In my last blog, we discussed the book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, by Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Yale University, who has studied pandemics and plagues almost his entire career. In it, he predicts we are about to enter into the “Intermediate Period” of this pandemic, …
Yogi Berra infamously said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The greatest anxiety for humans is the anxiety of the unknown. So we make predictions to try to understand and prepare for an unknown future. Unlike physics or chemistry, psychology is a relatively new science. Being new, it has relatively few laws. One of them, which is …
We’ve been talking about how you and your organization can adapt to the emerging hybrid workforce. In my last blog article, I discussed the shift to real-time communication between colleagues in different locations. This week, we turn to another persistent challenge in the hybrid workforce: maintaining genuine human connection when we are rarely (if ever) in the same location as …
We’ve been talking about how you and your organization can adapt to the emerging hybrid workforce. In my last blog article, I discussed the shift to asynchronous communication, which allows you to be anywhere, at any time, and still be able to send, receive and understand a message. However, in some situations, there’s just no substitute for real-time communication. To …
One of the biggest pushbacks I hear against the hybrid workforce is around communication. Many people — perhaps you are one of them — believe their workplace culture depends on everyone being in the same location at the same time so they can have face-to-face conversations. They saw remote work as a necessary evil during the pandemic. But now they’re …
I think I hit a nerve. My recent blog article on the post-pandemic workforce prompted many of you to respond with questions. In those questions, I heard some resistance to hybrid work. After all, we’re talking about big changes to the way we’ve been working for a very long time. If you’ve been feeling that resistance yourself, I want to …
During the coronavirus pandemic, an unprecedented number of Americans started working remotely. So what happens now that vaccines and falling case numbers are making it possible to return to the office? There’s a hotly contested debate. On one side, you have Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who believes the new workforce will look like the old, pre-pandemic, office-based workforce. …
The philosophy that “it’s just business” may work in the mob and in Hollywood. But, here in the real world, many of our business decisions are based on our relationships with the leaders of the companies with which we do business. Recently, a client (and friend) asked me for help in deciding whether to continue a business relationship between him …
“Culture Trumps Everything” is more than the title of my book. It is how I see the world, how I process information, how I evaluate the behavior of others. Last week, though, I got a painful reminder of its caveats. The People Who Don’t Adapt If you take someone who is loud and boisterous, and you walk them into a …
I lost my mother two years ago. This Mother’s Day, I spent my day fielding phone calls from all over the world, literally – the U.S., Argentina, Spain and Colombia – from family and friends who wanted to check in on me, but who also wanted to reminisce. It was as if they were trying to glue back the pieces …
