As a gay CEO who was in the closet until age 22, I’m familiar with the process of faking it. I know what it is to listen to locker room talk that’s all about girls, or to hear colleagues laugh at a male coworker with a “feminine” walk.
“Fake it till you make it” seems innocuous enough until you are trapped in a hell like I was. You may start off acting a bit brasher or more contained than your normal self. And before you know it, you’ve forced yourself into a cookie-cutter shape, eroding who you are. Worse, you have this huge, lurking fear of being found out.
This impulse to stifle who you are is present in all areas of adult life, including in the workplace.
In a world where we make snap decisions on likability and trustworthiness, the skills we need to thrive at work can be surprisingly cosmetic. Research shows that when we see ourselves as talented, others do too—regardless of whether that perception holds truth. Confidence, not competence, paves the way up the career ladder, leading to increased pay and quicker promotions.
AlbieAlbie Hecht always wanted to dunk. But at just 5-foot-10, he settled for becoming a television producer instead of playing in the NBA. Then, in the early 1990s, he began developing a series that revived his childhood dream.
“The question I posed, and which I think we answered resoundingly,” Hecht says, “was, ‘How do we let kids live out their greatest sports fantasies?’”
This was the basic idea behind NickelodeonGUTS, a show that delivered the ultimate in adolescent wish fulfillment. Every week, three teenage contestants competed in four Olympic-style, bungee-cord-enhanced events. Each half-hour episode culminated in a race up the Aggro Crag, an obstacle-loaded climbing wall that became a pop-culture touchstone among ’90s kids.
To adults, GUTS resembled a junior version of American Gladiators, but in reality, it was much different. Rather than team up to take down cartoonishly pumped-up bodybuilders, the young participants faced off against one another. The stars were teens, not superheroes. And presiding over it all was the boundlessly energetic Mike O’Malley, a host/unofficial coach who provided SportsCenter-anchor-like commentary and encouragement. This is what made Nickelodeon’s programming different: It wasn’t just about kids. It was for kids.
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Communicating is easily the single most important job of leaders. If leadership is mostly about influence–and it is–then the ability to communicate a vision and motivate people to move toward that vision is the single most important characteristic a leader can have.
The problem is, communication is hard. Sometimes people don’t understand the message we want to communicate. Sometimes we do a really poor job of expressing what we mean. In many cases, the way we communicate is directly affected by our perception of our position in a relationship, how we feel about the person we’re talking with, and our opinion on the subject of conversation.
Often those variables combine to make it more difficult than it needs to be to communicate effectively, especially when there is disagreement or emotions start to rise. In those cases, the 10-second rule can dramatically change any conversation.
It’s really quite simple: In any conversation during which the temperature has started to rise, wait 10 seconds before you respond. That’s it. Just stop. Don’t respond immediately. Instead, wait and give yourself a moment to be intentional in your response, instead of emotional. It isn’t magic, but you might be surprised at how well it works. Here’s what I mean.
Data management has bedeviled large companies for decades. Almost all firms spend a lot on it but find the results unsatisfactory. While the issue does not appear to be growing worse, resolving it is increasingly urgent as managers and companies strive to become more data-driven, leverage advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, and compete with data. In this article, we’ll explore a powerful approach to data management through the lens of “data products” and “data supply chains.”
Most companies struggle with a few common but significant data management issues.
First, companies have concentrated on the technical capabilities of data management, which are controlled by the IT function and are needed to acquire store, and move data. This is no mean feat — building technical “pipes” is a challenging job. But in so doing they have focused more on infrastructure and much less on the outputs: the data products that are used to make decisions, differentiate products and services and satisfy customers.
As the car with the blacked-out windows came to a halt in a sidestreet near Tübingen’s botanical gardens, keen-eyed passersby may have noticed something unusual about its number plate. In Germany, the first few letters usually denote the municipality where a vehicle is registered. The letter Y, however, is reserved for members of the armed forces.
Military men are a rare, not to say unwelcome, sight in Tübingen. A picturesque 15th-century university town that brought forth great German minds including the philosopher Hegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, it is also a modern stronghold of the German Green party, thanks to its left-leaning academic population. In 2018, there was growing resistance on campus against plans to establish Europe’s leading artificial intelligence research hub in the surrounding area: the involvement of arms manufacturers in Tübingen’s “cyber valley”, argued students who occupied a lecture hall that year, brought shame to the university’s intellectual tradition.
Yet the two high-ranking officials in field-grey Bundeswehr uniforms who stepped out of the Y-plated vehicle on 1 February 2018 had traveled into hostile territory to shake hands on a collaboration with academia, the like of which the world had never seen before.
The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defense ministry predict the future.
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Jürgen Wertheimer, who set up Project Cassandra: ‘Writers operate on a plane that is both objective and subjective.’ Photograph: Dominik Gigler/The Guardian
Like many people during COVID, I reevaluated what I really want my quality of life to be. I’ve lived in big cities making a high salary, but I’m single and have been intimidated by homeownership only having one income source (my job).
I’m 52, a renter, and have around $230,000 in retirement, brokerage, and savings accounts. I pared back my lifestyle, and I’m now saving $5,000 a month to play a bit of catch-up. I’ve been advised to consider real estate as part of my investment strategy. I have little debt beyond a car note ($300 a month) and a 750 credit score. Should I buy a home or invest in a property like a condo near a resort?
I am yearning for a more stable lifestyle as I age, and my family all own homes, so they are pressuring me to buy something near them in a lower-cost market. With remote working, this is now a feasible option. I would look at a 15- or a 20-year mortgage either way given my age.
Sincerely,
Too old to buy?
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Buying a home later in life involves different calculations. Getty Images
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
[Source illustration: CSA Images/iStock]
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James' World 2 