prodigy's ideas are being given the time and space to gestate, and who knows what wonders await. The dour among us might point out that such parallels can only go so far. In Newton's era, quarantine meant a profound isolation, with little but an apple tree to keep one company. Before Zoom, focus may have been more easily achieved. But even more important, science itself has changed entirely since then. Until around a century ago, an isolated thinker had a chance of touching off a sweeping intellectual upheaval. Now the biggest questions - even the theoretical ones - tend to give way only under the assault of global teams of scholars. Continued here

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The Psychology Behind Sibling Rivalry You can't avoid fighting. You can only hope to contain it.My 4- and 8-year-old are closer now than they were before the pandemic - I hear the sounds of giggling wafting from their bedroom several times a night. But the more time my girls spend together, the more they fight, too. The most common battlegrounds for my kids are perceived injustices and jockeying for position. The most absurd instance of the latter was when we were waiting to get flu shots this past fall. The girls got into a brawl over who received the first shot. My older daughter "won" that argument, but it was only as she was walking toward the pharmacist's door that she realized a shot was not actually a prize. Continued here

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Why parents should stop blaming themselves for how their kids turn out Millions of children have been studied to disentangle all the shaping forces. Studies have followed identical twins and fraternal twins and plain-old siblings growing up together or adopted and raised apart. Growing up in the same home does not make children noticeably more alike in how successful they are, how happy or self-reliant they are, and so on. In other words, imagine if you'd been taken at birth and raised next door by the family to the left and your brother or sister had been raised next door by the family to the right. By and large, that would have made you no more similar or different than growing up together under the same roof. On the one hand, these findings seem unbelievable. Think about all the ways that parents differ from home to home and how often they argue and whether they helicopter and how much they shower their children with love. You'd think it would matter enough to make children growing up in the same home more alike than if they'd been raised apart, but it doesn't. But just because an event doesn't shape people in the same way doesn't mean it had no effect. Your parenting could be shaping your children - just not in the ways that lead them to become more alike. Your parenting could be leading your first child to become more serious and your second child to become more relaxed. Or, it could lead your first child to want to be like you and your second child to want to be nothing like you. You are flapping your butterfly wings to your hurricane children. Continued here

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The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study Some people's careers take off, while others' take longer - or even stall out. Common wisdom says that the former attend elite MBA programs, land high-powered jobs right out of school at prestigious firms, and climb the ladder straight to the top, carefully avoiding risky moves. But our data shows a completely different picture. We conducted a 10-year study, which we call the CEO Genome Project, in which we assembled a data set of more than 17,000 C-suite executive assessments and studied 2,600 in-depth to analyze who gets to the top and how. We then took a closer look at "CEO sprinters" - those who reached the CEO role faster than the average of 24 years from their first job. We discovered a striking finding: Sprinters don't accelerate to the top by acquiring the perfect pedigree. Continued here

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How to Use Overthinking to Your Advantage Some might call it anxiety, others call it power. Here's how you can use your active brain to become more successful.If you're anything like me, overthinking is a common, if not daily, occurrence. Your head is spinning a million different directions, filled with thoughts buzzing around. Some believe this pattern of thinking is bad, as if it's a one-way ticket to self-destruction. But in my own life, I have discovered it to be a superpower that, if used correctly, can bring endless opportunities into your life. For an entrepreneur, the list of decisions is endless: marketing strategies, financial decisions, hiring selections, to name a few. So knowing how to make decisions quickly, and not get stuck in a tornado of rumination, could be the key to your success. Being entrepreneurial, there is a level of craziness that lives within you. Instead of ridding yourself of this aspect, learn how to manage it and use it to your advantage. After all, this is a characteristic that is truly a gift. Continued here

