When Your Manager is Afraid of You..

Kate, a 33-year-old marketing associate, sounded exhausted and confused. "It's the weirdest thing," she said. "I started my job ten months ago and got off to a great start. I launched our company's first HTML newsletter. 

I started a client service training program that got great reviews. My six-month performance review was stellar. Then two months ago, the whole thing started to go sour."

"How so?" I wanted to know.

Put Failure In Its Place….

You've started a company and it goes belly-up. Or you launched a new product and not only does it fail to sell, customers actually hate it. Or you get fired.

What happens when you dare to dream, make that dream real, and then fail?

There's the plucky Henry Ford quotation which admittedly, and almost embarrassingly, I have used: "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." Since Ford was eventually wildly successful, this aphorism does reassure, but it also jauntily skips over the emotional precipice on which we teeter when we fail. No matter how many chirpy quotes I may tweet out, when I fail my initial response is despondency, pessimism, and the feeling that perhaps I need to relocate to another city because I can never show my face in public. Ever. Again. I tend to identify with Margery Eldredge Howell, who said: "There's dignity in suffering, nobility in pain, but failure is a salted wound that burns and burns again."

As I have grappled with my own this-just-may-break-me failures, I am increasingly convinced that dreaming must be a process, an engine of experimentation. As we practice innovating we are propelled up a personal learning curve — and we begin to accomplish our dreams. But implicit in daring to disrupt the status quo is daring to fail. As we learn by doing and do by learning something will eventually (and inevitably) not work. As former DARPA official Ken Gabriel said, "An important part of disruption is having the nerve to take on a really big failure." At this critical juncture in the process of dreaming, we must decide how we will approach failure: Did I fail my way into a black hole? Or is failure a tool that will help me innovate more effectively?

On how to put failure in its place, read more by clicking on the link…

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• Embrace Failure.
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• What Would You Attempt To Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?

When Good People Work for Bad Companies!

You consider yourself to be a decent person. You pride yourself on your conscience, and are discerning in what you buy and consume. Yet every day you get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work for a company you think hurts other people and the planet.

This presents a terrible conundrum for millions of us. Too many industries do harm in the world — whether through their actual practices, their lobbying efforts, or their treatment of the environment or of workers. They have lofty mission statements and attempt to mitigate this harm by donating to some good causes. But part, or all, of their bottom line is built on doing or abetting bad stuff.

Meanwhile, in this flagging economy, many of us are glad to have work at all. It's difficult to think about quitting a decent-paying job simply because of the values of the person in the mirror. Instead of thinking about whether the work of our brains and hands actually helps to abet evil, we regular engage in various moral trade-offs to make ourselves feel better.

What Next for Us? Connect here with the HBR Blog Network article on the subject…

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How a Culture of Accountability Can Deteriorate!

The word 'accountability' is one of the most frequently used, in fact, abused words today in the corporate world as well as in general, to describe the status of leadership and quality of majority of our leaders. In fact one of the reasons why we as a society have degenerated to what we are today is attributed to the 'lack of accountability' amidst our leaders of today. 

'What Ever Happened to Accountability' by Tom Ricks is an article that has been published in the October 2012 issue of HBR. His latest book published very recently is titled 'The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today'.  Tom Ricks was interviewed by HBR recently on the subject of Accountability and his recent book mentioned earlier. 

The link for this interview is provided here...