Blog

  • Public figures and authenticity

    I did not intend to let so much time go by without posting, but the travel, teaching and speaking schedule of the past 10 days has been as hectic as any I can ever remember. So, on the plane between Moscow and Paris today, I began what I thought would be a blog post about politics and authenticity. Many people

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    John Sadowsky Leadership & Storytelling
  • Designing better bosses for a new generation, continued

    Last time, we looked at two of the lessons from Google’s Project Oxygen, their effort to build better managers. Now we focus on two additional things we might discern from Google’s findings, so I am labeling them lessons 3 and 4. Despite the fact that this is one company’s internal research, and as such designed to be specific to that

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    John Sadowsky Leadership & Storytelling
  • Designing better bosses for a new generation

    For the past few weeks, we have been discussing Google’s Project Oxygen, their plan to define the attributes of the best bosses at the company and to use these characteristics as guidelines to improve the performance of every manager. What are some of the things we might learn from Google’s research? Though the findings come from inside one remarkably successful

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    John Sadowsky Leadership & Storytelling
  • Google’s plan to engineer better bosses (continued)

    As we saw previously, in early 2009, Google launched a vast internal study designed to determine and share the characteristics of the company’s best managers. Statisticians examined more than 10,000 observations about managers, gleaned from performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They looked at more than 100 variables, correlating words, phrases, elements of praise, and complaints. In

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    John Sadowsky Leadership & Storytelling
  • Google’s interesting approach to HR research

    In March 2011, I read a New York Times article about management research at Google. Last week, I got to thinking that the extensive study they did there might have considerable relevance to our discussion of why people are miserable at work and what managers might do about it. With this last statement, I do not mean to imply that

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    John Sadowsky Leadership & Storytelling