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Your Brain Has A "Delete" Button -- Here's How To Use It This is the fascinating way that your brain makes space to build new and stronger connections so you can learn more. There's an old saying in neuroscience: neurons that fire together wire together. This means the more you run a neuro-circuit in your brain, the stronger that circuit becomes. This is why, to quote another old saying, practice makes perfect. The more you practice piano, or speaking a language, or juggling, the stronger those circuits get. The ability to learn is about more than building and strengthening neural connections. For years this has been the focus for learning new things. But as it turns out, the ability to learn is about more than building and strengthening neural connections. Even more important is our ability to break down the old ones. It's called "synaptic pruning." Here's how it works. Continued here

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Take these 5 things into consideration when you're trying to find your calling Psychologists share their findings about those who are trying to find some meaning in life.If, like many, you are searching for your calling in life - perhaps you are still unsure which profession aligns with what you most care about - here are five recent research findings worth taking into consideration. First, there's a difference between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive passion. If you can find a career path or occupational goal that fires you up, you are more likely to succeed and find happiness through your work - that much we know from the deep research literature. But beware - since a seminal paper published in 2003 by the Canadian psychologist Robert Vallerand and colleagues, researchers have made an important distinction between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive one. If you feel that your passion or calling is out of control, and that your mood and self-esteem depend on it, then this is the obsessive variety, and such passions, while they are energizing, are also associated with negative outcomes such as burnout and anxiety. Continued here

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"Innovation = Managed Chaos": Eric Schmidt, Former CEO of Google ERIC SCHMIDT: My first office at Google was an 8-by-12 office, just enough room for me and my desk and my little chair. And one day I walked in, and I find I have a roommate. I said "Hello." He says, "Hello." I said, "Hi, I'm Eric." And he goes, "Hi, I'm Amit." REID HOFFMAN: That's Eric Schmidt. This story happened on his first day as Google's CEO in 2001. SCHMIDT: Now as a new person coming into the company, it's very important to not create a cultural faux pas. Like it would be incorrect to say, "I'm the CEO. Get the heck out of my office." So I looked at my secretary and said, "Did you know anything about this?" And she said "no." And I said, "Well, who said you could move in?" And he said, "The VP of engineering." And I said, "Ah, they are playing a joke on me." And I said, "Well, why did you move here?" "Well, because I was in a six person office, it was very crowded, and your office was empty." So we became colleagues HOFFMAN: So was Amit playing a joke on Eric? Oddly enough, Eric doesn't say. He drops the investigation. Amit offers no further explanation. They settle into their work, and do a fine job of ignoring one another. Continued here

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How to Build Expertise in a New Field Better pay, more joy in the job, or prerequisite to promotion? Whatever your reasons for deciding to build expertise in a new field, the question is how to get there. Your goal, of course, is to become a swift and wise decision-maker in this new arena, able to diagnose problems and assess opportunities in multiple contexts. You want what I call "deep smarts" - business-critical, experience-based knowledge. Typically, these smarts take years to develop; they're hard-earned. But that doesn't mean that it's too late for you to move into a different field. The following steps can accelerate your acquisition of such expertise. Continued here

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Why PhDs Don't Become Billionaires We're all fans of education. I can admit that I'm a kind of an educational snob based on my own experience in pursuing advanced degrees. As a result, it's always been a foregone conclusion that my kids would also be heading to college to pursue similar academic pursuits, possibly including advanced degrees. A big reason why so many parents think and act this way is that we want to do our best to ensure that our kids have the best shot possible at a satisfying and independent life. Everyone knows that the more education someone attains, the higher the chances are that they will earn a healthy standard of living. We know, for example, that someone who earns a PhD will earn substantially more on average than someone who stops after graduating high school. The floor for what someone can earn becomes much higher for someone the more education they get. We also know that higher levels of education correlate to lower unemployment, better health, and longer lives. All of those sound like great things for our children. But there's a wrinkle here that we're not talking about, and that's the decrease in variability or the standard deviation that exists when you get more education. Continued here

