Articles
- The Real Reason People Won’t Change: Admittedly, when I read this article on my phone the full posting wasn’t available to me. I was only able to read the first page of the article, but the concept was enough to get me interested. “Competing commitments”. Heard of it? I hadn’t but it seems to explain a lot. Competing commitments are, as you might have expected, commitments to things that are in conflict. The article has a ton of examples, but the concept of competing commitments offers insight as to why some people seem stubborn in their ways, despite everything else being lined up for success. A simple example might be someone who is a die-hard advocate of the project they are working on and really wants it to succeed. However, they’re actually inhibiting the success of the project because they aren’t comfortable with their role in relation to teammate. As a result, the team suffers and then the project suffers, but their alignment to wanting the project to succeed is in the right spot. Now that I have full access to the article, I’m certainly going back and reading through the whole thing.
- Want to be Extremely, Wildly, Radically Successful?: I really appreciated the perspective of Joel Peterson in this article. There’s a million and one books and articles online about how to be successful. They all have titles just like this one. They’re all a bit over the top and unrealistic: “The one thing you need to do to be successful”, “The shortcut to success”, “5 simple steps to being the most successful human being in the universe”. There’s no shortcut to success. All the articles and books that offer information on being successful are doing just that: offering information. You need to make a habit out of doing things that make you successful. Live it. Day in, day out. And it’s not going to happen overnight.
- The Problem With “There’s a Problem”: This is one my own, so it’s another shameless plug. This post was all about, in my opinion, the right way to tell someone about a problem. If you simply just tell someone that something is broken, doesn’t work, or isn’t right and that’s all that you do, you’re slacking. Everyone, especially in a startup, has a million and one things to do. If you’re about to offload some problem onto someone, at least do your part and get some context around the problem. Better yet, generate some potential solutions so that you’re going to people with solutions, not problems.
- The Most Powerful Habit You Can Imagine: A colleague of mine shared this article earlier this week, and I felt I had to do my part to share it as well. In this article, Bruce Kasanoff outlines some traits to making your leadership skills more effective. By introducing some compassion and treating people like people, you can have a big impact. People will align more with you and want to work with you. It’s hard to resent your leader or manager when they’re the type of person who fights for you around the clock. You can greatly improve your team mechanics by not acting like an overlord robot.
- Leadership Tips from The Voice: This article was a bit unique compared to the rest, but I thought it was a cool parallel. Jackie Lauer from Axeltree put this one together. She uses a music performer’s traits as a comparison to a good leader. The highlights? Be fearless. If everything you do is calculated to eliminate all risks, you’ll never fail, and you’ll never learn from it. You need to be a human with the people you lead. Know your strengths and your weaknesses. Build a team that’s strong where you’re weak.
- The 6 Types of Thinkers to Seek for Your Team: Katya Andresen defines six variations of how people think and how they’re important in a team. She’s not claiming that you need six people (one with each way of thinking) to be successful but rather an individual can have a variety of these perspectives. The interesting part is that if you look at her list and compare it to your current team, you can probably fit each team member into one or two of those types of thinkers. Pretty neat!
- The Town BlackBerry Built: Is Anything Left?: This isn’t an article… but a video! Our CEO of Magnet Forensics, Adam Belsher, is featured throughout most of this video. Myself and a few colleagues actually have some cameo appearances too, which I thought was pretty cool too. For anyone outside of Waterloo that hears about all the RIM/Blackberry talk, they often have a different perspective of the town than the people living here. Waterloo has an absolutely incredible startup community, and regardless of how good or bad Blackberry is doing, it’ll continue to thrive. As Adam said, it’d be silly if you’re looking to expand your team or business and you’re not even considering Waterloo.
- 2 Mental Exercises For Battling “It Won’t Work” Syndrome: In startups (or any company really), generating new ideas is a big part of innovating. With any idea, there needs to be a choice to act on it or not. This article is about how some ideas are simply just dismissed without actually giving them a chance. it might be worth trying these exercises out with your team if you feel there isn’t a good environment for nurturing ideas.
- Infighting is Toxic and Probably Running Rampant at Your Company: What is infighting and how is it killing your company? Let Daniel Roth tell you. In his article, Daniel talks about how competing against each other inside your company can be poisonous. Why not work together towards your common goal against your common competition? If you truly want your company to be successful, you need to put aside your personal agenda.
- The One Belief That Is Holding Back Your Career: Like the infighting article, Fred Kofman‘s article has a similar perspective. Stop thinking about the goals of individual components of the company. If they are not working toward the common goal of the company, they are not operating effectively. An excellent example is given int he article: The aim of the defense of a soccer team is not to stop the other team from scoring. Their goal, like the rest of their team, is to win. Taking defensive action is how they accomplish that. However, if they’re down one point and the clock is running out, you can bet they won’t just crowd around their end trying to stop any more goals from being scored.
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