Strategies from a former management consultant to get you a promotion — I was sitting in my senior manager’s office. The promotion email had just been sent out that morning and my name had noticeably (I noticed!) not been on the email. Although if your counsellor (the person you work with to get promoted) had not already mentioned it to you (because…

Seven bits of advice from Kevin I wish I knew when I was younger — Kevin Kelly might be the world’s real-life most interesting man in the world. He helped launch and edit The Wired magazine. He’s written several best-selling books including The Inevitable, Vanishing Asia, What Technology Wants and more. He’s currently a co-chair of The Long Now Foundation which is building a clock…

Heraclitus is a strange and interesting man — You might not think there is anything special about ancient Greek philosophy. I certainly didn’t. But then I encountered the work of Roger von Oech, best-selling author of such books as “A Whack on the Side of the Head” and “A Kick in the Seat of the Pants”. Any time…

When you hit that rut or feel the afternoon slowdown — Don’t you hate it when you have a lot to do at work, but you feel drained when you get back to your desk — say after lunch or after a long meeting where you had to force yourself to stay awake and pay attention? Here are ten things I…

And the specific things to invest in to accelerate your career trajectory — A school is a form of investing in yourself. You pay tuition. You pay teachers. You pay for tutoring. Each of these things is for the bigger goal of getting a degree (assuming this is high school and then university). But then you come out of university with a nice…

Why it’s difficult to create a psychologically safe environment and one thing you can do to build safety — As a manager and leader, I know first-hand how hard it is to build psychological safety within your teams. But rather than speak from my experience as a manager, I want to share, from my experience as an individual contributor, several factors that may explain why psychological safety is hard…

You probably spend a lot of time in meetings — make sure they’re productive by avoiding these things — I’m willing to bet if you work in a corporate environment, you have too many meetings, or rather, too many unproductive meetings. From a 2021 Productivity Trends Report, the average professional spends 21.5 hours a week in meetings and a busy professional spends 32.9 hours a week in meetings. Don’t…

If I was starting again on LinkedIn, here is what I would do to get noticed, land a job and build my network — One of the ways I like to reflect on the skills and experiences I have is to imagine a conversation with my younger self. I think about what advice I would provide. I reflect on some of the mistakes I have made. I think about what I would tell my…

Finding the positives in a dark period in history — I’m generally a positive person, and when I hear about people complaining or otherwise being negative about the pandemic, I like to reflect on my life and consider the positives of the pandemic (or really, any negative situation). What mistakes did I make? What did I learn? How can I…