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"Today, whether we work with colleagues in Dusseldorf or Dubai, Braslia or Beijing, New York or New Delhi, we are all part of a global network (real or virtual, physical or electronic) where success requires navigating through wildly different cultural realities. Unless we know how to decode other cultures and avoid easy-to-fall-into cultural traps, we are easy prey to misunderstanding, needless conflict, and deals that fall apart.
Yet most managers have little understanding of how local culture impacts global interaction. Even those who are culturally informed, travel extensively, and have lived abroad often have few strategies for dealing with the cross-cultural complexity that affects their team's day-to-day effectiveness. Often the cross-cultural challenges that arise could be avoided by learning a few basic principles. For example, the answer to the simple question, 'When should I speak and when should I be quiet?' varies dramatically from one culture to another."
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"The analogical instinct is the human urge to compare what we encounter to what we know and, based on that comparison, jump to conclusions. This rush to judgment is a good thing, most of the time. It's an evolutionary advantage that helped our ancestors perceive the difference between a floating log and a floating crocodile; those who failed to see the similarity tended to get eaten at higher rates, and reproduce less. ...
Eons later, analogies still drive our decision-making as individuals, as organizations, as companies and even as nations. ... In fact, a survey of history's greatest innovators, from Copernicus to Gutenberg to Darwin to the Wright Brothers, all achieved their greatest breakthroughs in large part through the effective use of analogy. Leaders as diverse as Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King also used analogy to great effect, persuading millions that they could change the world, no matter what challenges might lie ahead."
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"When I discovered Warren Buffett, a light went on in my head. It did not take me long to realize that I wanted a life that was more like his than mine.
Determined to transform my life, I began a long journey of discovery. It lead to my having a charity lunch with Warren Buffett at Smith & Wollensky's in 2008, but it also came with many costly mistakes and hard earned, but valuable lessons. [...]
Today, I might not quite tap dance to work as well as Warren Buffett does, but I've gotten a lot better.
My suggestion to you: lighten up. Stop working so hard and focusing on the money and your next promotion all the time. Start having fun while you work instead. That joy will show in your eyes, and the promotion and that raise will take care of themselves, along with career and life success."
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"Growing up, most of us had to learn how to defend ourselves and think for ourselves. And, if you were anything like me, you had to learn the hard way—paying the consequences for bad decisions (and, for me, there were many). As parents, we try to remove every struggle we endured growing up, so they don't have to struggle the way we did, and yet those hard times and struggles are most likely exactly what made us who we are today. It is our responsibility just to help see them through those struggles and help them learn and grow from them. The same can be said for business today. And, in business, most of our employees are not as good as they could be—not because of our love for them or our desire to make their lives better than ours, but for the exact opposite reason. It is because most of the time we think they are not worth the effort to really coach them."
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"There is a common myth, told and retold, from the boardrooms of industry-dominating behemoths to the opinion columns and business pages of newspapers and magazines. It's a myth that litters the internet, and strikes fear in the heart of many an established executive. While it may seem like reality to many, this myth is actually more like a distortion of reality, often caused by a kind of inadvertent, self-imposed blindness—a willful, if unintentional, shoe gaze of sorts. The myth goes like this: large, established organizations can't get breakthrough innovations on their own. Breakthrough innovations, it says, are the domain of feisty, scrappy, nimble startups.
Companies that once graced headlines as models of homegrown innovation, once they reach a certain point, it seems, often believe themselves incapable of developing the types of innovations that disrupt markets or even create entire new ones—the kinds of innovations that can radically change the outlook of a company, or even the world, when successful. If it is, in fact, a myth, then why does it feel so real to so many? And what can be done to avoid the seemingly inevitable drought of innovation that comes along with building and cementing the apparatus of an established organization?"
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