Andy Parkinson’s World

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER
Title: Edgar Schein
Competencies: leadership skills, team building, talent management, organizational consulting skills, career-consulting skills, process consulting skills, group facilitation skills
Who benefits: leaders, team leaders, organizational consultants, career development consultants/counselors, mentors, executive coaches, group process consultants
Consultant Usage: any professional consultant working on people, culture, career, team issues should be knowledgeable about the [...]

“You don’t get anything from sleep but a dream.”
Don King

People can maximize their brain capacity to learn by getting enough sleep.  But the amount could determine not just how well you live but how long you live.  How just how much sleep do you need to learn and be healthy?
OPTIMUM SLEEP TIME
A new study by epidemiologist [...]

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER
Title: The Back Of The Napkin
Competencies: strategic problem analysis, driving change, vision/goal setting, oral presentation
Who benefits: entrepreneurs, planners, sales and marketing professionals at any level, internal and external organizational consultants, those who make oral presentations
Consultant Usage: highly recommended for organizational consultants, important skill for trainers at all levels, may be useful [...]

“Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men — the other 999 follow women.”
Groucho Marx

A UC Davis Study of California Women Business Leaders in 2008 found that only 13 of California’s 400 largest public companies have a woman CEO and women hold only 10.9% of board seats and executive positions (104% in [...]

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER
Title: Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average
Competencies: self-development (primary); decision making and judgment (secondary)
Who benefits: anyone who finds the topic of interest
Consultant Usage: good background material for coaches; could be incorporated into training programs
What’s [...]

“If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”
Thomas Szasz

In previous blogs I’ve mused a bit about the relatively high base rate of leadership incompetence (estimated to be 50%) and the challenge of predicting future leadership behavior.
Maybe praying for leaders can’t hurt–or can it?
I’ve become a bit more interested in [...]

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER
Title: more decision making books and articles
Competencies:decision making, judgment, self-development
Who benefits: anyone seeking to improve their judgments and/or decision making abilities
Consultant Usage: significant listings of current reference material on the comptencies of decision making and judgment
What’s it about? I want to thank Time Magazine for doing most of the work for me [...]

“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
Unknown

Remember this old saying from childhood?
No doubt someone was saying something to you that could have been emotionally hurtful. Well, it seems this old saying really doesn’t have any scientific merit at all. In fact, recent research suggests that indeed feeling emotional hurt, [...]

As consulting has expanded and morphed into so many different types of services being delivered under the same banner, it begins to dilute any meaning in the banner. What is consulting? To some it’s providing expertise or facilitating some process. For others it’s providing extra workers to staff a project or taking over a certain [...]

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER
Title: decisions, decisions, decisions
Competency: decision-making
Who benefits: those interested in how each of us makes a decision
Consultant Usage: background material for coaching the decision-making competency
What’s it about: I love the numbers game “Sudoku”.  I play the game on the Internet as [...]