John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged leadership · everything

Fast Company

Companies fire employees for these personality traits, but maybe they should be getting bonuses

Rather than treating nonconformity as a liability, companies desperate to innovate should actively recruit and strategically integrate "Rare Breeds"—rebellious, obsessed, audacious individuals whose refusal to accept conventional wisdom drives breakthrough thinking. These misfits, whose traits parents and bosses once derided as character flaws, need careful organizational management to channel their disruptive energy without destabilizing the broader team, but their presence fundamentally shifts how an organization thinks about problems and risk. The article argues that innovation isn't a mystery but rather the direct result of prioritizing unconventional talent over cultural fit.

Permalink cultureleadershipcreativitybusiness

www.forbes.com

3 High-Income Skills You Can Turn Into A Side Hustle In 2024

Rachel Wells identifies three high-income skills — project management, software development and digital marketing — that professionals can convert into profitable side hustles in 2024, advising readers to find market gaps, specialize and build a personal brand to increase demand and rates. She references demand projections and industry reports from [[U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics]] and [[Coursera]] to illustrate growth, and recommends practical routes such as consulting, creating niche services (SEO, email campaigns, branding) and freelancing via platforms like [[Toptal]] and [[Upwork]]. The piece stresses starting with smaller projects to build a portfolio, collecting client testimonials, and continuous upskilling to remain relevant as technologies reshape work, offering a pragmatic roadmap to monetize expertise alongside a day job and diversify income streams.

Permalink productivitytechnologyleadershipbusiness

www.cnbc.com

Want to sound and feel more confident? Ditch these 11 phrases from your vocabulary, say psychologists

The piece presents eleven negative self-talk phrases that undermine confidence and accomplishment, offering alternative reframes for each based on insights from behavioral scientists and psychologists. The core argument is that small linguistic shifts—from "I have to" to "I get to," from "I failed" to "this attempt didn't work," from passive to active language—can fundamentally change how we perceive challenges and our ability to overcome them. The reframes work by reducing the sense of obligation and finality in our internal dialogue, replacing fatalism with growth mindset and agency.

Permalink self-improvementcommunicationleadershippsychology

hbr.org

When Everyone’s Quitting … Except You

When widespread resignations leave established employees surrounded by newcomers, long-tenured leaders can be unfairly seen as relics of the past. Drawing on a client example, the author explains how to manage that perception and remain influential: proactively demonstrate curiosity and up-to-date skills, take visible risks through strategic projects, reframe institutional knowledge as a competitive asset, and invest in relationships with new colleagues by mentoring and listening. He advises creating a narrative that links past accomplishments to future priorities, seeking sponsors, and showcasing learning through small experiments. The goal is to replace the “long-timer” label with an image of adaptive leadership capable of guiding change while leveraging deep organizational knowledge. The piece offers practical steps for reframing your role, balancing continuity and innovation, and intentionally communicating contributions to stakeholders.

Permalink leadershipcareers

Fast Company

This is why no one wants to be a middle manager anymore

Middle managers are experiencing disproportionate stress and burnout because they're caught between executives focused on strategic transformation and cost-cutting, and frontline employees seeking flexibility and meaningful work. A Humu study found that HR leaders expect managers to drive transformation and high performance, while managers themselves are preoccupied with the immediate, grinding work of combating employee burnout and retention—a misalignment that's driving managers to job-search at twice the rate of other employees.

Permalink leadershipworkplacecareers

www.linkedin.com

10 Reasons Your Top Talent Will Leave You | Dhaval Shah (ssdhaval@yahoo.com) | LinkedIn

Research reveals widespread disconnects between employer rhetoric and employee experience: over 70% of workers feel unappreciated, more than 50% report misaligned values with their employers, and the majority lack respect for their direct supervisors. The article argues that talent retention isn't primarily about compensation or policy initiatives, but rather stems from whether leaders actively challenge employees intellectually, recognize their contributions, invest in their development, care about them personally, and follow through on commitments. Shah contends that leaders who focus on genuinely understanding and developing their people will naturally retain top talent, since employees who feel engaged, valued, and intellectually stimulated rarely leave regardless of external opportunities.

Permalink leadershipcareers

Harvard Business Review

Marginal REVOLUTION

Questions that are rarely asked (are we ready for “home college”?)

Robbins proposes a market-based alternative to traditional college: families could pool resources to hire a single highly-qualified professor to teach a small cohort through a customized first-year curriculum at roughly one-third the cost of private college tuition, with students then transferring into degree-granting institutions at the sophomore or junior level. This arrangement would provide intensive instruction in writing, research, and oral presentation skills—particularly valuable for international students—while solving the cost problem that makes selective higher education inaccessible to many families. Robbins argues that if homeschooling has achieved legitimate accreditation at the secondary level, there is no fundamental barrier to creating similar credentialing pathways for this kind of semi-private undergraduate education.

Permalink leadershipadviceeducationbusiness

Harvard Business Review

When You Feel Powerful You Talk Too Much, and Your Subordinates Perform Poorly - Andrew O’Connell - Harvard Business Review

Feeling powerful makes leaders more likely to dominate conversations and appear closed-minded, which undermines team performance—a simulation of a Mount Everest expedition found teams with dominant leaders achieved 59% of their goals versus 76% for teams with more restrained leaders. The researchers suggest organizations can counteract this tendency through egalitarian cultures, reminding leaders of their teams' value, and empowering employees to challenge overly dominant behavior.

