Most Popular Editorials: What Great Listeners Actually Do

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What Great Listeners Actually Do Chances are you think you're a good listener. People's appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they're above average. In our experience, most people think good listening comes down to doing three things: - Not talking when others are speaking - Letting others know you’re listening through facial expressions and verbal sounds ("Mmm-hmm") - Being able to repeat what others have said, practically word-for-word In fact, much management advice on listening suggests doing these very things - encouraging listeners to remain quiet, nod and "mm-hmm" encouragingly, and then repeat back to the talker something like, "So, let me make sure I understand. What you're saying is..." However, recent research that we conducted suggests that these behaviors fall far short of describing good listening skills. Continued here

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Inside India's booming dark data economy Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale.Ayushi Sahu was ambushed. One evening in 2018, five months after her wedding, the 21-year-old college student was visiting her parents in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, when her husband showed up unannounced, his father and uncle in tow. As the men settled in the living room, her husband said he had something he wanted them to hear. He took out his mobile phone and pressed "play." The audio was loud and clear: private conversations between Sahu and her friends and family, which had been recorded without her permission. And it wasn't only audio: "call logs, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, each photo and video, recordings of my video calls - he claimed to have accessed everything," Sahu said. That was when she realized that her husband had, for months, been spying on her. Continued here

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Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture? Continued here

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Want to Hire People With High Emotional Intelligence? Look for These 5 Things Learn to identify emotional intelligence when you see it.Smart employers recognize the value of emotional intelligence in the workplace. In a survey of more than 2,600 hiring managers and HR professionals, HR company CareerBuilder found that: - 71 percent said they value emotional intelligence more than IQ in an employee - 75 percent said they were more likely to promote a candidate with high emotional intelligence over one with a high IQ - Emotionally intelligent employees are invaluable because they help build chemistry. Great chemistry leads to great teams. And great teams do great work. But as an employer, how can you identify emotional intelligence when you see it? Continued here

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Why parents should stop blaming themselves for how their kids turn out Millions of children have been studied to disentangle all the shaping forces. Studies have followed identical twins and fraternal twins and plain-old siblings growing up together or adopted and raised apart. Growing up in the same home does not make children noticeably more alike in how successful they are, how happy or self-reliant they are, and so on. In other words, imagine if you'd been taken at birth and raised next door by the family to the left and your brother or sister had been raised next door by the family to the right. By and large, that would have made you no more similar or different than growing up together under the same roof. On the one hand, these findings seem unbelievable. Think about all the ways that parents differ from home to home and how often they argue and whether they helicopter and how much they shower their children with love. You'd think it would matter enough to make children growing up in the same home more alike than if they'd been raised apart, but it doesn't. But just because an event doesn't shape people in the same way doesn't mean it had no effect. Your parenting could be shaping your children - just not in the ways that lead them to become more alike. Your parenting could be leading your first child to become more serious and your second child to become more relaxed. Or, it could lead your first child to want to be like you and your second child to want to be nothing like you. You are flapping your butterfly wings to your hurricane children. Continued here

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How to Use Overthinking to Your Advantage Some might call it anxiety, others call it power. Here's how you can use your active brain to become more successful.If you're anything like me, overthinking is a common, if not daily, occurrence. Your head is spinning a million different directions, filled with thoughts buzzing around. Some believe this pattern of thinking is bad, as if it's a one-way ticket to self-destruction. But in my own life, I have discovered it to be a superpower that, if used correctly, can bring endless opportunities into your life. For an entrepreneur, the list of decisions is endless: marketing strategies, financial decisions, hiring selections, to name a few. So knowing how to make decisions quickly, and not get stuck in a tornado of rumination, could be the key to your success. Being entrepreneurial, there is a level of craziness that lives within you. Instead of ridding yourself of this aspect, learn how to manage it and use it to your advantage. After all, this is a characteristic that is truly a gift. Continued here

