Beauty and busi­ness are not nec­es­sar­ily top­ics you’d think of as going together, but most of us have heard of stud­ies link­ing good looks and career advance­ment. It cer­tainly doesn’t seem fair, but is it true? In a strange choice of Christ­mas spe­cial, the Econ­o­mist recently took a look at the issue. Not known for its sen­sa­tion­al­ist report­ing, the mag­a­zine nonethe­less came up with some pretty star­tling (and dis­il­lu­sion­ing) con­clu­sions. Among their most galling find­ings: dumb blond jokes aside, beauty is actu­ally cor­re­lated with intelligence.

A leader has to be many things to many men. But this is one of the best descrip­tions I’ve ever heard of what a leader is.

50 Ways to Foster a Culture of Innovation">

I’ve been doing a lot of Orga­ni­za­tional Devel­op­ment related work the past nine years. In fact, even before any­one told me that I was doing Orga­ni­za­tional Devel­op­ment, I was actu­ally doing it already. Before, OD was merely about train­ing. And so OD depart­ments made train­ing pro­grams and took care of train­ing sys­tems and gave inter­nal train­ings and sent peo­ple to exter­nal train­ing. But over the years, there is a real­iza­tion that there are other ways to develop an orga­ni­za­tion aside from train­ing. OD has to do with mak­ing the whole orga­ni­za­tion become a more well-oiled machine, first by inter­ven­ing in per­for­mance man­age­ment, but now, also by inter­ven­ing in cul­ture build­ing. Orga­ni­za­tions have goals (they call it Vision and Mis­sion, or Objec­tives and Targets).

5 Ways to Speak Like Barrack Obama">

This one is from Sims Wyeth, who is “a trainer and con­sul­tant in speeches, pre­sen­ta­tions, and high stakes conversations.”

I like the title. But I like the arti­cle more so I’m shar­ing it. The orig­i­nal post is here.

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs spoke to the grad­u­at­ing class of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. This is the first part of a speech that made a great impres­sion on me when I first read it. Great read!