Executives tell me it’s not easy to find an advisor with the right balance of experience, expertise, relationship skills, and client orientation. That’s not surprising. It’s a difficult role to pull off well. There are also lots of bad habits…

A large body of research shows that when we meet someone for the first time, we make judgments about their trustworthiness and competence in a fraction of a second. We do this based on a variety of clues, including physical…

You’re probably not as good a listener as you think you are. In fact, most people are poor listeners. What’s worse, as we get older and more experienced, it actually gets harder to listen. In any area you may work…

A client of mine was promoted to a very senior position in a large, Fortune-100 company. She had been the deputy in her area, and was now at the top. She told me that the day her promotion was announced…

The management guru Peter Drucker framed his consulting advice around five critical questions. With the answers to these five questions, you could run and grow your business. Peter Drucker is considered the leading management thinker of the last century. He…

Many years ago my coauthor, Jerry Panas, was asked to organize the annual meeting for the chamber of commerce in Alliance, Ohio, where he once lived. He decided—rather ambitiously—to ask J.C. Penney to be the annual speaker. At the time,…

I’ve heard a common complaint from the senior corporate executives I work with and also from some of our young, single female friends in New York City: Why can’t people have a good conversation anymore? In the executives’ case, they…

Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp underscores something I’ve believed for a long time: that notwithstanding social media’s ability to connect us with thousands of contacts, we ultimately gravitate towards a small handful of deep, meaningful relationships at work and…

The Firm: The Story of McKinsey is an in-depth profile of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. It was written by journalist Duff McDonald. Many terrible books have been written about the consulting industry, mostly by people who worked for…

Our contemporary culture promotes many trite, misleading, and self-absorbed ideas about what makes for successful romantic relationships. “Just be yourself”, “Find someone who won’t try to change you”, and the old chestnut, “You must love yourself first.” But these truisms…