Posts

Showing posts from December, 2018

A senior GE exec says successful leadership depends on how you spend 10% of your time

Image
"Make room for discovery," says Beth Comstock, pictured.  GE As you ascend the corporate ladder and your free time gets ever more limited, it might seem like the first thing to get rid of is all those optional activities — like going to conferences, watching educational talks, and relaxedly "ideating." Ask Beth Comstock, vice chair of General Electric, and she'll tell you that's a terrible idea. In an interview  with LinkedIn's editor in chief Daniel Roth, Comstock gave some leadership advice that applies both to people relatively new in their careers and to those who have been in the workforce for a while: "The first thing you have to say to people is: Make room for discovery. If I manage myself, I manage a team, I manage a division, there's a certain amount of your budget, your time, your people that need to be focused on what's next. "And it could be 10% — you know for yourself. I think usually 10% is a pretty good way to...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff relies on the same Zen Buddhist concept that propelled Steve Jobs to success

Image
Marc Benioff.  Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Alex Konrad's recent  Forbes profile  of Salesforce founder and CEO  Marc Benioff  paints a picture of Benioff as relentlessly curious — always looking for new ideas, knowledge, and inspiration to help him build the most successful company possible . Benioff calls this approach to business "beginner's mind." It's a concept from Zen Buddhism, and it describes constantly seeing the world anew, as if you didn't know anything about it. The Forbes profile is hardly the first time Benioff has spoken about his beginner's mind. Earlier in 2016, for example,  he told The Wall Street Journal : "I kind of try to let go of all the things that have ever happened so far in our industry, which is a lot of stuff, and just go, OK, what's going to happen right now?" In fact, it's the same strategy that Steve Jobs, himself a lifelong student of Zen Buddhism, brought to his work at Apple. As Jeff Yang ...

Jeff Bezos uses a smart tactic to make seemingly impossible decisions very easily — here's how it works

Image
Jeff Bezos uses a smart tactic to make seemingly impossible decisions very easily — here's how it works Shana Lebowitz Apr. 12, 2018, 10     Amazon  CEO Jeff Bezos uses a system called the "regret minimization framework" to make big decisions. ·          When he was thinking about starting Amazon, he knew he would regret not having tried more than he'd regret trying and failing. ·          Bezos encourages the same kind of thinking among his employees. An  oft-cited interview  with Jeff Bezos gives us some insight into how the Amazon CEO makes big decisions. In the interview, which appears to have been conducted by the Academy of Achievement, Bezos discusses his "regret minimization framework." (We first came across this snippet of the interview in Jenny Blake's 2016 book, " Pivot .") Here's what Bezos said: "'I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 a...