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Friday, August 31, 2012
Astronology - Attracting and Retaining Organizational Keepers
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
The History of the Power Lunch
The earliest power lunches likely took place in the 1830s at Delmonico’s, whose culinary wizardry (Lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska) and prime location in the financial district made it popular with well-heeled suits. Apart from the occasional visit from such authors as Charles Dickens or Mark Twain, Delmonico’s remained largely populated by business and finance moguls. Other powerful groups gathered at different locales over the years: playwrights and actors descended upon Sardi’s in the theater district in the forties, while wealthy socialites clustered at Le Cirque, Le Pavillion, and La Grenouille in the fifties and sixties, earning the not-entirely-flattering nickname “ladies who lunched.”Awesome. Just awesome
For literary types, the lunch venue of choice was the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. What would later come to be known as the Algonquin Round Table (or, as its members preferred, “The Vicious Circle,”) began in June of 1919, when Vanity Fair writers Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert E. Sherwood joined like-minded pals for a midday soiree to welcome back famously sharp-penned New York Times drama critic Alexander Wollcott from a stint as a World War I correspondent overseas. Theater agent John Peter Toohey had organized the lunch as a practical joke, ostensibly as a welcome home, but instead used the opportunity to roast Wollcott for failing to include one of his clients in a column. Legend has it that all attendees—Wollcott included—enjoyed the gathering so much they decided to do it again the next day, and the next, and the one after that.
Dining upon free popovers and celery sticks, or, in flush times, chicken hash with pancakes, the aforementioned writers—along with an ever-evolving cast that included playwrights George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, columnist Heywood Broun, and author Edna Ferber—bantered and gossiped, played endless games of cribbage and poker, and devised elaborate practical jokes to deceive one another. Conversation was fast, clever and biting—hence the “vicious” nickname, though the Round Table moniker was widely used after a Brooklyn Eagle caricature depicted the group draped in armor around a circular table. (Not all were fans of the club: Groucho Marx, whose brother Harpo occasionally joined the group, distanced himself from the table, claiming “the price of admission is a serpent’s tongue and a half-concealed stiletto.”)
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Quit the Yapping
But if you're running a company, don't you need to hear about anything that may have gone wrong? "There's a big difference between bringing your attention to something that's awry and a complaint," Blake says. "Typically, people who are complaining don't want a solution; they just want you to join in the indignity of the whole thing. You can almost hear brains clink when six people get together and start saying, 'Isn't it terrible?' This will damage your brain even if you're just passively listening. And if you try to change their behavior, you'll become the target of the complaint."The article doesn't stop there as it goes to give some advice on how to handle the Negative Nancies, including getting some distance and putting your shields up. My favorite piece of advice, though, was one that they describe as letting the complainer fix the problem:
"Try to get the person who's complaining to take responsibility for a solution," Blake says. "I typically respond to a complaint with, 'What are you going to do about it?'" Many complainers walk away huffily at that point, because he hasn't given them what they wanted, Blake reports. But some may actually try to solve the problem.I like it because it doesn't avoid the problem, but, instead, goes head on on how to fix it. The goal isn't to ignore what's going wrong, it's finding a way to fix it. And sometimes the best fixer of issues is the person who yaps the most. So while it's bad for your health to listen to them, find a way to make it a productive yapping.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Astronology - Business Coaching and Mentoring: Are They Worth the Effort?
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Thursday, August 16, 2012
Dealing with Yelling and Not Yelling at Work
Indeed, the yelling boss appears to be quietly disappearing from the workplace. The new consensus among managers is that yelling alarms people, drives them away rather than inspiring them, and hurts the quality of their work. Some bosses also fear triggering a harassment lawsuit or winding up as the star of a co-worker's cellphone videotape gone viral. While underlings may work hard for difficult bosses, hoping for a shred of praise, few employees do their best work amid yelling.But the article doesn't stop there--it goes on to say that while actual yelling doesn't go on as often, what's taken its place when all that aggression is swept under the rug may actually be worse:
Verbal aggression tends to impair victims' working memory, reducing their ability to understand instructions and perform such basic tasks as operating a computer, according to several studies of cellphone-company employees and engineering students published earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Managers spend about 25% of their time resolving conflicts, research shows. The "not-so-good part" of the no-yelling trend "is that people are pushing things under the carpet," causing frustrations to seep out in other ways, says Jack Lampl, president of the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems in Rainier, Wash. One favorite way of venting, angry email, "serves as a relief valve, but tends to inflame conflict. It takes a very corrosive role in the workplace, for gossiping and undermining others," he says.The way to solve all this behavior, according to The Journal is to have some sort of mediated discussion and air your grievances (in a better way than Festivus, hopefully). Hopefully this allows the two parties to come to a civil understanding which can serve better than angry e-mails, stone-cold stares and that embarrassing yelling that left me cowering in a cubicle years ago.
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
Astronology - 2012 SHRM Annual Conference and Exposition Recap
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