How Poor Decision-Making Affects Your Returns
In order to invest successfully, you need to be skilled at decision-making. This is true if you are a do-it-yourself investor or if you rely on recommendations from your financial advisor. The many decisions you must confront include whether or not to engage in stock picking, market timing and attempts to select an outperforming fund manager who tries to "beat the index." Making these decisions is not easy. The real way we make decisions. According to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and an authority on behavioral finance, most of the time we make decisions on autopilot, using our intuition, according to a 2014 Guardian Liberty Voice article, "Think You're Good at Decision Making? These biases, and others, play a major role in preventing us from making rational, intelligent decisions about our investments. The data on investing in index funds. What should you focus on? Be aware of your decision-making biases.
A Story from Google Shows You Don’t Need Power to Drive Strategy
Brian Fitzpatrick joined Google as a senior software engineer in 2005, shortly after the company’s IPO. Brian specialized in open-source software development and he quickly became a champion within the company for various initiatives focused on end users. One such project addressed a user’s control of his personal data. Brian started out working with two like-minded colleagues, but he soon attracted a broader team of coders and supporters. Their crowning achievement was a service launched in 2011 called Google Takeout, a unified site for exporting user data from multiple services like Gmail and Google Photos. Without any formal authority or role in organizational strategy, Brian drove broad change across the company. In our view, Brian’s work is an excellent demonstration of strategic leadership. It has become increasingly accepted that the work of strategy is no longer conducted solely from the C-suite. All these leaders demonstrated the essentials of classic strategic management.
How You Make Decisions Is as Important as What You Decide
Conventional thinking has suggested that leadership positions go to those who aggressively plan their careers with a keen eye for building the right skills to reach top jobs. Others believe that leaders are born, not made. But according to research one of us (Julia) conducted for her book Pivot Points, the key differentiator between the career arc of someone who becomes a successful business leader and the average person is consistency in how the person makes major decisions. In-depth one-on-one interviews with five recognized leaders who have been operating CEOs in five different industries—PR (Al Golin), health care (Glen Tullman), finance (John Rogers), social enterprise (Dale Dawson), and marketing (Bud Frankel)—revealed that their leadership development occurred in a process far more organic than career planning. Each one made a number of pivotal decisions with unwaveringly strong accountability and ingenuity that triggered learning and growth.
Does Technology Impact a Child's Emotional Intelligence? | Suren Ramasubbu
Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves define Emotional Intelligence (EI) as the "ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships." How has technology impacted EI, especially among digital natives? Daniel Goleman, author of several books on the subject, says that the expanding hours spent alone with gadgets and digital tools could lower EI due to shrinkages in the time young people spend in face-to-face interactions. Quite rightly, as technologies divert our attention away from a realistic present, there exists the danger of disconnect that decreases EI. But can the effect be quantified, or at least qualified? Or is it hokum? If self-awareness is defined as the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals, the digital age does indeed have a sizable impact on self-awareness.
Why You Need Emotional Intelligence to Succeed | Dr. Travis Bradberry
When emotional intelligence first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70 percent of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into what many people had always assumed was the sole source of success -- IQ. Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. Emotional Intelligence is the "something" in each of us that is a bit intangible. Personal competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior. Emotional Intelligence, IQ, and Personality Are Different
Job satisfaction jumped in 2014, report says
Job satisfaction increased last year for the first time in four years as an improving economy gave employers more flexibility in hiring and workers more confidence to seek out jobs they really want, according to a report released Tuesday by the Society for Human Resources Management. Eight-six percent of U.S. employees reported overall satisfaction with their jobs last year, up from 81 percent in 2013. It's the biggest jump since the trade association started conducting the annual survey in 2002. The job satisfaction rate had decreased steadily from a high of 86 percent in 2009 to 81 percent in 2012 and 2013. When the employees surveyed were asked what factors they considered "very important" for job satisfaction, the top response was "respectful treatment of all employees at all levels," followed by "trust between employees and senior management." Still, pay is important. The survey sample included 600 randomly selected individuals who were employed in full- or part-time roles.
The Personality Traits That Will Get You Hired
When you're interviewing for a job, you know you need to sell the hiring manager on why your background, skills and industry experience are a match for the position. But there's one crucial piece of the puzzle that you shouldn't overlook: Is your personality right for the job? "When companies are assessing job candidates, they're looking for ... someone who is not only proficient in a particular function, but also has the right personality," said Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at career resource and job-listing site CareerBuilder. "It's important to highlight soft skills that can give employers an idea of how quickly you can adapt and solve problems, whether you can be relied on to follow through, and how effectively you can lead and motivate others." According to a 2014 CareerBuilder study, these are the top 10 traits employers seek out in candidates: Hiring experts and business leaders weighed in on other specific personality types they look for in a new hire.
