SkillInside

Brains? Grit? Luck? Nope, science says the most likely sign that you're going to succeed big time is something else. What's the biggest predictor of success in life? Take a guess and you're likely to come up with something like talent, brains,  grit , even luck or connections. And certainly all of these are great things to have if you're looking to accomplish incredible things. But according to a recent Medium post by author and entrepreneur Michael Simmons, science actually offers a different answer to this question. "According to multiple, peer-reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success," he writes. "In fact, the study shows that half of the predicted difference in career success (i.e., promotion, compensation, industry recognition) is due to this one variable." The power of an open network Simmons explains that he discovered this startling truth in the c...

It goes without saying that you have to be responsible and alert to succeed in your career, no matter what your career path is. You have to be reliable, of course, and you have to be a good team member. No one can really act surprised if they miss out on a promotion and their boss says "We all like you, Stan, but you have a tendency to let us down when it matters, and that's not something a supervisor can do. I gave the promotion to Anjali, because I can always rely on her in the clinch." There is another, critical career skill that makes or breaks careers and that we don't talk about as often as we should. It's a muscle that we don't grow just by getting older or by going to school or even by taking on more and more responsibility over time. It is possible to reach a ripe old age without growing this muscle, and it always a shame when that happens. At Human Workplace we call this must-have career muscle "Fast Learning." What does it mean...

Fresh fish has long been an important part of the Japanese diet, but the challenges of meeting the demand was overtaxing the area’s waters.  To solve the problem, fishing companies acquired bigger boats that could go farther out. But—as is often the case—the solution brought with it a different problem. Longer trips to more distant waters meant the fish had to be frozen on the boats. But frozen fish didn’t suit the refined Japanese taste in seafood, and prices for the frozen fish quickly dropped.  So it came to the next idea—installing fish tanks in place of the freezers. After a little thrashing around, the fish became listless and apathetic—and their lethargy, like freezing, affected the taste of the final product. Consumers were still unsatisfied, and the industry was in crisis. Then they came up with a brilliant solution to keep the fish tasting fresh. They added a small shark to each of the fish tanks.  Fearful of the shark, the fish were constantly on th...

On average we spend 5.6 hours a week in meetings, and 71 percent of those meetings aren't very productive. Chances are, you've noticed that many meetings are a tremendous waste of time. A few years ago, Microsoft did some research into this problem and found that people spend on average 5.6 hours each week in meetings, and that 71 percent of American employees reported that these meetings "aren't very productive." When you multiply all the hours spent by employees around the world in meetings that "aren't very productive," it's easy to see that ineffective meetings are a huge problem for every business. Not only are they a waste of time and money, but they keep people from engaging in tasks that might be far more productive--and profitable for the businesses in which they work. Leadership and innovation experts Kevin and Jackie Freiberg have a simple prescription for running remarkably effective meetings. These 16 habits might be simp...

I've worked with thousands of sales people in many different industries. Professional selling is changing rapidly with technology-driven automation and commoditization resulting in   more than one-third of sellers losing their jobs in the coming years . Sales people need to fund themselves from the value they create rather than from the margins that the product or service delivers. For any sales person to prosper in their career they need to move beyond being good at building relationships to also embrace the holy trinity of sales mastery: ·          Lead with insight as a domain expert ·          Create tangible business value for clients ·          Leverage technology to be effective and efficient Make no mistake, relationships alone are not enough. Buyers today are busy and stressed. They are not looking for new friends. They instead want grea...

Need makeover from a pathetic to a kick-ass manager ?  Top 11 hacks from my career journey It is not uncommon to hear stories of rock-star employees  getting promoted to becoming bad managers.  Mine is a case of the opposite - a bad engineer becoming  a good manager ! In this series, professionals predict the ideas and trends that will shape 2016. Read the posts   here , then   write your own   (use   #BigIdeas2016   in your piece). In this post i will not get into all the gory details of why i was a bad engineer or how-the-hell i became a manager. Instead, what i want to do here is much more useful - Share some of my  valuable learning's from my experiences over the last 10+ years of leadership  - in both corporate world and as an entrepreneur - managing some really smart and capable men and women across the world - US, Europe, Asia, Latin America & India . Today as we stand in 2016 - the resource tha...