The Boostrappers Bible by Seth Godin is one of the best compilations of actionable, business insight I’ve seen.  It took me a while to go through it and each time I go through, I find another nugget of insight or a new lens.  I’ve been recommending it to friends, family, and colleagues.  The price is right – free – and it’s one of the best consolidations of insight and action I’ve seen in a while.
What I especially like about the Bootstrapper’s Bible is that it actually resonates.  For more …

As a mentor at work, I like to checkpoint results. While I can do area-specific coaching, I tend to take a more holistic approach. For me, it’s more rewarding to find ways to unleash somebody’s full potential and improve their overall effectiveness. Aside from checking against specific goals, I use the following frame to gauge progress.

Winners never quit and quitters never win, right?  Wrong!  Winners quit all the time.  Winners quit the things that aren’t working or the things that won’t pay off in the long run.  They move on to where they can be their best.  Perhaps the best in the world.
Winners don’t quit when it gets tough.  In fact, that’s exactly the wrong time to quit.  That’s where the Dip comes in.  The Dip is that long curve between starting out and making it to the top.  It’s where you find the …

How do you prepare for the second half of your life?  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about 3 potential paths for the second half of your life.
3 Answers for the Second Half of Your Life
Drucker provides 3 answers for the second half of your life:
1.    Start a Second Career
2.    Develop a Parallel Career
3.    Become a “social entrepreneur”
Start a Second Career
According to Drucker, one path is to start a different career:
The first is actually to start  …

This post is an index of my book nuggets from Work from the Inside Out: Seven Steps to Loving What You Do, by Nancy O’Hara. In this book, the author shows you how to find meaning in your job by looking inside yourself. Rather than get stuck in the routine of our jobs, office politics, and problematic projects, O’Hara provides a simple plan to reclaim your job and your life – and ultimately find the ability to truly love what you do.
My Nuggets
Here’s my nuggets so far …

How To Figure …

This is an index of my book nuggets from The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, by Michael E. Gerber. In this book, the author shows you how to grow your small business in a predictable and productive way. Gerber shows you how to apply the lessons of franchising to work on your business rather than in your business. You’ll also learn how to effectively manage your inner Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician, as well as understand and leverage the stages of your …

Tell me you’ve never had a difficult boss to work for? Even if you work for yourself, I’m sure you’ve had days where you’ve hated the boss. Well, what if there were patterns of these “difficult bosses,” and, if you knew them, you could either avoid them or you could work more effectively with them. In fact, you could even work with your own “inner boss” more effectively.
Coping with Difficult Bosses
In the book Coping with Difficult Bosses, Robert Bramson not only names these difficult bosses, but he shows you how …

How can you systematically chart out your professional development?  It’s not just functional experience that matters.  The types of business situations you’ve been in matter too.  For example, serving a marketing role during a Start-up is very different than the same role during a Sustaining Success situation.  You can use the STARS model to help you map out your professional experience as well as to chart your course.  In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about using the STARS model …

How could you work on your business rather than in it?  How would you design your business if this was the model for 5,000 more just like it?  One of the mistakes a technician cam make is to start a business to work in.   They become slaves to their own machine.  Instead, they can first design a system for results so that the business is both sustainable and a better place to work in (if they choose to.)  In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What …

How do you stay motivated?  How do you keep a sustainable pace?  Do you passionately take on challenges or do you try to do just enough to get by?  To produce great results, you need a healthy commitment.  A healthy commitment is performance-enhancing, while an unhealthy commitment drains you.  In Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More, John Eliot, Ph.D. writes about the distinction between a healthy and unhealthy commitment.
Healthy Commitment
Eliot considers “healthy” commitment to be sustainable and performance enhancing:

Being passionate
Striving for excellence
Earning it
Finding …

"Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power." — Lao Tzu
Finding your strengths is one of the best ways to improve your energy and effectiveness.  If you know your unique combination of strengths, and you play to your strengths instead of focus on your weaknesses, you can dramatically amplify your impact.
One of the key things that can hold you back is spending too much time on your weaknesses and not enough time on your strengths.  The better you know your strengths and talents, the better you can …

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How do you build a collaborative environment at work? Do you lead by example? Can you move your focus off yourself? Do you lift others up and help them to succeed? Do you treat others as you expect to be treated? Can you perform random acts of kindness and expect nothing in return? Can you forgive and forget those that don’t treat you as you expect?
What would life at work be like if you could resist greed, anger, and delusion? What if you could avoid the …

How do you build a team that trusts each other to speak their mind and take risks?  How do you make it possible for the team to engage in passionate and sometimes emotional debate, knowing that they will not be punished for saying something that might otherwise be interpreted as destructive or critical?  It’s not about trusting that your team members will behave in a certain way.  It’s about building vulnerability-based trust, where it’s safe to take risks and face conflict on the team rather than fear it.  In The …

How do you get people to take action?  If your results depend on other people, how do you set the stage for action and help build momentum?  In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins write about how to use action-forcing events to help move people into action.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Identify who does what when.  There’s a big difference between agreeing to actions and having owners that are accountable.  There’s also a big difference when you have a timeframe …

Self-efficacy is your belief about your ability to influence events that affect your life. Your self-efficacy beliefs determine how you think, feel, motivate yourself, and behave. If you have a strong sense of efficacy, then you approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about how to build your foundation for self-efficacy.
Key Take Aways
Here are my key take aways:

Don’t fail at the basics. Get the basics …

How do you build a productive relationship with your new boss? You need to first focus on the fundamentals. In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about how to start off on the right foot with your new boss.
Fundamental Don’ts
Watkins provides some fundamental don’ts to build a productive relationship with your boss:

Don’t trash the past.
Don’t stay away.
Don’t surprise your boss.
Don’t approach your boss only with problems.
Don’t run down your checklist.
Don’t try to change your boss.

Fundamental Do’s
Watkins provides some fundamental do’s …

What are the keys to successful transitions into new situations or roles? How do you learn, set priorities, create plans and direct action to build momentum? How do you gain confidence and get energized by your accomplishments? You can adopt a proven set of success strategies. In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about ten key strategies that provide a roadmap for success.
Key Take Aways
I find this set of strategies to be very grounded in the real-world. It’s not theoretical …

Are you focused on the right things and balancing the right priorities? How do you gauge your progress towards your targets for success? As a new leader, how do you know whether you’re trending in the right direction? In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about questions you can use to determine whether you’re building momentum or losing your balance.
Key Take Aways Here are my key take aways:

Know the common traps.  The big traps include using …

How do you build an effective support network for getting results? To be an effective leader, you need a combination of technical advisers, cultural interpreters and political counselors.
I think this is a particularly important post. Too many people with great ideas, can’t get results because they don’t have an effective network. The other scenario is a great person with a great idea, has to work too hard. An effective network would help both scenarios.
In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins …

Are you working harder but producing less?  While stress can initially help your personal performance, sustained stress at too high a level can  decrease your performance.  As you try to compensate for your decreasing performance, this creates more stress, further decreasing your performance.  It’s a vicious cycle.  In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about the Yerkes-Dodson Human Performance Curve and how it explains the relationship of levels of stress to your performance.
Yerkes-Dodson Human Performance Curve
Here’s an example of …