My boss rocked back in his chair, tapping his lip with a forefinger. “What exactly do you think my ‘real work’ is?” he asked. We had been talking about an issue with a man who worked for me. The discussion had been going on for a while and I had just apologized for keeping him from his “real » Read More
Tag: Boss
Learning to be a great boss
Today, Jeff Immelt is the CEO of General Electric, but once he was a boy whose father worked on the line at a GE plant. In 2005, Fast Company asked Immelt if his dad behaved differently at home when he had a bad boss. Here’s Immelt’s answer. “Yeah. He came home in a bad mood, uncertain about the future » Read More
What really matters
What makes a great place to work? All kinds of publications come up with lists of them, accompanied by articles about some of the more interesting practices. You’ll read about great salaries and interesting benefits such as great free food, dry cleaning on site, and nap rooms. But when people talk about whether a » Read More
Leadership: Tides and Seasons and Control
Stand on a beach in the heart of autumn and you become aware of how much you don’t control. The tide moves in and out, twice a day. Nothing you can do affects it. The season is swinging back from summer toward winter, and you can’t do anything about that either. Since you can’t control the tides and the » Read More
Leadership: Everyone else is taken
Dennis and Bill were part of the first group of great bosses that I studied. Both were rated as excellent by their bosses, their peers and their subordinates. Other than that, they didn’t have much in common. One was tall and square-jawed handsome, the other was short and unexceptional in appearance. One was » Read More