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How to Work with a Manipulative Person Almost everyone who's ever gone to work has had to deal with an office manipulator. Unfortunately, most employees hesitate to go public with their concerns. And with good reason: Even if they do, typical corporate responses range from wary or dismissive to actually retaliating against the victim, rather than the wrongdoer. Unfortunately, many workplaces promote manipulators because they appear to be effective at getting things done, despite the significant costs their abuse can inflict on productivity and people over time. Particularly when you can't get the hierarchy or other authorities to intervene on your behalf, it helps to have your own approaches for coping, short of legal action. Continued here

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I teach a course on happiness at Yale: this is how to make the most of your resolutions Forget tough love. Adopting a positive mindset and being kind to yourself is a more effective way to make a changeTo say that 2020 wasn't the best year is an understatement. For many of us, it felt like a giant global dumpster fire. Not surprisingly, the stresses of living through a pandemic have had a terrible impact on our collective mental health, with rates of depression and anxiety skyrocketing. Many of us feel we can't say goodbye to last year fast enough. And that means we're entering 2021 with high expectations. With the promise of a vaccine and the potential for a return to normality, the start of this year has given us something we've been missing for a long time: hope. Starting over after the year we've just had feels more exciting than usual. It's a brand new chapter in our lives, in which lots of positive changes are possible. Continued here

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'Bond. James Bond': Video reveals shockingly simple trick behind most famous movie quotes What: The first entry in a series looking at what makes classic movie lines so classic. Who: Etymology expert Mark Forsyth and YouTube's Little White Lies. Why we care: Nothing extends a movie's shelf life like quotability. If a line from a movie still shows up 20 years after its release, be it in conversations between friends or as a reference in Jeopardy! answers, then that movie has etched itself into the cultural fabric of history. But what makes a movie line quotable? This is a question that etymologist Mark Forsyth has thought about more than most. Continued here

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We've Known How to Combat Dementia For Years -- We're Just Not Listening We're still waiting for that shiny pill to cure us. What if we never find it? When I started working in my first lab researching Alzheimer's Disease, I was idealistic, determined the field would find a cure for the insidious disease in my lifetime. And I still hope we do. Alzheimer's runs in my family like it does in many families. But my time working in the field has forced me to realize that we already know how to fend off the debilitating effects of dementia. It's just not the answer we were looking for. For years, I researched in and out of the lab. I took classes about the brain and dementia. I read neuroscience books in my leisure time. I consumed every bit of information the field offered on cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's, and similar diseases. From the vagus nerve to cytokines gone wrong to demyelination, I scoured every potential source of memory loss. And everything I read, in one way or another, pointed back to the same perpetrator: stress. Continued here

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How to Build Expertise in a New Field Better pay, more joy in the job, or prerequisite to promotion? Whatever your reasons for deciding to build expertise in a new field, the question is how to get there. Your goal, of course, is to become a swift and wise decision-maker in this new arena, able to diagnose problems and assess opportunities in multiple contexts. You want what I call "deep smarts" - business-critical, experience-based knowledge. Typically, these smarts take years to develop; they're hard-earned. But that doesn't mean that it's too late for you to move into a different field. The following steps can accelerate your acquisition of such expertise. Continued here

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Fighting Against Dictatorship Dictatorial types gain and maintain power through a number of social processes and psychological dynamics. From our Palaeolithic roots onwards, dictators - whether they led tribes, fiefdoms, countries, religions or organisations - have always been with us. We have always been attracted to individuals who appear strong. Some people are easily persuaded to give up their freedoms for an imaginary sense of stability and protection, not to mention an illusion of restored greatness. Generally speaking, times of social unrest have always been the feeding ground for dictators. Periods of economic depression, political or social chaos give dictators the opportunity to appear as saviour and, when conditions allow it, seize power by coup d'etat or other means. Their populist demagoguery can seduce broad swathes of the population. However, most of their inflated promises turn out to be no more than hot air. So how is it that they're able to gain and maintain power? They succeed by taking full advantage of known social processes and dynamics. Continued here

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A Framework for Leaders Facing Difficult Decisions Many decision-making frameworks aim to help leaders use objective information to mitigate bias, operate under time pressure, or leverage data. But these frameworks tend to fall short when it comes to decisions based on subjective information sources that suggest conflicting courses of action. And most complex decisions fall into this category. Specifically, every complex leadership decision must balance three subjective dimensions: Continued here

