Month: January 2018

I recently attended a talk for human resource leaders that brought in Hitendra Wadhwa, a very popular professor at Columbia Business School and founder of the Institute for Personal Leadership (IPL). Wadhwa is a mathematician who has made a study of what makes a great leader. It didn’t surprise me that this scholar found that great leadership comes from the person you are inside, rather than being imposed from the outside, but I was excited to learn that his research offers some quantifying evidence to back up that philosophy, which I share. Letting your inner self be your "guiding light," as Wadhwa eloquently put it, is easy to say, but it's not always clear to each of us how we can bring that about. Wadhwa proposed paying attention to five key aspects of self. I'll…

Reading books is good for you. Even Oprah says so.(Writing books is, too, even if while you're doing it you're not sure if you'll ever finish. Ahem.)Late last summer I finished writing my first book. Among other benefits, that experience gave me even more respect for book authors than I had before. Writing is hard work. Putting your ideas and words out into the world for others to read—and perhaps criticize—is also a challenge. So one of my goals in the New Year, now that I'm done writing my first book, is to read more of other people's books. It’s sometimes hard to carve out time for book reading but I notice that when I do, what I get from a good book reverberates in my life far beyond the time…