All Posts in Office Politics

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Fun with PowerPoint:

Draw a circle for each of your direct reports, arranged in a ring. Color the solid performers green and those who present challenges yellow. Your problem children? Red.

Next: Connect every pair of circles with a colored line — green for good working relationships, yellow for those with some friction and distrust, red for pairs who would fight about whether Han shot first. (He did. Don’t argue.)

(Do you need a fourth color — do you need to color any circles or lines gray because you don’t know? Make a note: Unless you’re new, you shouldn’t need gray.)

When you look at the whole picture, what’s your overall impression … how un-green does it look?

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan goes with Voltaire and Churchill — they make the rest of us despair of ever saying something both original and well, because inevitably, one of them already said it, only better.

I’m reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (edited by Steven Weisman, 2010). It’s curiously unsatisfactory; also immensely worthwhile.

It’s unsatisfactory in the way one of those all-hand-held roughly-cut documentaries is unsatisfactory: You see a lot of stuff happening, but even with a narrator to provide context it doesn’t really paint a picture.

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