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Take these 5 things into consideration when you're trying to find your calling Psychologists share their findings about those who are trying to find some meaning in life.If, like many, you are searching for your calling in life - perhaps you are still unsure which profession aligns with what you most care about - here are five recent research findings worth taking into consideration. First, there's a difference between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive passion. If you can find a career path or occupational goal that fires you up, you are more likely to succeed and find happiness through your work - that much we know from the deep research literature. But beware - since a seminal paper published in 2003 by the Canadian psychologist Robert Vallerand and colleagues, researchers have made an important distinction between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive one. If you feel that your passion or calling is out of control, and that your mood and self-esteem depend on it, then this is the obsessive variety, and such passions, while they are energizing, are also associated with negative outcomes such as burnout and anxiety. Continued here

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Building a Startup That Will Last For the past decade, growth rates have defined success for most technology companies. Moore's Law enabled unprecedented computing power, setting off a sprint in winner-take-all marketplaces with increasing returns to scale. Growth-hacking became the entrepreneurial mantra of the early 21st century, resulting in the creation of new tech giants, entirely new industries, and an era in which online community, content, and commerce have redefined how we live, learn, and work. In a marathon, pacing and perseverance are paramount. Few companies from the tech boom of the mid-2000s had the foresight to temper their pace in anticipation of the long journey that lay ahead. Our collective obsession with disruption made us look at decades-old companies as something to dismantle rather than admire. The potential for career-defining gains got the best of many investors and advisors, and we failed to coach founders on the fundamentals of sustainability. We are only now recognizing how untenable the "move fast and break things" attitude was to become. Continued here

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Why You Should Create a "Shadow Board" of Younger Employees A lot of companies struggle with two apparently unrelated problems: disengaged younger workers and a weak response to changing market conditions. A few companies have tackled both problems at the same time by creating a "shadow board" - a group of non-executive employees that works with senior executives on strategic initiatives. The purpose? To leverage the younger groups' insights and to diversify the perspectives that executives are exposed to. They seem to work. Consider Prada and Gucci, two fashion companies with a good track record of keeping up with - or shaping - consumer tastes. Until recently, Prada enjoyed high margins, a legendary creative director, and good growth opportunities. But since 2014, it has witnessed declining sales. In 2017, the company finally admitted that it had been "slow in realizing the importance of digital channels and the blogging online 'influencers' which are disrupting the industry." Co-CEO Patrizio Bertelli said, "We made a mistake." Continued here

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When You Know Layoffs Are Coming... William recalls the excruciatingly uncertain months before he finally lost his job. He had worked in the real estate sector, where his work dried up. Piece by piece his responsibilities were taken away. His company­­ was not doing well, that much was evident. It was letting people go in small batches. If you didn't get tapped on a Friday, you were safe for the next week. "We were just kind of sitting there staring at each other, waiting for the axe to fall," William says. And this waiting period was agonizing. "You ever watch like a documentary with a herd of zebra and there's a lion? The lion catches one zebra and all the other zebras are a little way off, just kind of watching." William says that's what it was like for all the other employees. "And then they're just kind of wondering when it's their turn." Continued here

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When Should You Collaborate with the Competition? Why don't Australians drink much whiskey? They're hardly known for being abstemious. Part of the answer is that they tend to drink beer and wine. But another part of the answer is that whiskey brands haven't made a concerted effort to get them to really try whiskey. Perhaps they should, because Australians have been lured into changing their drinking habits in the past. Rewind to the 1960s and Australian wine consumption was way down on today's level. So, wine producers got together and educated the public on the nuances of fine wine. Now Australians are drinking four times the amount of wine they drank in 1961 and are among the largest consumers of wine on a per capita basis in the world. This is not a one-off. Back in 1998 real men didn't eat avocados. Continued here

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From crop to cup: How coffee travels through its supply chain View a more detailed version of the above graphic by clicking hereThere's a good chance your day started with a cappuccino, or a cold brew, and you aren't alone. In fact, coffee is one of the most consumed drinks on the planet, and it's also one of the most traded commodities. According to the National Coffee Association, more than 150 million people drink coffee on a daily basis in the U.S. alone. Globally, consumption is estimated at over 2.25 billion cups per day. But before it gets to your morning cup, coffee beans travel through a complex global supply chain. Today's illustration from Dan Zettwoch breaks down this journey into 10 distinct steps. Continued here

