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Showing posts from July, 2010

HBR: Paths to Power by Jeff Pfeffer

"Power is the organization’s last dirty secret." ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter POWER IS REQUIRED IF ONE WANTS TO GET ANYTHING DONE in any large organization. Unfortunately, Power doesn’t just fall into one’s lap: one will have to go after it and learn how to use it. Stanford University professor for Organizational Development, Prof. Jeffery Pfeffer, argues that being uncomfortable with Power Dynamics has cost career promotions (and sometimes, the job) to many talented people from premier organizations and institutes including Harvard and Sloan. Pfeffer offers a primer on why power matters, how to get it, and how to use it to advance your organization's agenda - and thus, in turn, how to furthering your career, not just incidentally. Powerful people prevail by using various techniques when push comes to shove. With examples from real-life and historical accounts from corporate and national political scenarios Pfeffer illustrates many of these techniques. (Interestingly, Pfeffer

Steve Jobs' Presentation Skills Reflects Why Apple is Apple

"This changes everything. Again" AFTER THE WORLD'S LARGEST PRODUCT LAUNCH EVENT YET, on July 16 Steve Jobs did the press conference following the recent keynote for the world's largest IT organization that Jobs staged for the eleventh year running after his return in '99 to the (then struggling) company he originally co-founded in '76 as Apple Computers Inc. Over the last two and an half years since the launch of the first iPhone, the competition has grown (and perished ) in the smartphone product space. The information hungry, instantaneously reacting, viral population of Social Media 'journalism' was increasingly demanding of this Silicon Valley veteran from 1, Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, USA. Apparently, Apple's latest offering of iPhone 4 smartphone with services from AT&T ran into media highlighted issues of a certain "loop antenna" problem where the device was dropping calls if the user happened to hold the device in a