When I was growing up, I looked for a savior in just about everyone. There were too many fruitless visits from child protective services. There were too many police cars that arrived to “quiet things down” only to let them flare up again the next day. There were too many visits to the hospital ….The [...]
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Lesson of Cezanne & The Upcoming Disruption
There was a time when great art was about depicting things as close to what the human eye could capture in real life. And then photography came along. Imagine being the artist that had perfected your craft up to that point. You would be thinking something like, “flubbertyjickets”, as you found yourself more a master [...]
Steve Jobs’ Legacy: Design Your Own Life
While there are many things worth celebrating of Steve Jobs’ life, the greatest gift Steve gave us is a way to design our own lives. Steve Jobs was known for being a design god who sweated experience, and pixels and, well, everything. “Design,” he once said, “is a funny word. Some people think design means [...]
And, Who Are You?
The quiet and art-filled office space overlooking majestic oak trees, the joy of working with Mike Mace, the significant source of income for our family. These were things I thought of when I thought of what I was losing when shutting down Rubicon. What I didn’t think of until it happened was this: when you [...]
The Excuses
When I was getting divorced from my first husband, I spent many months reliving the past. These mental hamster-wheel moments were accompanied by sleepless nights, too much scotch, and – to complete this picture in all it’s transparency—family-size bags of Lays BBQ potato chips. During these long nights, I would try and re-imagine each crucial [...]
Don’t Give Up
Life is full of twists and turns and it is sometimes easy to get sick of the many gyrations that are needed to make a business thrive, a project launch, or even to get internal signoff in some bureaucratic version of the Hokey Pokey. It would be so easy to quit. But a part of [...]
TEDx: How We Deny Innovation
Innovation! Isn’t it Great?! We just love talking about innovation and thinking about innovation, and tweeting about innovation. But we actually suck at it, for entirely human reasons. There are 3 things we need to understand about our own humanness in order for us to unleash our own potential (and the potential of our organizations): [...]
The Success Equation
Human stuff — the soft stuff — is rarely valued. We talk about it, sure. But we don’t change it. We don’t reinvent it. We give lip service to it but, when times are tough, we focus on the hard stuff. We manage numbers because it’s easier. We say we value people but we focus [...]
Stopping Theft at Work
She had dark circles under her eyes as she walked into the conference room. Not just Friday-morning dark circles, but major-product-launch dark circles. I asked her how she was doing. She was ready to explode with fury. A key project was hitting a deadline, and a member of her team hadn’t been able to pull [...]
The Snot Factory Story
People say that their faith is tested during tough times of job loss or divorce. But, I’m not so sure I had much faith to test. You likely know my story of getting fired because it was shared in Harvard Business Review’s forum on failure. That is the secular part of the story. I have [...]
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About Nilofer…
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And, Who Are You?
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What Replaces Marketing
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What’s Your ScoreBoard?
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Rogues, Misfits Or Heroines?
- Is TED Elite?
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Just How Powerful Are You?
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Resilient Organizations & Open Networks
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Advice to Writers
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The Synergist; Valuing All the Roles
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What defines scale?
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Michele Tilander: This identifies many of us who know that while oth...
- The dilemma of ‘free’ | Journeys towards Justice: [...] a taste of the amazing: Nilofer Merchant rec...
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Nilofer Merchant: I really like slide 7 because of the full Wizard o...
- Can Women Leaders Truly Succeed In Your Organization? - Carge77.com: [...] chosen professions, regardless of gender, cr...
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Susan: Enjoy your posts. This one struck a chord. The so...
Author of “The New How”
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