Those of you who participated in our New Year’s Day Teleseminar learned that one of my favorite magazines — the kind I read, not just subscribe to — is The Week. And one of my favorite sections is a middle-of-the-magazine feature in which they ask a writer to list his or her six favorite books, […]
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.
Over at the Inside Influence Report, Noah Goldstein writes about a recent study that examined whether infusing a task with purpose can motivate high performance. The study, conducted by Wharton’s Adam Grant, involved the call center at a university fundraising organization. Grant obtained permission to talk to the folks working at the call center —
At the International School of Curacao, teacher Danny Kinzer asked his Theory of Knowledge students to undertake the “What’s your sentence?” described in Lindsey Testolin’s remarkable video and on page 154 of Drive. Then each participant posted his or her answer on the school bulletin board.
Gary Lauder has a brilliant proposal to make traffic signs more emotionally intelligent — and to reduce energy costs and accidents in the process. Just watch his four-and-a-half-minute TED Talk, which I’ve embedded below.
The folks over at Challenger Gray & Christmas have taken a look at what happens in the workplace when people are lured into the force field that is the NCAA basketball tournament. The results? They estimate that during the first week of the tournament alone, workers distracted by March Madness (and that includes you, Mr.
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
Would having this odometer make you drive more safely? (Note: If it’s not obvious, the scale is in kilometers rather than miles.) (HT: Adam Shepard)
In the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to work for Robert B. Reich, then the U.S. Secretary of Labor. He taught me a simple (and free) tool for diagnosing the health of an organization. When he visited companies and talked with employees, Reich listened carefully for the pronouns people used. Did employees refer
