New York-to-Paris automobile race: [Automobile stuck in snow]

Top Reasons Why Your Resume Says “Career stalled”

Forrest ChristianCoaching, Underachievers 7 Comments

Have you ever considered that your career path is a lot like a movie? Film scholar Chris Simmons, a colleague of mine, lectured once on the massive blockbuster, Titanic. He showed how everything in its visual language spoonfed what the director wanted you to see, know and feel. The director made deliberate choices to make it easy for us as …

Luck Does Not Determine Your Essential Character

Forrest ChristianCareers, Coaching Leave a Comment

I like to point out idiocy by “experts” when I see it. And management writing in Harvard Business Review is usually such a fertile field! Today, let’s look at idiocy about luck and being a great strategist from Hans H. Hinterhuber and Wolfgang Popp (“Are You a Strategist or Just a Manager?”, Jan-Feb 1992). As Moltke observed, the good strategist …

Putting Flattery to Work by IT Staffers: Flatter 4 Success, Part 4

Forrest ChristianCareers, Coaching Leave a Comment

Flattery really does work and it works in real life and not just for politically savvy types. We’ve seen that flattery works, that flattery has no upper limit and works even when they know you have an ulterior motive, and that the people who poo-poo flattery as only useful for the politically savvy are full of it. I told you …

Flattery Only Works For the Politically Savvy, Which Is All of Us: Flatter 4 Success, Part 3

Forrest ChristianCareers, Coaching Leave a Comment

I’ve been telling you this week that flattery works, and that it’s not just researchers who believe that flattery apparently has no real upper limit. Most of you haven’t really believed this and you’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. So here’s those caveats I’ve been talking about:

Smiling crowd— Bild Publikum. Photograph by Roger & Renate Rössing , 1954 (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE). Deutsche Fotothek?. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere: Flatter 4 Success, Part 2

Forrest ChristianCareers, Coaching Leave a Comment

I know that flattery doesn’t work on you, as you some of the world’s more intelligent people who see right through such things. But the rest of the world isn’t as savvy as you. You can get much more and be seen as much more effective at work by simply flattering your boss. Yesterday we saw how Prof Chatman’s unpublished …

Volunteer Jennifer Van Vleet experiences what it would be like to be arrested after failing a field sobriety test. (2009) Orgeon Dept. of Transportation. (CC BY 2.0)

How Simply Being BIgger (like a Hidden High Potential) Gets You Arrested

Forrest ChristianCoaching, Underachievers 4 Comments

When you are bigger than everyone else, you are much more likely to get hammered for irritating people. It doesn’t matter if that’s physical size or “work” size, where you have the capability to do a larger job than the people around you. This is one of the key problems of Hidden High Potentials (HHPs). Work comes in different sizes, …

Lighthouse at night, (c) 2009 Martin Belam. Via flickr. (CC BY SA 2.0)

Forget, Then Forgive to Move Forward (and not the other way around)

Forrest ChristianChange, Coaching 6 Comments

In my lessons on the Tao of Joe: Redeeming Our Stories, I’ve pointed out that the patriarch’s model was to forget well before he ever forgave. Forgetting not only the wrongs, he forgot those who had wronged him (in his case, his brothers). Joseph named the firstborn Manasseh (Forget), saying, “God made me forget all my hardships and my parental …