Eric Jacobson On Management And Leadership

This year's Father's Day has come and gone. However, the business and life lessons he taught me stays with me forever. What he taught me has served me well--even lessons I learned when I didn't at the time necessarily realize I was learning from him. So, I thank my dad for teaching me the following  business and life lessons : Listen  - Growing up, I thought my Dad was perhaps shy or quiet. Really, he was just a great listener. I believe that's what made him so wise. He would listen to anyone. Young or old. New acquaintance or friend. Provide  - My Dad provided for me. Music lessons. Vacations. Summer camp. Boy Scouts.  He gave. He put others' needs first. Today, I find in  volunteering  likely the same satisfaction he felt when he provided. Educate  - My Dad's passion was education. He loved to learn. He loved even more to teach. He lived to help other people learn. In the workplace, providing learning opportunities is one of the most powerful things ...

Why do some teams succeed while others stumble?   Because hiring, developing and engaging talent requires careful decisions that are too easy to get wrong without data. In   The Science of Dream Teams: How Talent Optimization Can Drive Engagement, Productivity, and Happiness , author   Mike Zani   introduces the science of “ talent optimization ,” a new discipline that’s a far more reliable way to manage your employees than your gut instincts.  “ Proper talent optimization lifts morale, builds teams, and turbocharges productivity ,” explains Zani.  With simple steps, Zani (a former US Olympic sailing team coach) shows how companies of any size can collect and analyze voluntary data about their employees to purposefully align a company’s business and talent strategies.  The book explores how CEOs and management teams can collect and use data to: Build effective teams of highly sought-after professionals while optimizing costs. Create a company culture b...

Startup founders are often celebrated as visionaries—but what happens when their greatest strengths become their biggest liabilities?   They face a crucial, often overlooked problem in the startup world: the very qualities that help founders launch companies—relentless drive, rebellious thinking, and big-picture vision—can derail them as their businesses grow.   Most founders hit a leadership ceiling, and without personal evolution, their companies (and careers) implode.   “Why? Because the same people who command respect and effort also happen to be control freaks who are terrible at delegating and worse at empowering,” share Richard Hagberg and Tien Tzuo , authors of the new book, Founders, Keepers .   They add that, “The same people who will new things into existence are undisciplined workaholics who exhaust themselves and everyone around them. They can see the future, but they lack the capacity to think and organize collectively.”   Drawing on nea...

“Today, being memorable is the holy grail of communication,” says bestselling author Bill McGowan . “ Exceptional speaking, in its truest sense, has been buried under layers of bland, banal, and forgettable communication. In a world where everyone’s 'on message,' no one can stand out.”   His terrific, tactical, timely, and entertaining new book, Speak, Memorably  (authored with Juliana Silva ), helps professionals break away from canned communication and find their true—and most effective—voice no matter the workplace.  McGowan explains that the three edicts for how NOT to speak memorably are: Produce three key messages. Keep bridging back to those messages. Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em, tell ’em, and tell ’em what you told ’em.  Therefore, Speak Memorably  offers concrete strategies and tools to help anyone, in any stage of their career, cut through the numbing sameness of cliches and boring business rhetoric — and helps them break ...

In the new book, The Upper Hand , human behavioral scientist Dr. Abbie Maroño shows you how to influence people and situations in your favor with skill and integrity—and without the need for leverage or coercion.  “You will learn how to get what you want from others and build stronger relationships by replacing coercive tactics with a social science-backed playbook for winning trust,” says Maroño.  She explains that “The Upper Hand” is a framework for using influence through ethical, mutually beneficial means. And more specifically, she shows you how to build and maintain trust by gaining an understanding of the psychological mechanisms underpinning human decision making.  The book presents five key truths about the complexity of human behavior that you can count on one hand to give you the upper hand: We are our brains. We are driven to survive (by any means necessary). We want to connect and cooperate. We have a mind-body feedback loop. We want to protect our ...

“How you show up, what you stand for, and what actions you take to that end—as an individual and as a leader in your organization—are now gating factors to lasting success,” explains   Frank Calderoni   in his book,   UPSTANDING:  How Company Character Catalyzes Loyalty, Agility, and Hypergrowth .  Calderoni explains that leaders must put character at the center of everything they do, and he explains that  company culture is distinct from company character . He explains that:   Company culture  is the system of beliefs, values, goals, behaviors, and the way employees feel working in the organization—from leadership style, decision-making norms, customer experience, and company policies—officially and unofficially. Essentially, it’s the personality of the organization.   Company character  is the integrity, respect, and fortitude residing at the core of your culture. It is the basis of trust and emotional connection people have with your ...

