My last HBR blog post, How to Close a Sales Call, reviewed sales call closing techniques. Now let's analyze whether or not you are a natural born closer. The drive to take command of a situation is instrumental to a salesperson's success. Salespeople with a weak dominance instinct are never quite in control of an account. They operate under the direction of customers or are at the mercy of the competition. They also find it more difficult to close the sale because they are uncomfortable exerting their will over the customer. Dominance is gaining the willing obedience of the customer. ... [Link] [Cache]

Until recently, I hadn't really known any great leaders. As a writer, the highest-ranking people I deal with are editors, and they're pretty much just writers who have gotten lazy. The only thing an editor has ever led me into is a bar. So my images of leadership were based mainly on movies and sports. I figured great leaders did a lot of alpha-male yelling and inspirational speechmaking. To me, the epitome of leadership was when a baseball player is yelling at the umpire and about to get ejected and his manager runs out to the field to jump in ... [Link] [Cache]

Over the 23 years since we met, my wife Eleanor and I have spent considerable time, money, and energy on our development. Individually and together, we've taken workshops, studied meditation, practiced yoga, written in journals, talked about our dreams, participated in training programs, and gone to therapy. A few weeks ago, we were taking a walk along a rural road, questioning why we do it. Is all this inner work simply navel gazing? Or does it impact our lives in a real way? Just as we were exploring the question, we turned a bend and heard a loud party at ... [Link] [Cache]

People talk about Francis Bacon as the last person to know everything. Apparently, these people don't know any 15-year-old girls. Because these girls know everything. And they just can't believe we don't. And parents! Don't get them started. Plus, 15-year-olds are preternaturally alert. Nothing gets past them. I was reminded of this at MTV recently, where I ran into Nick Shore, a brilliant guy with whom I worked years ago. Back then, we were working as consultants for a big American brand and we wanted to talk to teens, teen girls specifically. Nick and I knew one thing for certain: ... [Link] [Cache]

Facebook's shares open for trading today. Chances are, you're holding your breath or rolling your eyes. Whether you're inspired or baffled about the company's valuation and prospects, the occasion is hard to ignore. What we are witnessing, and participating in, is more than an IPO. It's a collective rite. The event will sanction Mark Zuckerberg's place in the pantheon of innovative entrepreneurs who built fortunes upon technologies that changed the world, or more precisely, that changed the way people experienced and lived in the world. At a time when identities and communities are as fluid as ever, Zuckerberg grasped, before ... [Link] [Cache]

While Facebook's rise took many by surprise, its success was little surprise to the hundreds of researchers who study social interactions in neuroscience labs across the country. Over the last decade, these neuroscientists have uncovered some unexpected quirks of the brain, that all link to one big idea: we are far more socially oriented, at the level of brain structure and systems, than we account for in daily life. Why does this matter? It certainly matters to Google, or to any organization wanting to get people's attention. Yet this insight also has a dark side that deserves some airtime too. ... [Link] [Cache]

Polymath is one of those words more likely to show up on the SAT than in everyday conversation. But the reason we don't use the word much these days has less to do with vocabulary than it has to do with practicality: there aren't a lot of polymaths around anymore. In case you don't have your pocket dictionary handy, a polymath is a person with a wide range of knowledge or learning. Think people like Leonardo da Vinci artist and helicopter designer , Benjamin Franklin founding father, inventor, and all-around lady-killer , Paul Robeson scholar, athlete, actor, and civil rights ... [Link] [Cache]

Facebook "goes public" Friday, May 18th. Imagine what it might be like inside the company right now. Soon, paper stock option agreements tucked into employee compensation folders could erupt into cascades of real dollars. Maybe employees will soon barge through the doors and board shuttle busses to the BMW dealerships, software bugs be damned. Or something like that. What is it really like to work at a company when it "goes public?" And what happens afterward? How will Mark Zuckerberg hold on to the people who make the company what it is, now that many of them will be independently ... [Link] [Cache]

An interview with Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever. This interview is featured in the forthcoming June issue of HBR. Download this podcast A written transcript will be available by May 24. [Link] [Cache]

In my last blog post, I encouraged thoroughly investigating the culture you're thinking of joining. In the comments, some people agreed they needed to learn about culture but were unsure how to approach it. A few were skeptical. I believe you can learn about culture, even in the early stages. Here are suggestions about how to structure your inquiry. To get started, be clear what culture to learn about. In a large institution, there may be big differences across departments. Cultures also can be moving targets. Large institutions may change with their environment. In start-ups, expect everything to be different ... [Link] [Cache]

Three-quarters of the world's CEOs say more emphasis should be placed on measuring the value of non-financial assets such as intellectual capital and customer relationships. This was the headline finding of a recent study PDF by the American Institute of CPAs and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. Considering the sponsors, it's sort of like the Army reporting that what we really need is more battleships. Unexpected, to say the least. But let's give our financial colleagues credit for acknowledging the fundamental imbalance that the CEOs are referring to. Companies spend countless hours tracking financials: assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses, and ... [Link] [Cache]

Tony Schwartz's recent post The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time made a convincing case for staying focused. His claim that multitasking reduces individual productivity by about 25% is well supported by a mountain of research and other evidence. Schwartz argues that it's up to individuals and managers to avoid the multitasking trap. But I look at it a different way: ultimately, it's up to institutions to make sure employees are focused. Businesses and government agencies that are serious about improving productivity need to tackle this as an organizational initiative. With increasing automation in every aspect of organizational ... [Link] [Cache]