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Collaborative Overload Too much teamwork exhausts employees and saps productivity. Here's how to avoid it.Collaboration is taking over the workplace. As business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down, connectivity is increasing, and teamwork is seen as a key to organizational success. According to data we have collected over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more. Certainly, we find much to applaud in these developments. However, when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. Consider a typical week in your own organization. How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. Performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become real risks. Continued here

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A Growth Mindset Is Powerful, but Only if You Know How to Use it Trouble is, many small business owners don't. Here's why -- and 3 tips to tap into it.Carol Dweck's seminal book Mindset and her decades-long research at Stanford University have made a company's mindset the focal point of how companies will compete in uncertain times. It is indeed the strategic imperative of choice among leaders across sectors who want to advance and continue to thrive. Trouble is, many entrepreneurs aren't actually using it. Why? Dweck's mindset theory is simple and, when applied consistently, can be very powerful. It boils down to one simple observation proved by countless studies by Dweck and others -- each of us is equipped with the ability to tap into two mindsets: fixed and growth. Each mindset produces vastly different paths, in particular for those who hope to build thriving organizations. Here's how the two mindsets play out. Continued here

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Want to Hire People With High Emotional Intelligence? Look for These 5 Things Learn to identify emotional intelligence when you see it.Smart employers recognize the value of emotional intelligence in the workplace. In a survey of more than 2,600 hiring managers and HR professionals, HR company CareerBuilder found that: - 71 percent said they value emotional intelligence more than IQ in an employee - 75 percent said they were more likely to promote a candidate with high emotional intelligence over one with a high IQ - Emotionally intelligent employees are invaluable because they help build chemistry. Great chemistry leads to great teams. And great teams do great work. But as an employer, how can you identify emotional intelligence when you see it? Continued here

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When Should You Collaborate with the Competition? Why don't Australians drink much whiskey? They're hardly known for being abstemious. Part of the answer is that they tend to drink beer and wine. But another part of the answer is that whiskey brands haven't made a concerted effort to get them to really try whiskey. Perhaps they should, because Australians have been lured into changing their drinking habits in the past. Rewind to the 1960s and Australian wine consumption was way down on today's level. So, wine producers got together and educated the public on the nuances of fine wine. Now Australians are drinking four times the amount of wine they drank in 1961 and are among the largest consumers of wine on a per capita basis in the world. This is not a one-off. Back in 1998 real men didn't eat avocados. Continued here

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How to be More Productive and Eliminate Time Wasting Activities by Using the "Eisenhower Box" Eisenhower lived one of the most productive lives you can imagine. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961. During his time in office, he launched programs that directly led to the development of the Interstate Highway System in the United States, the launch of the internet (DARPA), the exploration of space (NASA), and the peaceful use of alternative energy sources (Atomic Energy Act). Before becoming president, Eisenhower was a five-star general in the United States Army. He served as President of Columbia University, became the first Supreme Commander of NATO, and somehow found time to pursue hobbies like golfing and oil painting. Eisenhower had an incredible ability to sustain his productivity not just for weeks or months, but for decades. And for that reason, it is no surprise that his methods for time management, task management, and productivity have been studied by many people. His most famous productivity strategy is known as the Eisenhower Box (or Eisenhower Matrix) and it's a simple decision-making tool that you can use right now. Let's talk about how to be more productive and how Eisenhower's strategy works. Continued here

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Fighting Against Dictatorship Dictatorial types gain and maintain power through a number of social processes and psychological dynamics. From our Palaeolithic roots onwards, dictators - whether they led tribes, fiefdoms, countries, religions or organisations - have always been with us. We have always been attracted to individuals who appear strong. Some people are easily persuaded to give up their freedoms for an imaginary sense of stability and protection, not to mention an illusion of restored greatness. Generally speaking, times of social unrest have always been the feeding ground for dictators. Periods of economic depression, political or social chaos give dictators the opportunity to appear as saviour and, when conditions allow it, seize power by coup d'etat or other means. Their populist demagoguery can seduce broad swathes of the population. However, most of their inflated promises turn out to be no more than hot air. So how is it that they're able to gain and maintain power? They succeed by taking full advantage of known social processes and dynamics. Continued here

