When you’re constantly shown to the back of the career bus, quitting what looks like a good job can be a vital moment of reclaiming the self-esteem that unlocks a world of possibility. At least it was for me.

Once upon a time, I worked at a magazine, reporting to a white woman who, early in our working relationship, told me that she didn’t consider me a threat because “a black woman will never have this job.”She then proceeded to use every one of my ideas to completely redesign the magazine we worked for. It was the end of a moment in publishing when such a thing as a “big magazine job” still existed. I hung on because I really wanted to be an editor in chief one day and knew that quitting would take me out of the game.

Hundreds of years ago, famed mathematician Blaise Pascal said, “People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.” And the latest science is showing he was pretty much on the money. Change happens when people talk themselves into change. You trying to do it is often counterproductive.

Organizations don’t change—people do Many companies move quickly from setting their performance objectives to implementing a suite of change initiatives. Be it a new growth strategy or business-unit structure, the integration of a recent acquisition or the rollout of a new operational-improvement effort, such organizations focus on altering systems and structures and on creating new policies and processes. To achieve collective change over time, actions like these are necessary but seldom sufficient. A new strategy will fall short of its potential if it fails to address the underlying mind-sets and capabilities of the people who will execute it. McKinsey research and client experience suggest that half of all efforts to transform organizational performance fail either because senior managers don’t act as role models for change or because people in the organization defend the status quo.2 2. For more on McKinsey’s organizational-health index and findings on organizational change, see Scott Keller and Colin Price, “Organizational health: The ultimate competitive advantage,” McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011. In other words, despite the stated change goals, people on the ground tend to behave as they did before. Equally, the same McKinsey research indicates that if companies can identify and address pervasive mind-sets at the outset, they are four times more likely to succeed in organizational-change efforts than are companies that overlook this stage.

What's something you want people to do (e.g., a thing you'd like your friends to do for you) but only if you don't ask them to do it?

So here's my trick for making conversations with friends even more fun: before meeting with them, I send over a list of a few things I'd really enjoy discussing with them and ask if they want to add anything to the list. During the meeting, we pick the items we are both excited to discuss.

According to Patrick, most leaders are looking for people that will tell them this truth. And when you do that, you'll usually get rewarded and people will listen to what you have to say. However, there are situations where you go to the leader with good intentions & humbly tell them what they can do to improve the organization & they decide they're not interested in that.

Yet, that's something that you'll probably be glad to know about because then, you can think about how long you want to be in that organization.

Patrick starts his video by saying that many people ask him “what do you do about creating a healthy organization if you're not the CEO or in charge of the organization?” However, according to Stephen Covey, we should focus on our circle of influence not our circle of concern. In other words, think about “what organizational components do we have direct influence over” i.e., the department we lead or we're a member of. So, we must realize that “I might not be able to change the whole organization but I can focus on the part of it that I influence directly.”

antshrike Aug 14, 2017ReportEdited 5 years agoreferencing There Goes The Neighborhood! (CD, Album) CCD79506Wow, did Gary Bartz unwittingly predict 9/11?The title of this is "There Goes The Neighborhood!"…the cover photo shows Bartz with the World Trade Center looming in the background…and the very last piece is titled "Flight Path"…eerie...

I'm not just talking about journaling. I'm talking about writing down the first few thoughts you have after you've arrived at work but before you've started on the day's tasks. Draw a picture or doodle an idea. It's a way to figure out what is important, and what is stressing you out. It is a record of your preparation and a way to help you look back and see, for these seven minutes, what was really important. Make sure you don't get too focused on the writing and not enough on the thinking.

Before I begin, I should tell you a little story. I was born of the Colored/Negro/Afro American/Black/African-American persuasion (although I'm still, 42 years later, trying to figure out exactly what that means!). However, in 1984 while attending a finance seminar at the University of Michigan, I, along with my seminar mates, filled out a "lifestyles survey", designed to tell us the risk of various aspects in our lifestyle, like smoking and drinking, killing us before the age of 50. Being only 32 at the time, I was really interested. When I got the survey results back, I was shocked. I didn't smoke, rarely drank, was an avid runner and tennis player so I was in excellent shape. Nevertheless, it seems I had a _very high_ risk of dying young. The reason: I was black! We've all heard the statistics about young black men having a high risk of violent death at a young age. Well, there you go.

BTW, "male" style was defined as "risk aversion, comfort with hierarchy, following chain of command, communicating with people only in your immediate area". Furthermore, "In the new workplace, the winners are the outsiders: women and members of minority groups, teachers and networkers. The losers are the control freaks, the rigid personalities and the hoarders of information."