Permalink communicationleadershippsychologyresearch

Fast Company

10 Paradoxical Traits Of Creative People | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on 91 eminent creative people reveals that they are defined by complexity—embodying ten seemingly contradictory traits simultaneously, such as being energetic yet restful, smart yet naive, playful yet disciplined, and humble yet proud. Rather than following a single formula, creative individuals succeed through resourcefulness and an ability to adapt to any situation while maintaining passion for their work itself. The defining characteristic across all creative people is their capacity to enjoy the creative process for its own sake, which sustains them through difficulty when external rewards alone would not.

Permalink leadershippsychologycreativityentrepreneurship

Richard Rodger |

Why I Have Given Up on Coding Standards | Richard Rodger

The author argues that formal coding standards are counterproductive and based on flawed reasoning rooted in developers' own ego and need for control. He traces how well-meaning programmers who internalize best practices often become dogmatic managers imposing rigid rules that don't actually improve outcomes, and contends that trusting skilled developers to make their own judgments about code quality produces better results than constraining them with standards. At his company nearForm, he abandoned coding standards entirely, instead relying on developers' professional judgment to write clean code according to context-specific needs.

Permalink philosophyprogrammingleadershipdevelopment

Vanity Fair

Michael Lewis: Obama’s Way | Vanity Fair

This wide-ranging profile follows President Obama through his daily routines, decision-making processes, and personal reflections, while interweaving the story of Captain Tyler Stark, a navigator whose F-15 crashed during the Libya intervention on Obama's orders. The piece explores how Obama approaches the presidency—his need for routine and exercise to maintain mental clarity, his basketball games where he plays as an equal rather than a figurehead, his method of staffing meetings to hear dissenting views, and his late-night habit of writing speeches by hand to clarify his own thinking. Paralleling Obama's meditation on intervention in Libya is Stark's survival story in the desert and rescue by Libyan rebels who initially mistook him for a French pilot, illustrating how a president's abstract decision reaches forward into the lives of ordinary people whose fates then circle back to constrain his political options.

Permalink leadershippoliticsmilitary

www.andismith.com

AndiSmith.com

# Don't Lose Your Head AI is making people faster at their work, but the piece examines what this speed is costing in terms of decision-making quality and human judgment. It questions whether efficiency gains from AI tools are coming at the expense of thoughtfulness and deliberation.

Permalink programmingaileadershipcareers

Harvard Business Review

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs - Harvard Business Review

Isaacson identifies key practices from Steve Jobs's career that CEOs can adopt, examining how Jobs applied imagination to technology and business across multiple industries—from personal computing to retail—while building Apple into the world's most valuable company. Rather than portraying Jobs as a flawless leader, Isaacson situates him among great American innovators like Edison and Ford whose lasting legacies stem from transforming entire industries despite personal flaws. The piece distills lessons from Jobs's dramatic arc of cofounding Apple, being ousted, and returning to rescue the company from near failure into principles applicable to contemporary business leadership.

Permalink leadershipapplebusinessentrepreneurship

Inc.com

10 Things Employees Want Most | Inc.com

This article lists ten factors that motivate employees and reduce turnover, drawing on the experience of a software company CEO who implemented a results-only work environment where staff can work anywhere, anytime, as long as they complete their tasks. The ten desires—purpose, goals, responsibility, autonomy, flexibility, attention, innovation opportunities, open-mindedness, transparency, and fair compensation—are illustrated with expert commentary and real-world examples showing how trusting employees and giving them control paradoxically increases productivity and loyalty. The underlying argument is that successful managers focus less on surveillance and rigid schedules and more on creating conditions where employees feel valued, heard, and empowered to do meaningful work.

Permalink leadershipadvicebusinesscareers

Forbes

Clayton Christensen: How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy - Forbes

Clayton Christensen argues that business schools' teaching of profit-maximization metrics like Internal Rate of Return and Return on Net Assets has systematically driven American companies to outsource their manufacturing and core expertise to foreign competitors, hollowing out entire sectors of the economy. Companies like Dell progressively shed low-margin operations to boost profitability ratios, only to discover that competitors in Taiwan and China eventually captured the entire value chain by maintaining integrated manufacturing capabilities and measuring success in absolute cash generation rather than ratios. Christensen contends that sustainable innovation and economic growth require shifting from profit-focused metrics to customer-centric strategies that prioritize continuous value delivery and competitive resilience.

Permalink leadershipbusinesseconomics

www.managementexchange.com

The Art of Impossibility | Management Innovation eXchange

The author argues that most organizations waste energy defending the status quo rather than pursuing genuinely transformative goals, using RIM's dismissal of the iPhone as a cautionary example of how companies become mentally paralyzed by threats to their established beliefs. He contends that only about 5% of organizational effort goes toward pursuing the truly impossible, while the rest gets absorbed debating incremental improvements within the realm of the "possible"—a timidity that guarantees stagnation in a world hungry for discontinuous innovation. His prescription: treat any goal the status quo considers feasible as insufficiently ambitious, and instead empower the creative renegades already inside most organizations to pursue what competitors consider impossible.

Permalink leadershipstrategyadvicebusiness

www.danpink.com

Entrepreneurs are Iron Chefs, Managers are Swedish Chefs | Daniel Pink

Saras Sarasvathy's research distinguishes entrepreneurial thinking from managerial thinking: entrepreneurs improvise with available resources like Iron Chefs working with unexpected ingredients, while corporate managers decide on a predetermined goal (Swedish meatballs) and optimize the path to achieve it efficiently. The piece explores whether this difference represents a fundamental cognitive divide in how successful business leaders approach problems.

Permalink leadershipadvicebusinessentrepreneurship