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How Will You Measure Your Life? On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I'll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I'll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it's not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys - but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction. Continued here

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When You Know Layoffs Are Coming... William recalls the excruciatingly uncertain months before he finally lost his job. He had worked in the real estate sector, where his work dried up. Piece by piece his responsibilities were taken away. His company­­ was not doing well, that much was evident. It was letting people go in small batches. If you didn't get tapped on a Friday, you were safe for the next week. "We were just kind of sitting there staring at each other, waiting for the axe to fall," William says. And this waiting period was agonizing. "You ever watch like a documentary with a herd of zebra and there's a lion? The lion catches one zebra and all the other zebras are a little way off, just kind of watching." William says that's what it was like for all the other employees. "And then they're just kind of wondering when it's their turn." Continued here

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103 lessons people often learn too late in life (a little manual for life) How you approach life says a lot about who you are. To succeed in life, you must be in a constant state of adaptation - continually unlearning old 'rules', relearning new ones and doing more of what makes you come alive. Most people operate on autopilot, doing the same things today that didn't work yesterday. They are caught in a cycle. They rarely stop to measure the impact of their actions on themselves and others, and how those actions affect their total well-being. These are some of the most powerful lessons I have learned over the years. I chose to make a list because it's easier to digest. Sometimes less is more. You can easily ponder over each lesson quickly and apply them to your life. Continued here

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What Great Listeners Actually Do Chances are you think you're a good listener. People's appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they're above average. In our experience, most people think good listening comes down to doing three things: - Not talking when others are speaking - Letting others know you’re listening through facial expressions and verbal sounds ("Mmm-hmm") - Being able to repeat what others have said, practically word-for-word In fact, much management advice on listening suggests doing these very things - encouraging listeners to remain quiet, nod and "mm-hmm" encouragingly, and then repeat back to the talker something like, "So, let me make sure I understand. What you're saying is..." However, recent research that we conducted suggests that these behaviors fall far short of describing good listening skills. Continued here

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This Doctor Says Humans Actually Need 7 Kinds of Rest (and You're Probably Not Getting All of Them) Getting a solid eight hours of sleep isn't enough.We're only a few days into 2021 and we've already had a coup attempt, a rampaging new strain of Covid, a halting vaccine rollout, and even attack squirrels (murder hornets and meth alligators are so 2020). It does not appear we're in for a restful year. But even if the world makes it hard to relax, at least one doctor insists we all need to find a way to reset and recharge anyway. And that's more complicated than just switching off your brain and switching on Netflix every once in a while. In a new TED Ideas post, Saundra Dalton-Smith insists "we go through life thinking we've rested because we have gotten enough sleep -- but in reality we are missing out on the other types of rest we desperately need" and outlines the seven types of rest that are essential for human flourishing. Continued here

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I teach a course on happiness at Yale: this is how to make the most of your resolutions Forget tough love. Adopting a positive mindset and being kind to yourself is a more effective way to make a changeTo say that 2020 wasn't the best year is an understatement. For many of us, it felt like a giant global dumpster fire. Not surprisingly, the stresses of living through a pandemic have had a terrible impact on our collective mental health, with rates of depression and anxiety skyrocketing. Many of us feel we can't say goodbye to last year fast enough. And that means we're entering 2021 with high expectations. With the promise of a vaccine and the potential for a return to normality, the start of this year has given us something we've been missing for a long time: hope. Starting over after the year we've just had feels more exciting than usual. It's a brand new chapter in our lives, in which lots of positive changes are possible. Continued here

