You may be facing today’s need for much more constructive conflict

Many leaders, managers, supervisors, and employees have become conflict-averse. They shy away from conflict, feel uncomfortable about “going against the grain”, rocking the boat, or being perceived as a “trouble-maker,” not being a “team player.”
Does constructive conflict even exist in your organization, your department, [...]

The key to understanding why so many good ideas are strangled at birth — and so many able people passed over

What do top people fear most? Failure. They’re nearly all over-achievers. They’ve been successful at most everything they’ve done. Failure is more scary to them than death. Many have never experienced it in any form, [...]

Is competition a universal motivator? Is it worth encouraging? Does it work to bring out the best in people?

In business, competition is everywhere: organizations compete for customers, suppliers compete for orders, and employees compete for attention and promotion. In most organizations, this employee competition is encouraged — even required. But is more competition — competition [...]

Exploring the oddities of the work ethic

Many of the choices people make about work are based on a set of conventional values collectively termed the Puritan Work Ethic. I think this group of beliefs is false, outmoded, and generally counter-productive. Even if you accept the idea of the Work Ethic at face value, it contains [...]

How to handle today’s macho bosses, using the Laws of Executive Behavior

The Laws of Executive Behavior summarize what matters most to those who must play the game of office politics at the highest levels in an organization — and that’s just about anyone who wants to succeed. Only by understanding those laws, and using them [...]

Re-runs: Our most popular articles

In case you missed them, here are the ten most popular posts to date on the “Slow Leadership” site, in descending order of popularity:

Three simple ways for any leader to increase productivity
The real work/life balance: how to save yourself (and your business) from becoming over-extended
The Law of Repulsion
Why a great deal [...]

Why the “change industry” is a curse and a waste of resources

Browsing through the Amazon.com site recently, I tripped over an interesting statistic. I discovered that there almost sixty thousand titles on change in the business section of Amazon alone. And of those, nearly forty thousand titles have to do with Change Management. [...]

Some further Laws of Executive Behavior — and how they will influence your boss’s decisions

In this article, we’ll look at those Laws of Executive Behavior that have to do with the key relationships your boss needs to promote his or her career — and how appealing to them can propel most bosses into action in [...]

Why today’s mania for all-out competition isn’t going to help us survive

In 1889, Andrew Carnegie wrote: “While the law [of competition] may sometimes be hard for the individual it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.”
He was wrong.
The notion of survival of the fittest is widely [...]

Why you might need to imitate your children . . . or your grandparents.

Speed and greed are today’s obsessions. To do more and do it faster isn’t something, it’s everything.
People run faster, yet find they’re still desperately short of time. Their state of material riches and time poverty doesn’t make them happy. Mostly, it [...]