For anyone running a sales organization, the 48 hours before a pipeline presentation are the worst days of the month. The pipeline meeting is where you tell management your team's sales forecast for the next month, and no matter how good your numbers were last month, your work life is a mess. In the days and weeks leading up to this point, you've had everyone send you their individual and team projections. You've told them, "Update me on the deals you've been working on, tell me about the new ones, estimate when they are going to close, and give me ... [Link] [Cache]

Each year, twenty million babies worldwide are born prematurely or with a low birth weight, and four million of them die, most in developing nations. Those who survive often suffer from low IQ, diabetes, and heart disease when they reach adulthood. According to the World Health Organization, 75% of these deaths and ailments could be averted by simply keeping these premature babies warm. Unfortunately, current options for warming babies in developing nations are either expensive or unsafe. The incubators sold in Western countries cost up to $20,000 and require electricity — which is unreliable in developing nations. And ad-hoc solutions ... [Link] [Cache]

What do your innovators want? What do they need from you? Earlier this month, we invited the HBR community on Twitter to share their personal insights into what they need to be at their most innovative. "What can your organizations do to help you?" we asked. "If you tell us, we will pass your comments on." A spirited conversation followed, one whose very richness demonstrates just what a challenge fostering innovation really is. Innovators are, almost by definition, a diverse lot, and our discussion made it clear that different people need different things to be innovative, some of which are ... [Link] [Cache]

Every day brings some new bit of information — or hype — about social business. If you actively follow the social space, it's easy to get caught in the never-ending stream. If you don't, you may find all the talk about social overwhelming. So it's useful to step back, gain some perspective and see the bigger picture. And it is a big picture. Communication revolutions like this have happened before, but you have to go back to Gutenberg in 1450 to find one as significant. Before Gutenberg's printing press, monks laboriously produced written manuscripts and few people could read. The ... [Link] [Cache]

Ever been shut down by someone who supposedly knows more than you? It happens to me daily. I get denied by people that are more senior, more polished, and more knowledgeable than me. I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed professional rejection, but I try my best to dust myself off and move forward, reminding myself that that a series of controlled failures are necessary for eventual success. Not surprisingly, I'm not the only one getting ignored because of my inexperience, and the rejections can be downright vicious. Just last week, Kate called me in tears after attending a ... [Link] [Cache]

The new millennium has not brought much progress for women seeking top leadership roles in the workplace. Although female graduates continue to pour out of colleges and professional schools, the percentages of women running large companies, or serving as managing partners of their law firms, or sitting on corporate boards have barely budged in the past decade. Why has progress stalled? A recent study suggests the unlikeliest of reasons: the marriage structure of men in the workplace. A group of researchers from several universities recently published a report on the attitudes and beliefs of employed men, which shows that those ... [Link] [Cache]

You want to start a business. So you need a plan, right? No. Not really. As part of the research for a book I'm co-authoring — Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, due out in August from HBR Press — my colleagues and I interviewed and surveyed hundreds of successful entrepreneurs around the globe to better understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur and build a really great business. One of our most striking findings was that of the entrepreneurs we surveyed who had a successful exit that is, an IPO or sale to another firm , about 70% did ... [Link] [Cache]

You probably think that the barriers to innovation are negative elements of your organization — that is, the wrong people, behaviors, and processes. But the most subtle and pernicious barriers to innovation may be the seemingly positive myths about what has made your organization successful. Every organization has myths about who are the great leaders, what are the behaviors to admire and imitate, what business you are in, what customers want, what are the best skills to run a process. Whenever someone proposes an idea, it is explicitly or implicitly screened with the myths. Unfortunately, the competitive landscape changes, but ... [Link] [Cache]

HP announced in March that it was combining its printer and personal computer businesses. According to CEO Meg Whitman, "The result will be a faster, more streamlined, performance-driven HP that is customer focused." But that remains to be seen. The merging of the two businesses is a reversal for HP. In 2005, HP split off the printer business from the personal computer business, dissolved the Customer Solutions Group CSG which was a sales and marketing organization that cut across product categories, and pushed selling responsibilities down to the product business units. The goal was to give each business unit greater ... [Link] [Cache]

Technology is meant to serve us. Instead it increasingly runs us — and runs us down. Where we put our focus shapes our agenda and defines our experience in every moment. More and more, we're turning over this precious resource to our digital technology, allowing it to define the depth and span of our attention, and to seduce us into operating at such high speeds that we don't notice the insidious toll that's taking. I see it in myself, as I fight to stay focused on what's most important, and to resist the urgent, addictive, Pavlovian pull of my digital ... [Link] [Cache]

People get awfully excited about quotas. So do countries. After Norway's lead in 2008, gender quotas on corporate boards have been rolling out in a whole series of countries: Spain, then France, the Netherlands, even Italy voted them in. EU Commissioner Viviane Reding is pushing hard, and if she has her say, and if companies continue to make so little progress unassisted, quotas are likely to become an EU reality within the next few years. Managers in Anglo-Saxon countries hate the idea. And perhaps there's a better alternative: harness the power of investors. New York City's public pension fund has ... [Link] [Cache]

Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor and HASTAC cofounder, shares new ways to collaborate, share, and learn, which make teams more productive. She is the author of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. [Link] [Cache]

If you've spent any amount of time in executive retreats or leadership off-sites, you've probably been asked to participate in a familiar evaluation of your career and impact. "Take twenty minutes," a facilitator will say, "and write your professional obituary. What legacy did you leave? What contribution did you make? What might colleagues remember about you?" At one level, it's a strange and slightly morbid exercise. At another level, it serves a worthwhile purpose — encouraging leaders to see themselves the way their colleagues see them, to evaluate their long-term impact from the perspective of people who feel that impact. ... [Link] [Cache]