Lord Acton described how leadership changed over time, and explains despotism pretty well. It applies to corporations.
How Do You Know What You Can Do If There’s No One Modeling It?
Dan Ariely, in Predictably Irrational, says “We don’t even know what we want to do with our lives  until we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing.” Hidden high potentials often never get a model like this. What should they then do?
Bonuses Backfire by Reducing Long-term Employee Performance
New research shows that bonuses backfire on companies, even blocking common sense. A summary.
Employees Who Aren’t Team Players Make The Team Perform Better, But Like It Less
Teams need oddballs to help them make the best decisions. So being a team player is not necessarily a good thing, since a whole team of team players will lead to poorer decision making. Summary of recent research.
New Webinar: “Why You Hate Your Church”
Why You Hate Your Church. Sunday, 2009 April 19 at 8pm CDT / Chicago time A good percentage of readers of Requisite Writing are Christians of one sort of another, and a common complaint from them has been about how they feel alienated at church like the feel alienated at work. “It’s all well and good to say ‘find somewhere …
Latest Newsletter Now Out
The latest Secret Rules of Career Success newsletter is out. (Egyptian Dreams edition.) I’ve added a podcast version for subscribers to download and listen to. This is especially handy for commuters. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, check your spam folder. Thanks to Jim Krajewski of Echo Software — and my old comrade-in-arms in designing information security solutions for …
How Being Stuck in Your Career Leads to Bitterness, Anger and Rage, Which Gets You Stuck Even Farther
Being a Hidden high potentials can lead to bitterness and anger, and left untreated to rage. People don’t recognize what you bring, what you do, who you are. It’s hard, frustrating and spiritually debilitating. But you need to let go of the bitterness and anger you feel about this, even though it just forces you to do more without compensation.
Full Employee Participation in Policy-Making Through Representative Council (workplace democracy)
Wilfred Brown, the Managing Director and Chairman of Glacier Metal Company during Elliott Jaques’s work there, continued to believe that all employees had interest in changes to POLICY. He delimited that against the rights of managers to do their jobs within policy. What was policy was defined within the works council. Elliott Jaques abandoned this later in favor of trusting managers to represent their subordinates, in direct contradiction to his supposed value of creating systems rather than trusting people to be “good” as managers. Here’s why Brown was right and Jaques was not.
Young Stars vs. Systematic Innovators
The Young Genius vs. Old Master ideas of David Galenson, professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Probably a pretty straight-forward idea but one that troubles the fields of art and economics both. Hidden high potentials are often systematic innovators, and since these are less valued in our society, there are interesting implications.
For Underachievers & Other Losers Who Will Change the World
Some old posts are linked to that explain how underachievers are often high potentials who get stuck but want to do more.