Coaching highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students: Create accountability for yourself

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Adding accountability to your transformation increases its chances of working and the quality of your work. I hope I've written this idea in many other posts. I say it to nearly every Columbia Business School student I coach. It's a fundamental part of my role with coaching clients. We all know we get done what we're accountable…

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Coaching highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students: find a relevant exercise

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] No matter what you want to improve about yourself, no matter how important the insight of feedback, and no matter how much you can learn from books, ultimately you have to practice to improve meaningfully. Find an exercise I think one of the greatest values a coach can add, especially in a short session, is to give…

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Coaching highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students: figuring out what to start with

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] When your 360-degree feedback report features this chart and you want to start improving something, what do you start with? Keep in mind, you don't need a 360-degree feedback report to have to decide what to work on. Today's post applies to any time you want to pick something to improve yourself. You know from two days…

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Coaching highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students: Personal development skills

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Leaders learn and push themselves to develop personally constantly and consistently. They don't see it as a burden, just something they do. Nor do they feel compelled from outside to do it. They enjoy learning. Nor do they feel like they need to accomplish some goal. They just enjoy doing things better. At least that's what I've…

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Coaching highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students: Improve one thing at a time

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] A lot of students see the dots on the charts in their reports and decide they want to improve a few. In this chart, for example, they'll look at all the dots below the line, think "Uh oh, I'm behind my peers in everything," and decide to work on everything at once, or at least a few…

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INSEAD leadership seminar

When I met Jose Gaztelu, my business school classmate and friend who did the bulk of the organizing for this weekend's INSEAD leadership seminar in Singapore, at the hotel Friday, he asked how many people I thought were signed up. When my flight had taken off that morning from Shanghai it was ten or twelve so I guessed about a dozen. "Thirty-two" So the attendees filled the room -- a great group. They were attentive, asked great questions, and started applying the material before the seminar ended. When I mentioned burpees, they wanted to get me to do a few…

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A sample 360-degree feedback report: qualitative feedback

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Any feedback report has to include qualitative feedback -- that is, free form feedback that describes how the subject performs and how to improve. In my experience the feedback I've seen hasn't been as useful as feedforward. It's been more feedback, which generally means evaluation of an unchangeable u, but feedback can still be useful. In any…

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A sample 360-degree feedback report: more detail

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Yesterday's post covered what for most people are the highlights of a 360-degree review -- charts comparing how your leadership skills compare to others'. Those charts summarize most of the information in a 360-degree feedback report. One should always remember they summarize. They don't present all the information. Sometimes details tell a different story but get lost…

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Leadership lessons from 360-degree feedback charts

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Just the structure of yesterday's charts teaches a lot about leadership. They emerged as main tools for communicating leadership ability and guiding improvement so even if you're never the subject of one, you can still benefit from knowing about them. Let's see a few reasons why. Let's look at one again. The chart breaks leadership into sub-skills…

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A sample 360-degree feedback: Overview charts

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Let's look at part of a sample 360-degree feedback report. Today I'll show the highlights -- the summary of all the questions. Even if you've never had a 360-feedback for yourself, just knowing how they work can help you. Understanding their structure alone can help you figure out how to improve your leadership skills. First I'll explain…

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Coaching highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students: 360-degree feedbacks

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Before going into the details of looking at a 360-degree feedback report, I want to talk about the structure of the 360-degree feedback process and what it tells you about leadership. What is a 360-degree feedback? 360-degree feedbacks are usually done in corporate and bureaucratic environments as review processes, both to help evaluate performance and to help…

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Coaching highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] I've been posting a lot on personal development, so I'm going to focus on specific leadership and leadership development issues for several posts. I've had the privilege and responsibility of coaching leadership to many Columbia Business School students, both in the regular and Executive MBA programs. For the next several posts I'll cover a few of my…

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Sports and passion

I ask people about their passions a lot. Many tell me they have no passions, which makes me sad for them. I don't think passions are something you find lying around but something you create and build from small interests through self-awareness, effort, and dedication. It means they haven't created something they could have. They either never invested enough to find out what it took to create a passion or, if they did, capitulated on the effort. Or they're young enough not to have had the chance yet. I've written before about the sink-or-swim moment experience in college that taught…

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Why food matters

I don't know if I have to explain how shopping for, preparing, and eating food qualifies as fundamental to self-awareness and therefore leadership. A few years ago I would have considered food shopping irrelevant to self-awareness. I've changed. I'll start with an aside on how big an effect just gardening can have with Victory Gardens. During the World Wars, when mainstream food production dropped, governments promoted their citizens planting so-called victory gardens -- using whatever spare land anyone had, even window-sills, to plant fruits, vegetables, herbs or whatever you could grow. They started them in parks, some continuing as gardens…

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Motivating populations

I figure most people have seen this quote before. It's scary -- particularly for how matter-of-fact it is. You get the idea he has no doubt of the effectiveness of his strategy, probably from years of trial and error. It's scary not just for its historical roots, but for how well it seems to work in more mundane but still important contexts -- particularly with national leaders. People as individuals consider themselves (ourselves) independent and intelligent. Large groups of people seem to lose those properties. Anyway, sorry about posting something so serious out of the blue. I just keep meaning…

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If you want to change something you do, its opposite usually is no better. Look for its complement.