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How to read the news like a scientist Overwhelmed by your news feed? Use tools from science to evaluate what's true and what's fake, suggests researcher Emma Frans.In our daily reading, we encounter all kinds of claims. Depending on the news story and the week, Chinese imports, coffee, large-cap stocks, snacking, and eggs should be embraced - or they should be avoided altogether. What's a person to do when bombarded with confusing, contradictory information? Try thinking like a scientist, says Emma Frans, who's an epidemiology and psychiatry researcher at Oxford University in the UK and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. "In present times, our risk of being fooled is especially high," she says. There are two main factors at play: "Disinformation spreads like wildfire in social media," she adds, "and when it comes to news reporting, sometimes it is more important for journalists to be fast than accurate." Continued here

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We've Known How to Combat Dementia For Years -- We're Just Not Listening We're still waiting for that shiny pill to cure us. What if we never find it? When I started working in my first lab researching Alzheimer's Disease, I was idealistic, determined the field would find a cure for the insidious disease in my lifetime. And I still hope we do. Alzheimer's runs in my family like it does in many families. But my time working in the field has forced me to realize that we already know how to fend off the debilitating effects of dementia. It's just not the answer we were looking for. For years, I researched in and out of the lab. I took classes about the brain and dementia. I read neuroscience books in my leisure time. I consumed every bit of information the field offered on cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's, and similar diseases. From the vagus nerve to cytokines gone wrong to demyelination, I scoured every potential source of memory loss. And everything I read, in one way or another, pointed back to the same perpetrator: stress. Continued here

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The Stickiest, Most Addictive, Most Engaging, and Fastest-Growing Social Apps -- and How to Measure Them When a social app is working, it's often clear in the data: how many people are using the app on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and how is the network growth trending over time? But evaluating the success - or, in our case, the potential - of a social app is not as straightforward as it seems. What does "good" look like, anyway? How do various categories of social apps stack up in terms of engagement, stickiness, and retention (and which KPIs are most important to track)? Can upstarts compete with the reigning social giants? To answer these pressing questions, we took a deep dive into the top social apps across a dozen categories, in partnership with the app intelligence software company Apptopia. Continued here

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The Art of Blooming Late Mozart was a celestial genius, but he struggled like a mere mortal during his teens and early twenties. Though already a prolific composer, he had to work as an organist and concertmaster in his native Salzburg to make ends meet. Underpaid, unfulfilled, and hemmed in by his frustratingly average gigs, he felt a burning desire to devote more time and energy to his art. So after a period of doubt and deliberation, that's exactly what he did. He quit his job, set up shop in Vienna, and embarked on what turned out to be the most productive and creative period of his life. Even if you never hope to reach Mozart's level of mastery, you may relate to his need to break free from convention. Maybe you feel as if your job is like painting by numbers. Maybe you've done everything right - excelled at school, worked hard, and landed a good, high-paying job - but you're tired of being just like everyone else. Maybe you yearn to achieve something that is unmistakably you. Continued here

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A Framework for Leaders Facing Difficult Decisions Many decision-making frameworks aim to help leaders use objective information to mitigate bias, operate under time pressure, or leverage data. But these frameworks tend to fall short when it comes to decisions based on subjective information sources that suggest conflicting courses of action. And most complex decisions fall into this category. Specifically, every complex leadership decision must balance three subjective dimensions: Continued here

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How to turn a strategic vision into reality Too often, companies get lost in buzzwords that muddle a clear path for the future or offer vague platitudes instead of precise goals. Here's a guide for turning vision into guidelines for action. Too often companies get lost in jargon. Sull has made a Mad Libs-style chart of overused buzzwords - fallback words like "digitize" and "monetize" and "leverage" - to illustrate how often companies overinflate their vision. Other times, companies lay out an overly detailed long-term plan. The problem with this overambitious method is that "no plan survives contact with reality," he said. Instead, a strategic vision must be detailed enough to lay out a clear vision while being broad enough to allow for flexibility and adjustment. Continued here

