Business - Business Strategy

February 19, 1020

Interview with Terry R. Bacon, author of the book What People Want: A Manager's Guide to Building Relationships That Work

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Mike Carruthers:
A lot of managers are lousy at their job and the process of promoting managers is a big part of the problem.

Terry Bacon:
A lot of managers are promoted because they're very good technically at what they do.  And they're so good technically, they're promoted into positions of management, often without having a real aptitude for people and usually without any real good training on how to manage people.
 

February 15, 2010

Interview with Melanie Billings-Yun, author of the book Beyond Dealmaking: Five Steps to Negotiating Profitable Relationships

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Mike Carruthers:
You negotiate when you try to get someone else to agree to do something, but getting someone to agree to do something and having them actually do it are not the same thing.

Melanie Billings-Yun:
Psychological studies have shown that people do not feel committed to agreements that they felt they were bullied into or forced to make and will find ways to get back at you.
 

February 12, 2010

Interview with Chip Heath, co-author of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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Mike Carruthers:
Some ideas stick with us for a long time; other ideas die the minute after we hear them.

Chip Heath:
Ideas that stick - JFK's Man on the Moon speech, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Aesop's fable that has stuck for twenty-five hundred years, the "this is your brain on drugs" campaign from the 80's.
 

Chip Heath, co-author of the book Made to Stick... 

February 9, 2010

Interview with Alice Adams, author of the book Playing to Strength: Leveraging Gender at Work

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Mike Carruthers:
A common belief (in the workplace anyway) is that men and women have very different strengths that they bring to the table.

Alice Adams:
"Men are more analytical, have higher intensity leadership qualities, women are more empathetic they’re better at collaborating..."

Alice Adams, author of the book Playing to Strength, says these perceptions about gender differences in the workplace are actually completely false.

February 2, 2010

Interview with Marianna Olszewski, author of the book Live It, Love It, Earn It: A Woman's Guide to Financial Freedom

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Mike Carruthers:
If you’re still not exactly certain what the perfect job or career is for you, here’s some advice…

Marianna Olszewski:
We all have talents and if we follow those talents the money will come, I promise you, I promise you, I promise you.

January 22, 2010

Interview with Frans Johansson, author of the book Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

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Mike Carruthers:
People who come up with great ideas typically have something in common.

Frans Johansson:
If there's one thing that characterizes breakthrough artists, scientists, entrepreneurs - it is that they generate and try out many ideas.

Frans Johansson, author of the book Medici Effect, says Pablo Picasso for example…

January 20, 2010

Interview with Daniel Pink, author of the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

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Mike Carruthers:
Pay for performance. That’s the model many organizations use to motivate their people; if you perform we’ll pay you money.

Daniel Pink:
And what the science shows that you've got to pay people enough, but once you pay people enough, external rewards like that (If/then rewards) don’t play that big of a role in high performance.

January 19, 2010

Interview with Daniel Pink, author of the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

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Mike Carruthers:
Reward and punishment, the old "carrot and stick" are the classic methods organizations use to motivate their people. However…

Daniel Pink:
There’s actually a better approach to motivation that is not routed in carrots and sticks but has to do with autonomy and mastery and purpose.

January 7, 2010

Interview with Timothy Ferriss, author of the book The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content.

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Mike Carruthers:
We are so available to other people with cell phones and all the other technology that we don’t have a lot of uninterrupted time to focus on the task at hand.

Timothy Ferriss:
One of the biggest sources of stress (and this is measurable) is self-interruption and interruption. Looking at some of the internal audits at Morgan Stanley people are often interrupted on average every three minutes.

Timothy Ferriss

January 1, 2010

Interview with Alan Axelrod, author of the book Getting Your Way Every Day: Mastering the Lost Art of Pure Persuasion

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Mike Carruthers:
Tall people are perceived to be more authoritative and persuasive than short people, but also…

Alan Axelrod:
People with deep voices are perceived generally as more authoritative than people with high voices.