Reading and resources for CEOs, founders and anyone interested in becoming a stronger, more resilient leader and human being.
A few weeks ago I was working with a group of engineers who had been recently promoted to management roles. The biggest challenge they wanted to address was how to reprioritize their time. When they were individual contributors it was very clear what they needed to focus on: projects! Now they have people to manage on top of projects.
In our world today “life hacks”, “leadership hacks”, “time hacks” etc. are very common phrases. When I told the room of engineering managers we were going to review “time hacks” the energy in the room shifted. I wasn’t sure what happened. Did I say something that offended them? Someone spoke up saying “hack has a negative connotation”. Wow. Of course! That makes a lot of sense. “What would be a better way to talk about this topic?” I asked. The response seems obvious now. “Efficiency Strategies”. While it doesn’t roll off the tongue the same way “hacks” does…I’m glad to have this reframe.
In honor of this group of engineering managers, here is a list of resources to support with “efficiency strategies”.
When it comes to delegating, invite your team into both the thinking and the doing. Do you consider yourself “a doer”? That person who enjoys doing the work, fine-tuning the details, meddling in the weeds of how it’ll all work? Then you probably have trouble delegating as a leader.
The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition. I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague.
Vern Loomis, a retired structural draftsman in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had a standard office lunch: a peanut-butter sandwich, with various fruit, vegetable, and dessert accompaniments. He ate this, he estimates, nearly every workday for about 25 years.
How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals – including embracing failure. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. “You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.”
There have been two main changes in dietary habits from the 1970s (before the obesity epidemic) until today. First, there was the change is what we were recommended to eat. Prior to 1970, there was no official government sanctioned dietary advice. You ate what your mother told you to eat.
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