Self-management

Should you psych yourself up with confident declarations — or ask yourself questions about whether you’re up to the job? In my latest Sunday Telegraph column, I turn to a team of University of Illinois researchers — and the legendary management theorist Bob the Builder — for the answer.

From the playing fields of 21st century America to the killing fields of 20th century Europe, here are two interesting perspectives on motivation. The first comes from Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre, who’s interviewed in the new BusinessWeek and explains why he left a job managing the New York Yankees: “I was offered a very […]

In 2003, my pal Mark Frauenfelder (one of the impresarios behind Boing Boing) and his wife Carla Sinclair — two young parents suffering from dot-com bubble burnout — distilled their frustration into a brief manifesto. They made a vow: To take more control of our lives; To cut through the absurd chaos of modern life and […]

Give customers what they want. It’s a sturdy principle of business, one that most of us endorse.  But it’s also a principle that can carry seeds of its own demise. And nowhere is that clearer than in the suddenly wild and wooly world of journalism. As newspapers disappear and big media’s business models crater, there’s […]

On Saturday, the first issue of the newly redesigned Bloomberg Businessweek hit the mailbox here at Pink, Inc, world headquarters. The magazine looks great — smart, simple, and forward-looking. Alas, according to today’s Times, the design of some of the magazine’s work practices are almost the mirror opposite — rigid, retrograde, and bizarrely controlling. Here’s […]

Most people are more frightened of failure than of mediocrity. It should be the reverse. Failure is a broken leg — painful, but easily fixed. Mediocrity is a creeping disease — invisible and insidious — that disables so completely that there’s often no recovery.

To my amazement (and delight), Malcolm Gladwell has selected Drive as the March pick for the New Yorker Online Book Club. And as a way to gear up readers for the discussion, the magazine asked me a few questions — including whether I had any “rules” for writing. I’d actually never thought about that. But […]

Tasha Graff, a 9th grade English teacher at Morse High School in Bath, Maine, saw the Drive video excerpt, and decided to play it for her class. Then she asked her students to answer the question posed in the video and in an exercise on page 154 of the book. Here’s a sample of their […]

A major TV network is doing a piece on new ways to work — and has enlisted my help in finding folks to profile. In particular, the producers are looking for people in the Washington, DC, area who contribute to open source projects such as Linux, Apache, and Firefox. If you fit that bill (or […]

Call someone a “liar,” and it’s clearly an insult. Call someone a “genius,” and it’s almost always praise. But how about calling someone a “perfectionist”?  Is that a diss or a kiss? The answer, it turns out, depends on what kind of perfectionist the person is. And that depends, in turn, on the person’s motivation. […]