The Professional Business Coaches: Blog

What's All This Blockchain Stuff About?

Trust in Yourself!

When the likes of Facebook and Starbucks are getting into blockchain technology, you just know it's time to at least give it some thought. For 40 years now, we have had a love-hate relationship with the Internet. Try to imagine all the information you've sent out into cyberspace. And remember that all those emails, documents, photos, and personal data are copies of originals that become part of the tsunami of trivia that is subject to tampering and...

To Buy or Ally? That is the Question!

Here are some worrisome statistics from The Journal of Finance: On average, companies that take over others have a 10% reduction in wealth over five years post-acquisition. And up to 55% of all alliances fall flat with losses accruing to both firms. It seems that too many company executives have a narrow-minded view of takeovers and alliances, seeing them mistakenly as equivalent strategies. But the two are definitely not the same, even if an alliance involves acquiring a...

Are You a Truly Effective Business Leader?

Self-development towards executive effectiveness must be learned and practiced. How often and how well do you practice the following habits? We define habits as the synergy of knowledge, experience, skill, and motivation. Take time to reflect on each item in the PBC leader's checklist. Then rate yourself on a scale of zero to 10. Zero means you never perform that action, while a rating of 10 means you can recall numerous occasions when you leveraged this habit to the benefit...

The Happiest People Spend Money to Buy Time

Our working lives are first and almost exclusively about the money. Too often the dollar trumps the dream in our organizational culture. We also struggle to prioritize time over money in our mind. We have biases that equate "busyness" with status and prestige. We also have guilt complexes about buying time but feel less guilty about spending our money on stuff.

So here are some mind-shifting ideas that can lead to rational habits, which can significantly upgrade your life.

Plan leisure time ...

Rethinking "Task Delay" aka Procrastination

Frank Partnoy, in his excellent book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, makes the compelling case that procrastination is not only our middle name, it is also an essential survival tactic in modern business life. We all have so many tasks demanding our attention and only 16 of 24 waking hours (see our February newsletter "Six Secrets of The REM Realm"), so that kicking those cans down the road is inevitable. The problems come when we procrastinate badly. Yes, it comes in two...