“By understanding how their own mind works and training it for the most essential qualities, leaders can lead themselves effectively first, in order to better lead their people and tap into their human need for meaning, fulfillment and human connectedness,” explain  Rasmus Hougaard  and  Jacqueline Carter , authors of the book,  The Mind Of The Leader . Their book is based on extensive research, including  assessments of more than 35,000 leaders and interviews with 250 C-level executives. The authors found that  three mental qualities are essential to becoming effective leaders . Leaders must be: Mindful  – being present and attentive to their employees’ needs. Being focused versus distracted. Being aware versus being on autopilot. Selfless  – to model cultures based on growth and learning instead of ego. Being selfless versus ego-centered. Being confident versus diffident. Compassionate  – to show their employees they have their backs. Being...

  One of the best ways to determine if your service/business/organization is providing excellent customer service is for you, as a manager, to pretend you are the customer. Try it today. Contact your business via the phone, mail, email, and via the web. Use all four methods! Make a different contact each day for the next week. During those different instances, ask to reach a person where you only know their first name. Next time, ask for a person who no longer works at the business. Another time, complain about the service/product. Ask how to return a product. Or you can pretend you want to talk to someone to learn more about the business. Try different scenarios that would be typical for your customers when they contact your business. Then, observe what happens. I bet you'll be surprised. Hopefully,  pleasantly  surprised. But you may be shocked. In addition to likely getting helpful assistance, you may experience people being rude or unhelpful. You may get bounced from ...

Here are ten questions (or bundles of questions) you should ask yourself to ensure you are thinking and acting like a  superboss . These are from  Sydney Finkelstein 's book,  Superbosses . Do you have a specific vision for your work that energizes you, and that you use to energize and inspire your team? How often do people leave your team to accept a bigger offer elsewhere? What's that like when it happens? Do you push your reports to meet only the formal goals set for the team, or are there other goals that employees sometimes also strive to achieve? How do you go about questioning your own assumptions about the business? How do you get your team to do the same about their own assumptions? How do you balance the need to delegate responsibilities to team members with the need to provide hands-on coaching to them? How much time do you usually spend coaching employees? When promoting employees, do you ever put them into challenging jobs where they potentially might fail? ...

The book,  Decisions , by   Robert L. Dilenschneider , features vignettes on 23 individuals who made decisions that shaped the world. Each chapter offers practical thinking on how these women and men made decisions. You can use their decision-making skills as guidance at work, in your leadership role, and in your daily life. You’ll learn decision making tips from  Harry Truman ,  Margaret Thatcher ,  Mohammed Ali ,  Rachel Carson ,  Pablo Picasso  and others who made decisions during war and peace, and in fields of science, commerce and invention. Author Dilenschneider suggests takeaways about decision-making from each featured historical figure. Some of my favorite decision-making lessons from history and from the book include these:   Own your decisions . Be responsible for them and for their implications. Do not be reactionary—that is, making decisions to spite others or because of outside pressure—but do be respectful of their effect on o...

The  Harvard Business Review Family Business Handbook , is a comprehensive guide for how to build and sustain a successful enduring enterprise.  If you are in a family business, serve as a silent partner or board member, or are contemplating becoming part of a family business, this handbook is essential reading. And, even if you aren’t working in a family business, you’ll find the book enlightening because many best practices and learnings are transferrable to a non-family business.  Family businesses represent an estimated 85% of the world’s companies, and in the US, 5.5 million of these businesses employ 62% of the workforce. Therefore, understanding how these businesses work and how they contribute to the economy is critical. Book authors  Josh Baron  and  Rob Lachenauer  take readers deep behind the scenes to share: The secrets to longevity for family-owned businesses. How to decode the family dynamics that impact business decisions. How to plan fo...

Somehow, I missed reading this terrific book when it debuted 11 years ago. It is Moments of Impact by Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon .  I read it this past week, and as you read the book you will learn how to design strategic conversations that accelerate change, using five core principles .  Drawing on decades of experience as innovation strategists—and supported by cutting-edge social science research, dozens of real-life examples, and interviews with well over 100 thought leaders, executives, and fellow practitioners, Ertel and Solomon unveil a simple, creative process that allows teams to tackle their most challenging issues.  “In our fast-changing world, leaders are increasingly confronted by messy, multifaceted challenges that require collaboration to resolve. But the standard methods for tackling these challenges— meetings packed with data-drenched presentations or brainstorming sessions that circle back to nowhere—just don’t deliver ,” explain the author...

The new book, Reinventing the Leader , is an inspiring account of the magic that can happen when a leader realizes they must undergo their own transformation in order to transform their organization.  This candid and practical book by Guilherme ( Gui) Loureiro , Regional CEO overseeing Walmex, Walmart Canada, and Walmart Chile (now Chairman of the Board for Walmex and Regional CEO for Canada, Chile, Central America, and Mexico), and his executive leadership coach Carlos Marin shows how even the most successful leaders must be open to personal change in order to transform their company. The book details how the pair pioneered a data-driven, customer-centric business transformation at Walmex—Walmart’s biggest division outside of the United States. “This book is a blueprint for transformational success for leaders in any business who find themselves facing the need to retool their own company’s systems and operations and energize and inspire an entire corporate culture in order...