IS ENGLISH IMPORTANT FOR YOU AND YOUR CAREER?

101 countries. Nearly 340 million native speakers. Over 1/3 of the world's population understand the language. PORTAL’s Business English club works for developers, creative directors, producers, product managers, entrepreneurs, CEOs, freelancers, non-profit leaders. It works for people in design, finance, HR, marketing, sales, management and every other part of the ecosystem. Mostly, it works for people who are in a hurry. It’s possible to do more, learn more and make more of a change. And it’s possible right now!

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YOUNG WOMEN ARE STILL LESS LIKELY TO NEGOTIATE A JOB OFFER. WHY?

Nearly a decade ago, Carnegie Mellon University researchers surveyed a group of graduating college students and found just 7 percent of women said they'd tried to negotiate their initial job offers, compared to a whopping 57 percent of men.

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HOW GM USES SOCIAL MEDIA TO IMPROVE CARS AND CUSTOMER SERVICE

In 1933, General Motors President and CEO Alfred Sloan established the automobile industry’s first full-time consumer research department under the direction of Henry “Buck” Weaver, a pioneer in market-based decision making. Weaver’s staff sent three million mailings a year to GM and non-GM customers, achieving a remarkable 25% response rate. People were asked about GM products, upholstery textures, colours, vehicle designs, and technology, and their feedback was incorporated into GM vehicles. The approach was so novel that Time magazine featured Weaver on its cover in November 1938, reporting that his research led to 185 vehicle improvements, ranging from longer bumpers and rubber-padded pedals to air conditioning and the partial elimination of running boards.

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ECONOMIC MODELS SAY WE MAKE RATIONAL CHOICES. DO WE?

For years, economists and psychologists have argued about whether the standard model that economists use to explain how people make decisions is correct. It says that people make rational choices: they weigh all the options against a well-defined set of preferences to choose the one which makes them happiest or is the most valuable to them.

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WHAT THE DALAI LAMA TAUGHT DANIEL GOLEMAN ABOUT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Two decades before Daniel Goleman first wrote about emotional intelligence in the pages of HBR, he met his holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama at Amherst College, who mentioned to the young science journalist for the New York Times that he was interested in meeting with scientists. Thus began a long, rich friendship as Goleman became involved over the years in arranging a series of what he calls “extended dialogues” between the Buddhist spiritual leader and researchers in fields ranging from ecology to neuroscience. Over the next 30 years, as Goleman has pursued his own work as a psychologist and business thinker, he has come to see the Dalai Lama as a highly uncommon leader. And so he was understandably delighted when, on the occasion of his friend’s 80^th birthday, he was asked to write a book describing the Dalai Lama’s compassionate approach to addressing the world’s most intractable problems. Force for Good, which draws both on Goleman’s background in cognitive science and his long relationship with the Dalai Lama, is both an exploration of the science and the power of compassion and a call to action.  Curious about the book and about how the Dalai Lama’s views on compassion informed Goleman’s thinking on emotional intelligence, I caught up with Goleman over the phone. What follows are edited excerpts from our conversation...

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WHY REMOTE WORK THRIVES IN SOME COMPANIES AND FAILS IN OTHERS

Since people began telecommuting decades ago, companies have been excited about the prospects to increase productivity, reduce costs, and gain access to a much larger talent pool.

But has remote work lived up to the hype? In some organizations, yes. Automattic (the creator of WordPress) and the U.S. government are two good — and very different — examples.

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BRING IN OUTSIDE EXPERTS TO MENTOR YOUR TEAM

Organisations depend increasingly on independent, temporary workers, even for mission-critical work. We call this subset of freelancers who do strategic work in companies or nonprofit organisations agile talent. They contribute technical expertise that an organisation does not already have a critical project or initiative. By providing temporary support, they make it possible for organisations to resource their critical activities more cost efficiently.

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3 WAYS TO UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY

The Formula 1 season will begin later this month, pitting the most talented drivers in the most finely honed machines against one another.

The image of a car designer sitting at a computer, working on a complex 3D visualization, is consistent with our perception of a ‘creative person’, but you may not immediately think about the act of driving a Formula 1 car as a creative process.

In fact, drivers are continuously finding inspired ways to take full advantage of every opportunity provided by their car, the conditions and their competitors. The world of Formula 1 represents a fascinating laboratory for exploring human creativity through drivers and their teams.

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SEVEN STEPS TOWARD BETTER CRITICAL THINKING

It's been said that the problems you encounter in life stem not so much from what you don't know, but from what you know for sure that isn't so. Who said it? We don't know, although many people are certain that it was Mark Twain. More on that later. For now, why would it be less hazardous—to your health, to productivity, to happiness—to not know a whole bunch of things than to believe things that aren't true? Because if you're sure that you know something, you act on it with the strength of conviction and resolve.

