Raf Sanga dot com

Overcoming people's past perceptions of you isn't easy. When I launched my consulting business seven years ago, I was astonished to find — years later — that acquaintances and even friends hadn't kept up with my career transition. They'd ask about my past work in politics or nonprofit advocacy, oblivious to the changes that had been consuming my life. It wasn't their fault, however. These days, we all have thousands of Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections; it's just not realistic to keep up with everyone's latest developments. But the fact that they weren't aware of my new business meant I was losing out on referrals and potential clients. I realized I had to ensure they took notice. Of course, you can't just prop someone's eyelids open, A Clockwork Orange -style, and force them to read your white papers or watch your webinars. So how do you get other people to realize, and remember, what you're doing now — and grasp what you...

You are stressed — by your deadlines, your responsibilities, your ever-increasing workload, and your life in general. If you are like me, you even stress about how much stress you're feeling — worrying that it is interfering with your performance and possibly taking years off of your life. This might sound a little crazy, but what if it's the very fact that we assume stress is bad that's actually making it so bad for us? And what if there were another way to think about stress — a way that might actually make it a force for good in our lives? Well there is, according to new research from Yale's Alia Crum and Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage. Let's take a step back, and begin with a different question: What is stress? Generally speaking, it's the experience — or anticipation — of difficulty or adversity. We humans, along with other animals, have an instinctive physical response to stressors. It includes activati...

I came across this article which I think is really relevant to any business that has accumulated stockpiles of data about clients, and its operations. What to do with this and how it can be put to good use to identify opportunities. Below are the key points of the interview  Big data and analytics actually have been receiving attention for a few years, but the reason is changing. A few years ago, I thought the question was “ We have all this data. Surely there’s something we can do with it.” Now the question is “I see my competitors exploiting this and I feel I’m getting behind.” And in fact, the people who say this are right.   I get asked, “Who’s big data for?” And my answer is it’s for just about everybody. There are going to be data-based companies: Amazon, Google, Bloomberg. They’re great companies, and they have a lot of opportunity. But just because you’re not going to be a data company doesn’t mean you can’t exploit data analytics...

“I don’t know what we’d do without him!” That’s what an executive in a Fortune 100 company recently told us about a brilliant project leader. We’ve heard the same sentiment expressed about many highly skilled specialists during the hundred-plus interviews we’ve conducted as part of our research into knowledge use and sharing. In organizations large and small, including NASA, the U.S. Forest Service, SAP, and Raytheon, managers spoke of their dependence on colleagues who have “deep smarts”—business-critical expertise, built up through years of experience, which helps them make wise, swift decisions about both strategy and tactics. These mavens may be top salespeople, technical wizards, risk managers, or operations troubleshooters, but they are all the “go-to” people for a given type of knowledge in their organizations. Because deep smarts are mostly in experts’ heads—and sometimes people don’t even recognize that they possess them—they aren’t all that e...

We all tend to trust what we can see. If someone is always in the office early and leaves late, you'd probably assume he is a dedicated, hard-working employee. But he might actually be the least productive of his co-workers. And that's why numerous experts have advised that companies should avoid management by observation, and instead focus on the actual work itself. But many companies have clung to cultures of "face time," in which staffers who log the longest hours are assumed to be the best employees. I, myself, have been guilty of that bias. Though as telecommuting becomes more widespread and the workplace becomes increasingly virtual, management by observation simply doesn't work anymore. Supervisors can't concern themselves with the "where" and "when" of work. Instead, they now have to concentrate on the "what" and "how." A number of researchers we talked to have observed that the virtual wor...

Listen to the language that any leader, consultant, or HR professional uses, and you'll hear them expound at length about how "we" need to change "them." That says it all: the fact is, no one likes to be changed, even if the change is ultimately beneficial. In his recent HBR blog post , Ron Ashkenas argues that the reason most change management initiatives fail is due to stunted managerial capability to implement change. He points out — correctly, I believe — that in many organizations the responsibility for change initiatives has come to rest with HR, and not with the line supervisors and managers. However, I believe that there's a deeper, more fundamental problem with the way we frame the whole notion of change management. In fact, I propose that we dispense with the concept of "change management" entirely. History shows that's a recipe guaranteed to foment fear, resistance, and — ultimately — failure . Many factors underlie that...