This is the first in a series of posts on common leadership pitfalls. When I think about the best leaders I’ve known and seen and when I think about occasions my time – whether in a primary leadership role or not – has been best used or wasted, several themes come into focus. In this first post, I will take up one of the most common leadership pitfalls: confusing good process with actual productivity. I intentionally modify “process” with the adjective “good” because I want to be clear that a) I think attention to process is very important and b) this isn’t a complaint about busyness for busyness sake. Attending with care to...

Who will you be in 10 years? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably immediately answer that you’ll be pretty much the same, just a little older and (hopefully!) wiser. But according to psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of the wonderful Stumbling on Happiness, you’ll actually be a far different person that you imagine. Why? Because we live with the convenient and helpful myth that the person we are today is our “true” self, the self toward which everything up to now has been pointing. It’s a convenient myth in that it doesn’t take much effort to maintain and doesn’t require us to anticipate changing all that much, and...

Occasionally, when I have a hard time deciding between options on a menu, I have joked that while I’m great with big decisions – whether to get married, buy a house, or change jobs – I can get paralyzed by the prospect of choosing between (as I had to do just the other day) General Tso’s Chicken or Pad Thai. That’s not entirely true, of course. I sometimes agonize over big decisions as well! ☺ Which is maybe one of the reasons I find the whole topic of understanding how we make choices so interesting. In this TED Talk, lawyer-turned-philosopher Ruth Chang invites us to think differently about how we make hard decisions. Several...