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WHY SUCCESS ALWAYS STARTS WITH FAILURE

I'm half-way through reading Tim Harford's book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. So far, the book is brilliant.

Anyone who's wondered why it's so difficult to find leaders who can provide us with solutions to today's problems should read this book.

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3 TIPS TO HELP YOU HAVE A MORE PRODUCTIVE DAY, TODAY

When a major product is about to launch or your team is scheduled to make an important presentation, it’s easy to ride the wave of deadline-induced adrenaline spikes and push yourself to work every waking moment. But of course that’s not sustainable, and we inevitably crash. So how can you make productivity habitual and lasting?

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HOW TO BECOME MORE RESILIENT

Many of our woes begin with language. For example, consider the difference between believing life happens to you and thinking life happens. Those two extra words create the potential for disastrous results: depression, uncertainty, anxiety, guilt. Traveling a different track affords you a level of personal responsibility that proves freeing.

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8 LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Napoleon, Empress Wu, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Oliver Cromwell, Akbar, Stalin. History provides many examples of strong leaders who left their marks, for better or for worse.

But what the past will not do is provide the magic formula for how to become an effective leader. Looking for clear lessons in history is a futile quest: there are too many and their meaning is always in dispute. History can be useful, however, in suggesting patterns and parallels, raising questions, and – equally important – giving warnings about why things go wrong.

So here, from one historian, are first some tips about what goes into the making of a successful leader and, second, warnings about what can bring failure.

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HOW TO HAVE AN AWKWARD CONVERSATION AT WORK, MINDFULLY

I’ve developed a theory that the biggest driver of mindlessness at work comes from lack of communication. Most times, this is connected to the conversations we’re not having about our values, or about the boundaries we set (or don’t set) around how we live, honour, or uphold these values at work. You know the type of conversation I am talking about: the really uncomfortable one, where you know what you need to say is going to be awkward and might displease or disappoint another person.

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WHY ENGLISH IS SUCH A DIFFICULT LANGUAGE TO LEARN

I am often asked why English is such a difficult language to learn, for non-native speakers. In fact, how hard it is to learn depends on what your native language is; and this follows as languages are more (or less) closely related to one another; if your mother tongue is more similar, in terms of sounds, vocabulary and grammatical patterns to another--for instance you're a speaker of Dutch or German--then English will be easier to learn. But if you speak a language that comes from a more distantly related tongue--say Japanese--then English is more likely to prove a tougher nut to crack.

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CAN WE TEACH INTELLIGENCE?

Hardly any other psychological concept is as important to us as intelligence. We want to make intelligent choices, be able to keep up an intelligent conversation, and simply be intelligent people. Not surprisingly, scientists have investigated intelligent and less intelligent behaviour for decades. A wide array of different, sometimes even contradicting definitions of intelligence and tests of intelligence have emerged as a result.

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THE 1-MINUTE TRICK TO NEGOTIATING LIKE A BOSS

Life is full of negotiations, big and small. We negotiate for raises, we negotiate with clients and providers over prices, and we negotiate for more staff, the best projects, and flex time. (Then we go home and negotiate with our kids about how old you have to be to get your own smartphone.)

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THE KEY TO GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE

This is the story of how I learned the key to great customer service.

I’d come down to New York for HSM’s World Innovation Forum. The first day of the conference, customer service guru and Zappos chief Tony Hsieh gave his spiel about Zappos being a service company that just happened to sell shoes. In fact, he said, their primary business wasn’t even delivering shoes or clothing. It was delivering happiness. He talked about how they hire — and fire — on their core values, how they’d developed and refined those values over the course of several years, and how their company mission was grounded in the latest science of what makes people happy. There was a music video and a PowerPoint. We got his book, Delivering Happiness, free in our conference bags. It was all compelling, inspiring stuff.

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PRINCIPLES FOR THE MODERN LEADER

We’re all aware that there are timeless leadership principles that have been true since the dawn of time and that will continue to be valid in tomorrow’s business environment. Things like integrity, honesty, and personal responsibility immediately come to mind. While those are all vital traits, they’re not the leadership traits I’m addressing right now. In today’s world of technology-driven transformation, leaders need to embrace a new leadership principle if they want their organization to be relevant today and in the future.

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DO YOU SPEAK THE MOST POWERFUL LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD?

There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, but some 2,000 of them count fewer than 1,000 speakers. Moreover, just 15 accounts for half of the languages spoken in the world.

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