“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you.

 What you do makes a difference; and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

Jane Goodall

Anthropologist

 Reaching Violent Agreement

Good leaders encourage meaningful debate (Patrick Lencioni’s “healthy conflict” – see “The Advantage”) between their subordinates in order to get to the best answer and build consensus; and, like anything else, there’s a right and wrong way to manage this process. Too often, these interchanges degenerate into argument with the primary objective of both sides being to win the leader to their respective positions.

Malcolm Gladwell, (author of the recently released “David and Goliath”) suggests a way to avoid this trap. While participating in a debate at the Sports Analytics Conference at MIT, Gladwell suggested that each side should be required first to state the position of the other to the other’s satisfaction at the outset of the debate. A few minutes with this one page HBR Blog posting on how to have an “Honest, Data Driven Debate” may make your meetings much more productive and result in a more professional and cohesive team.

You “Onboard”….Do You “Inboard”?

Many companies have developed elaborate rituals for welcoming and integrating new employees. These “onboarding” practices are important but what about the employees who were onboard before the practice of “onboarding” started….and how do you maintain the benefits of onboarding down the line for everyone?

Larry Cassidy, a Vistage chair with nearly three decades of working up close and personal with dozens of C Level Leaders, provides an overview of how to make inboarding part of your culture in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article “Six Ways to Use Inboarding to Improve Employee Productivity”  (This one page article recaps the chapter Cassidy contributed on “inboarding” to a new anthology of articles penned by C-Level leaders entitled “Cracking the Business Code ” ).

Your Personal(Social Media) Klingon Cloaking Device

Remember how the Klingons in “StarTrek” TV series employed a cloaking device to make their ship invisible whenever the Enterprise was about?  Now, you can be invisible, too! (at least from some popular social media apps.) This brief article from the New Yorker profiles Cloak, an app whose tagline is  “Incognito mode for real life,” says it offers its users the ability to “avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat—anyone you’d rather not run into.” Learn more about  this “Anti-Social Media App”.

More Fun from Southwest Airlines

The words “airline” and “fun” rarely appear in the same sentence; but when they do, the airline is almost invariably Southwest. Southwest’s passengers are occasionally treated to a creative rendering of the pre-flight safety briefing. Take three minutes before you “take off” today to check out what Time calls “the funniest in flight-safety demo ever.”

Econ Recon: De-Icing Part 2

Last week economist Brian Wesbury wrote about how the weather affected the performance of the economy year over year; this week he offers 4 minutes of video commentary of what’s happened so far and what’s ahead on his Wesbury 101 posting.