The NY Times published an article about President Bill Clinton’s visit to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong-il about releasing the two imprisoned American reporters, Laura Ling and Euna Lee. The result was simple and surprising- they were released! I found this article particularly interesting...
From Work-Life Balance to Work-Life Bursts and Work-Life Teams I was reading a colleague’s post on work-life balance , where she was referencing Jack Welch’s statement that there is no such thing . Those who know me would certainly laugh if they knew I was commenting on work-life balance...
In a prior post I wrote about the deceitful group that was tricking me into running up hills for long distances. The status of that is that I continue to fall for their trickery and deceit every Saturday morning (which doesn't bode well for me). I guess you could call them trickster friends. But, this...
I went to Leadership Boot Camp (my own name for an intensive HP Leadership Development program) earlier in the summer with a number of senior leaders from across the company. The class was mostly VPs with a few directors. As part of the program, they have assessments to help you understand yourself better...
Management guru David Maister has an interesting post on the effectiveness of the strategy of hiring "laterals" into an organization. David's premise is that hiring laterals can only work if they are properly integrated into the company. I agree. This got me thinking about the relationship between the...
I just spent a day in Tokyo with my research team in Japan. The researchers in Japan have very interesting perspectives, some of which are quite different from those of the researchers in the US and Europe. Whenever I visit the team, they give me updates and I learn something new about technology and...
Managing research sounds like an oxymoron. How do you manage creativity? How do you manage the creativity of N researchers, where N=1,10,100,...? How do you manage people so that their total output is not just the sum of the individual contributions, but reaches the full potential of the team? Managing...
Phil McKinney has a great post on Permission Based Innovation , so please take a minute to read it over. From my perspective as a manager, all I can say is that he is right on with all his points. I have a few additional points: The creativity of a team far exceeds the individual creativity of the team...
Every so often someone asks me what I learned in grad school that helped me in the working world. I learned a lot about my research domain (video communications) and about how to do research. I learned a lot from my thesis advisor and from my grad student colleagues and friends. These learnings have...