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Why You Should Create a "Shadow Board" of Younger Employees A lot of companies struggle with two apparently unrelated problems: disengaged younger workers and a weak response to changing market conditions. A few companies have tackled both problems at the same time by creating a "shadow board" - a group of non-executive employees that works with senior executives on strategic initiatives. The purpose? To leverage the younger groups' insights and to diversify the perspectives that executives are exposed to. They seem to work. Consider Prada and Gucci, two fashion companies with a good track record of keeping up with - or shaping - consumer tastes. Until recently, Prada enjoyed high margins, a legendary creative director, and good growth opportunities. But since 2014, it has witnessed declining sales. In 2017, the company finally admitted that it had been "slow in realizing the importance of digital channels and the blogging online 'influencers' which are disrupting the industry." Co-CEO Patrizio Bertelli said, "We made a mistake." Continued here

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How are the demographics of India and China changing over time! As the impacts of China's one-child policy are felt, and India's population continues to grow, the two nations' demographics are diverging. By 2050, it's estimated that more than a third of China will be over 60. India's working population is expected to reach 800 million by that time.As seen in today’s animation, which comes from AnimateData and leverages data from the United Nations, the two countries are expected to have very different demographic compositions over time as their populations age. Although the countries have roughly the same populations today - by 2050, India will add roughly 270 million more citizens, and China's total will actually decrease by 30 million people. Let's look at the demographic profiles of these countries to break things down further. We'll do this by charting populations of age groups (0-14 years, 15-24 years, 25-64 years, and 65+ years). Continued here

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Building a Startup That Will Last For the past decade, growth rates have defined success for most technology companies. Moore's Law enabled unprecedented computing power, setting off a sprint in winner-take-all marketplaces with increasing returns to scale. Growth-hacking became the entrepreneurial mantra of the early 21st century, resulting in the creation of new tech giants, entirely new industries, and an era in which online community, content, and commerce have redefined how we live, learn, and work. In a marathon, pacing and perseverance are paramount. Few companies from the tech boom of the mid-2000s had the foresight to temper their pace in anticipation of the long journey that lay ahead. Our collective obsession with disruption made us look at decades-old companies as something to dismantle rather than admire. The potential for career-defining gains got the best of many investors and advisors, and we failed to coach founders on the fundamentals of sustainability. We are only now recognizing how untenable the "move fast and break things" attitude was to become. Continued here

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What Is Strategy, Again? At a fundamental level, all strategies for Porter boil down to two very broad options: Do what everyone else is doing (but spend less money doing it), or do something no one else can do. While either approach can be successful, the two are for him not economically (or, I think, morally) equivalent. Competing by doing what everyone else is doing means, he says, competing on price (that is, learning to be more efficient than your rivals). But that just shrinks the pie as, in the rush to the bottom, profitability declines for the entire industry. Alternatively, you could expand the pie by staking out some sustainable position based on a unique advantage you create with a clever, preferably complicated and interdependent set of activities (which some thinkers also call a value chain or a business model). This choice is easy to see in the airline industry, where most airlines "compete to be the best," as Porter puts it, fighting over a very stingy pie indeed, while Southwest, among a handful of other airlines, built far more profitable businesses with a completely different approach, which targeted a different customer (people who might otherwise drive, for example) with a cleverly efficient set of interdependent activities, thereby expanding the entire market. Continued here

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How to Work with a Manipulative Person Almost everyone who's ever gone to work has had to deal with an office manipulator. Unfortunately, most employees hesitate to go public with their concerns. And with good reason: Even if they do, typical corporate responses range from wary or dismissive to actually retaliating against the victim, rather than the wrongdoer. Unfortunately, many workplaces promote manipulators because they appear to be effective at getting things done, despite the significant costs their abuse can inflict on productivity and people over time. Particularly when you can't get the hierarchy or other authorities to intervene on your behalf, it helps to have your own approaches for coping, short of legal action. Continued here