Happiness is the ultimate lagging indicator. It takes a lot of effort to have enough money here in the USA, so it’s understandable that many business leaders think that getting rich will make them happy.   They’re often disappointed when they achieve this goal because it doesn’t feel as good as they thought it would. Don’t get me wrong, having plenty of money is a great source of happiness. In fact, it’s one of the four major sources of happiness.   I help leaders double thei

Google says that “Ghosting is  t he act of suddenly cutting off all communication with someone without any warning or explanation . The person who ghosts ignores all calls, texts, and social media messages, effectively vanishing from the other person's life. It is often used to avoid confrontation, leaving the recipient hurt, confused, and without closure.”     I’ve been ghosted a couple of times in the last few years, and I would add “annoyed” to the definition above. It’s

Friday the 13 th is here again, and I always have a brief moment of fear that bad things may befall me out of nowhere. Why? Because some folks told me a long time ago that Friday the 13 th  brought “bad luck.”   Interesting, right? We humans are a highly adaptive species, and we can adjust to all kinds of environmental conditions. When you’re young and adults tell you that you should be afraid of something, it seems adaptive to listen to them and act on that information.   H

Having an effective organizational design is a very important part of scaling up your business. Knowing who is accountable for what is paramount in reducing ambiguity and conflict and in achieving that exciting vision of the future that you have.   A traditional hierarchical organizational design works best for most businesses. I’m not a big fan of matrix style organizational designs because they introduce too much ambiguity regarding who’s accountable for what. You can’t hol

I don’t believe that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Instead, my experience has been that scarcity is the root of all evil.   For starters, I’m not sure that the “good” and “evil” labels are very helpful in being successful and happy. My thinking is that people are either behaving in such a way that they’re creating more happiness or less happiness in the world.   People share what they have. Happy people spread happiness, and unhappy people spread unhappiness.  

I help leaders decide who to add to their teams. We begin by creating an ideal profile of success for the role, and then we match against the profile as we assess candidates.   One of the predictors we consider is risk tolerance—yes, just like in financial investment strategy. Overall, we look at three different levels of risk tolerance:   CONTROL FREAKS: If you look in the dictionary under “control freak” you’ll see a picture of me. 😊 I know what I want and have a pretty go

It’s true. I’ve sometimes heard it said that I’m almost always happy and positive, but this isn’t my natural state. Because of my early experiences I’m a natural pessimist who was programmed to wait for the other painful shoe to drop.   My life script originally was written as an epic tragedy. Instead, to paraphrase Jimmy Buffett, some of it’s tragic, but most of it’s magic, and I’ve had a good life all the way.   How? As I said in my book, it mostly depends on what movie you

Nope. Nor are they intrinsically good. People are just people. They just want to feel good more often than they feel bad, i.e., be happy, so they’re going to maximize their happiness within the options provided by the environment they’re in.   As a business leader, why do you care? Because as Peter Drucker purportedly said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is great news, because this means that you can create and enforce core values (how we do things around here) a

In the grand scheme of things, simpler is better. For example, in strategic planning increased complexity in a plan results in more opportunities for miscommunication and “pilot error” in implementing the plan.   The main reason for this is that we humans can only hold around seven pieces of information in our minds at any one time. Sure, there may be a great deal of complexity in the calculations that underpin your strategic plan, but at the end of the day humans will be in

This is a no brainer, right? And yet one of the most powerful people in the world is famous for mocking others and calling them pejorative names. Sounds like something a small child would do, doesn’t it? Have you ever wondered why a powerful leader would stoop to such tactics?   Top leaders have a monopoly on power in the organizations they lead. Since they are the final arbiter of rewards and success in the organization, the behavior that they reward increases, and the behav

Okay, not every time, but more times than not. Here are the typical steps:   1.    Two good friends get an idea for a fun and exciting business 2.    They like and trust each other, so they create a 50/50 partnership because neither wants to act like the “boss” of the other 3.    Then they realize they must agree on EVERY decision made for the business 4.    Since no two people in the world agree on EVERYTHING, they begin to experience many conflicts and arguments 5.    The b

I can see the men rolling their eyes already. We males are socialized to think that being tough, analytical, and detaching from our emotions are the greatest superpowers, but they aren’t. There’s plenty of research to show that consideration, or caring about your followers’ happiness, is by far the best predictor of success as a leader.   Some other words for consideration are love, approval, and nurturing. Most women are socialized to be better at nurturing than we men, and

Strange question, right? And yet there are a lot of hiring pundits out there who’ll tell you not to give in to your emotional “biases” about hiring someone. They encourage you to remain focused on technical skills and detached from your emotions as you evaluate a potential new hire.     Sure, we all have emotional biases that don’t serve us well all the time. As Denzel Washington says, some people can “angry up your demons.” Well, that’s a therapeutic issue that runs deep, is

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Okay, okay, I’m aware that having “flat” organizations is all the rage these days. A while back the matrix organizational structure was...

Very often the leadership teams I work with are suffering from “data overload.” They have so many detailed numbers that they lose track...

Your relationship with money is one of the 4 major sources of happiness. Dr. Jenn Serlin tells us how to make it "true love" through...

In my interactions with clients and colleagues I often am privy to conversations about organization and time management. Leaders often...

I’ve always been fascinated by why people do what they do. When I see leaders do things that clearly aren’t in their best interests, I...