Listen to Kerrying On via iTunes This past week I’ve spent every single evening in the hospital visiting my mother-in-law who recently broke her hip. For me a hospital is a scary place to visit—dredging up childhood images of needle pokings, haunting screeches, and indelicate probings of all kinds. My company’s recent research into the …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry Patterson is coauthor of four New York Times bestsellers, Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, Influencer, and Change Anything. READ MORE Listen to Kerrying On via iTunes One night somewhere in deepest rural America, a fellow driving along a lonely stretch of country road blew his right front tire. After pulling over and …
“He’s here!” someone shouted as I walked across campus. Solomon Asch, the renowned social scientist, was going to give a speech. Excited about the prospect of listening to one of the true pioneers of the field, I skipped class for a chance to hear what he had to say.
Yesterday a colleague of mine told me that the company he works for has a rather interesting practice. At the end of every quarter, no matter the company’s financial state, the sales team holds four meetings a day for two weeks. During each, they talk via conference call with the big bosses. The first call …
I’ve just returned from a week’s vacation with my wife, our parents, our children, and our grandchildren—a rambling group totaling sixteen people. Given that we varied in age from seven weeks to eighty-seven years, deciding what entertaining thing to do next was always a challenge. Frequently, as we engaged in a spirited discussion to make such decisions, someone would try to force his or her way onto the group.
During this last month I did a couple of things I haven’t done before. I went to comedy club with my friends (a first for me) and I had a colonoscopy (also a first). One was a frightening and painful experience, and the other was the colonoscopy. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not as …
In my last article, I suggested that employees frequently defer to their boss’s suggestions even if they disagree with an idea or, worse still, if they think the idea is positively moronic. To show how this insane transformation might happen, let me share a personal experience.
One day while waiting for my car to be repaired, I asked Leo, the repair shop’s head honcho, why his crew members kept coming to him with questions. “It’s simple,” he explained. “They aren’t as good at diagnosing as I am. Never will be. So every time they can’t figure out what to do they ask me, I tell them, and then they do it. The truth is, I know just about everything there is to know about their jobs and they don’t. That’s why I’m the boss and they aren’t.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry Patterson is coauthor of four New York Times bestsellers, Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, Influencer, and Change Anything. READ MORE Listen to Kerrying On via iTunes It’s Valentine’s Day, 1968 and my mother is holding a heart-shaped box. She abruptly opens the cardboard container to reveal a pathetic looking array of chocolates—one …
Today’s thought comes by way of my neighbor Dr. Alan Christensen, a professor of Maya history and language. At one point in his life he had been a dentist, but he tired of the “grind” and went back to school to study his first love—the Maya. It is this part of his life that I find most fascinating.