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Why employee surveys, like political polls, are misleading It’s time to stop relying on old ways of gauging how people feel. When results of the 2020 elections began to come in, a familiar question resurfaced: Why did so many polls get their predictions so wrong? The question has sparked all sorts of analysis, with Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief of the nonprofit news agency ProPublica, describing a "big failing." It isn't just news media and political groups that need to take note of the mismatch between polled behavior and actual behavior. This moment should also serve as a wake-up call to businesses. The systems our society uses to measure how people feel simply aren't, at some level, working. That includes the surveys organizations use to try to gauge the sentiment of their workforces. Continued here

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The Stickiest, Most Addictive, Most Engaging, and Fastest-Growing Social Apps -- and How to Measure Them When a social app is working, it's often clear in the data: how many people are using the app on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and how is the network growth trending over time? But evaluating the success - or, in our case, the potential - of a social app is not as straightforward as it seems. What does "good" look like, anyway? How do various categories of social apps stack up in terms of engagement, stickiness, and retention (and which KPIs are most important to track)? Can upstarts compete with the reigning social giants? To answer these pressing questions, we took a deep dive into the top social apps across a dozen categories, in partnership with the app intelligence software company Apptopia. Continued here

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How Will You Measure Your Life? On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I'll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I'll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it's not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys - but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction. Continued here

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The 15-Minute City -- No Cars Required -- Is Urban Planning's New Utopia From Paris to Portland, cities are attempting to give residents everything they need within a few minutes of their front doors. Can it work - without leaving anyone out?The Minimes barracks in Paris don't look like the future of cities. A staid brick-and-limestone complex established in 1925 along a backstreet in the Marais district, it's the sort of structure you pass without a second glance in a place as photogenic as Paris. A closer look at its courtyard, however, reveals a striking transformation. The barracks' former parking lot has become a public garden planted with saplings. The surrounding buildings have been converted to 70 unusually attractive public housing apartments, at a cost of €12.3 million ($14.5 million). Elsewhere in the revamped complex are offices, a day-care facility, artisan workshops, a clinic, and a cafe staffed by people with autism. Continued here

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The commas that cost companies millions For most people, a stray comma isn’t the end of the world. But in some cases, the exact placement of a punctuation mark can cost huge sums of money. How much can a misplaced comma cost you? If you\'re texting a loved one or dashing off an email to a colleague, the cost of misplacing a piece of punctuation will be – at worst – a red face and a minor mix-up. But for some, contentious commas can be a path to the poor house. A dairy company in the US city of Portland, Maine settled a court case for $5m earlier this year because of a missing comma. Three lorry drivers for Oakhurst Dairy claimed that they were owed years of unpaid overtime wages, all because of the way commas were used in legislation governing overtime payments. The state\'s laws declared that overtime wasn\'t due for workers involved in "the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: 1) agricultural produce; 2) meat and fish products; and 3) perishable foods". Continued here

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What Sets Successful CEOs Apart The four essential behaviors that help them win the top job and thrive once they get itAt the top of the ladder, the stakes are high and the demands intense. Too many CEOs falter in the job; about a quarter of the Fortune 500 chiefs who leave their firms each year are forced out. Clearly, boards do not always get their hires right. In conducting an analysis of in-depth assessments of 17,000 executives, the authors uncovered a large disconnect between what directors think makes for an ideal CEO and what actually leads to high performance. The findings of their 10-year research project challenge many widely held assumptions. Charisma, confidence, and pedigree all have little bearing on CEO success, it turns out. Instead, top performers demonstrate four specific business behaviors: (1) They're decisive, realizing they can't wait for perfect information and that a wrong decision is often better than no decision. (2) They engage for impact, working to understand the priorities of stakeholders and then aligning them around a goal of value creation. (3) They adapt proactively, keeping an eye on the long term and treating mistakes as learning opportunities. (4) They deliver results in a reliable fashion, steadily following through on commitments. Continued here