People seem to want to change a lot about them. I see them trying to do the opposite of what they are trying to change. Sometimes it works. More often trying to do the opposite of what they want to stop reinforces doing it more. Food For example, overweight people often think if they eat too much they should try the opposite and try to eat less. But dieting seems to predict obesity more than prevent it -- that is, people who diet tend to be more obese than those who don't (sorry I don't have a source, so feel…

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Examples of ignoring impediments on the way to greatness

When you think of great orators, Winston Churchill has to be near the top of the list. His speeches include I would say to the House as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. and Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus…

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Lessons in freedom from Charles Barkley

When I talk about freedom here I usually mean your mental freedom to think and believe what you want. I consider this freedom more fundamental than, say, political freedom, not that I see much point in comparing them. Everyone benefits from both and few, if anyone, has to choose between either. Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning described how fundamental he considered the freedom to believe what you want, the freedom that allowed him to find meaning in life as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of…

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You can plan good times. The best times just happen.

I think the title of this one says it all. A lesson in leadership -- not necessarily business leadership, but leading in social occasions: You can plan good times. The best times just happen. I think these words a lot, but especially during the Manila trip that ended up going to Boracay. Looking back I see I specifically didn't plan any details of what to do in Manila before arriving. I just contacted the people involved and made sure we had flexibility in the schedule. Then when the Boracay opportunity arose, I knew we could do it. The result? The…

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More on power, leadership, lawlessness, justice, and amnesty

The New Yorker published a piece, "The Fairness Trap," echoing the issues I wrote on yesterday in the context of the U.S. foreclosure and Greek economic crises. In both cases, people's desire to punish people conflicted with clearly better economic solutions, according to the author. He talks about fairness, basically the same concept as justice -- reacting to emotions like outrage, indignation, and self-righteousness over agreeing on criteria to evaluate future outcomes on and trying to achieve the best one based on those criteria. A major problem with fairness, justice, outrage, indignation, self-righteousness, and the like is their subjectivity. We…

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Power, leadership, lawlessness, justice, and amnesty

I'm going to present an over-simplified case related to issues many of us face in much smaller contexts. The goal is to learn from simple hypothetical cases to build experience for more complex, real-life cases. Normally I separate my North Korea posts from leadership ones, but they overlap here, along with my being in China now. One of the greater challenges the world faces is how to bring some kind of justice, or at least rule of law, to the North Korean regime. I think any community in the world not directly benefiting from the North Korean government's behavior would…

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The Leaders in Software and Art Conference, October 16

Savvy readers will notice the conference mentioned in the title covers two big topics of this blog -- leadership and art. I've twice spoken at Leaders in Software and Art events, helped host another, and attended many others (a video of my work is currently on the LISA site's front page). The organizer, Isabel Draves, has been building the events, consistently assembling artists and technologists to speak, network, and share about art and technology. (Her husband, Scott, creates just about the most amazing computer-based art I've ever seen.) After many successful monthly salons, she's finally making the first big LISA…

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My essays for getting into an Ivy League business school in 23 days

Here are my Columbia Business School application essays, to complete the series on getting into business school in 23 days. I edited them slightly, mainly to take out personal details. In the optional essay 5, I can see I was blatantly name-dropping Columbia Business School Professors and my experience at the school. I think I could have used more subtlety. My graduate school stipend -- what I lived on in Manhattan for about four years -- surprises me to this day. I think the number was accurate, but wonder if the first number might have been a 2 instead of…

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My background for getting into an Ivy League business school in 23 days

Yesterday I posted about the process I stumbled into for getting into an Ivy League business school in 23 days. How to read this post Today I'll talk about the credentials that made it possible. But please recognize, the point of these posts is not merely to show you how to get into business school, but to show you that you can combine whatever you have in your past into something bigger than you expect. You have to be aware of the possibilities and ready to act on them. If you are insecure and want to justify why can't succeed,…

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I started at an Ivy League business school 23 days after deciding to apply. Here’s how.

On December 10, 2004 I decided to apply to business school. I had written no essays, taken no GMAT, reviewed no school's web site or application process, and asked no one for a recommendation. On January 2, 2005, 23 days later, I began orientation at Columbia Business School (ranked #5 by Forbes, Economist, and Financial Times). I got my MBA the following May, less than eighteen months from deciding to apply. Prep schools (such as Manhattan GMAT and Kaplan) recommend starting the application process eighteen months before starting classes. I completed my entire application and degree in less time than…

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