Rabbi Haim of Romshishok was an itinerant preacher. He traveled from town to town delivering religious sermons that stressed the importance of respect for one’s fellow man. He often began his talks with the following story:
“I once ascended to the firmaments. I first went to see Hell and the sight was horrifying. Row after row of tables were laden with platters of sumptuous … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior / HR
You don’t necessarily need an outsider to provide an outside perspective, however. Occasionally a creative, clear-headed insider can break free of both his company’s and his own preconceptions by adopting a novel point of view.
This was demonstrated by Andy Grove in 1985, when he and his boss, Gordon Moore, were fighting what appeared to be a losing battle against an impossible business dilemma. In … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Leadership, Management
There’s a story that’s going around about the janitor at Carnegie Hall who had been there for 20 years. He’s 45 years old. He was cleaning up the restroom, and a guy in a business suit went up to him and said, ‘You seem to be an intelligent fellow. For 20 years you’ve been cleaning the toilets. Why don’t you do something with your life … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Organizational Behavior / HR, Personal Improvement, Purpose / Meaning
In 2005, the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets were looking for a talented player to add to their roster. The usual scouting reports and analyses delivered a list of names. Some of them were unavailable or too expensive, and others did not seem like the right ft for the team.
Then, using advanced analytics capabilities, the Rockets’ general manager identified a player named … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior / HR
In 1945 the Raytheon Company faced a tremendous demand for magnetron tubes to power the new radar system used to detect enemy aircraft. One day when a Raytheon engineer named Percy L. Spencer stepped too close to a magnetron tube, he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted.
Other engineers had noticed the same thing, but didn’t give it much thought. Spencer, on … [ Read more ]
Subjects: History, Innovation
The EOQ formula dates back to the Industrial Revolution and a 1913 article by Ford Whitman Harris, a self-trained engineer at Westinghouse Electric Company, in Factory: The Magazine of Management, a relic of another era. The article showed how to balance the fixed cost of ordering or producing a batch of goods with the cost of carrying the inventory between order periods. Graphically displayed with … [ Read more ]
Subjects: History, Management, Miscellaneous, Operations
A fable from the East tells of an emperor and a zen monk who came face to face for the first time. The emperor ruled over a kingdom that practiced Buddhism and the monk was eager to meet with him, looking forward to sharing tales of enlightenment.
But when they met, the emperor decided to test the monk by saying to him: “When you look at … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior / HR
An ancient Chinese story, retold by Phil Jackson, coach of the phenomenally successful Chicago Bulls basketball team, makes this point rather more emphatically. In the 3rd century BC, the Chinese emperor Liu Bang celebrated his consolidation of China with a banquet, where he sat surrounded by his nobles and military and political experts. Since Liu Bang was neither noble by birth nor an expert in … [ Read more ]
Subject: Leadership
A sales manager was deciding which of two salespeople to recruit. Passing over a ball point pen, he said, “Sell me one of these.” The first salesperson took the pen, examined it and said, “This is a very good pen. You will note the transparent barrel which indicates the color of the ink as well as showing when it is about to run out. There … [ Read more ]
Subject: Marketing / Sales
The field of neuroscience has been especially helpful in expanding our understanding of the role of emotions in decision-making. Research shows that while emotions are essential for decision-making, they can also lead us far astray in ways we may not anticipate. Antonio Damasio, one of the world’s leading researchers in neuroscience, helped design a seminal experiment that assessed the role of emotions in decision-making. It … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior / HR
An exercise and known as ‘Stephen Covey’s Big Rocks’. Imagine a bucket. Put three or four big rocks in. “Is the bucket full? ” “No” you reply. “Of course not” I say and put some smaller rocks in it to fill in the gaps. “Full now? “, “No”. I put in some sand, then some water. It’s full.
So, what’s the learning here? It’s to … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Career / Employment, Organizational Behavior / HR, Personal Improvement, Purpose / Meaning
In this experiment, five monkeys are put into a large cage. There’s a stool in the middle of the cage and a banana is hung from the ceiling above the stool. Outside the cage, an observer has a hose filled with ice water. It hardly needs mentioning that monkeys like bananas better than ice cold showers.
Within a few minutes, the most daring of the … [ Read more ]
Subject: Organizational Behavior / HR
In 1959, Play of the Week, an icon of civilization on television, was at risk of being canceled. Broadcast on Channel 13, New York’s public television station, the show offered high-quality theater week after week — including works by such writers as Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, and Jean-Paul Sartre, with top talent. But the ratings were low, and sponsors were dropping out.
Ogilvy was looking for … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Ethics / Integrity, History, Leadership, Management
In the 1930s, when I first knew the automotive industry, Alfred Sloan, who ran General Motors, would disappear from Detroit once every six weeks. Next morning he would walk into a dealership in Cincinnati or Kansas City and say, “I am Mr. Sloan from Detroit. Would you allow me to work for two days as your assistant service manager?” When he left, customers always said, … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Customer Related, Leadership, Management
The first [leadership lesson] I learned in the jungles of Bangalore, at an elephant camp. When you visit such a camp you see these gigantic elephants tethered with a small stake. I asked the trainer: ‘Why do they stay tethered when they could so easily pull up the stake?’ He told me: ‘Well, the elephant is tethered as a small calf; when it tries to … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Career / Employment, Change Management, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior / HR
Charles Steinmetz was once called out of retirement by General Electric to help it locate a problem in an intricate system of complex machines. Having spent some time tinkering with and testing various parts of the system, he finally placed a chalk-marked ‘X’ on a small component in one machine. GE’s engineers promptly examined the component, and were amazed to find the defect in the … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Humor / Amusement, Miscellaneous
In 1991, we put some 900 people through a basic seven-step problem-solving course, using two approaches. About half the employees came to our central corporate training facility for standard classroom training. The other half were trained in teams, on the job. This group didn’t get trained until they were part of a team that was working on a real problem. When they got to a … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Management, Training
In Ability Development from Age Zero, Shinichi Suzuki describes telling a violin student:
‘”Stop playing the violin for one week. There is something you must learn besides the violin. It is the spirit of doing things for other people. … To begin with, pick up your friend’s books when they have fallen…. Live by looking for things to do for other people. This is your homework … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Career / Employment, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure / Achievement
A Violinist in the Metro
A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
Three minutes went by … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior / HR
Positive change requires letting go of old patterns and taking a fresh approach. It demands going beyond our preconceived ideas. A story about the relationship of a teacher and student illustrates this principle. A student who thought he had it “all fgured out” would visit his teacher each day for personal lessons about life. Despite the teacher’s attempts to share her life experience, the student … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior / HR