What makes effective teams? Google found the answer.

Peter Drucker famously said, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

Some people are linchpins. And the skills they possess that make them special are anything but "soft"

This post was originally published in 2017 and updated in 2026. Why it might be time to adjust your drug-testing policy The headline in a recent Washington Post article caught my attention: “ Companies need workers — but people keep getting high .” The article outlines the twin challenges employers have in today’s environment: unemployment rates are dropping and more applicants are failing pre-employment drug tests due to marijuana. Marijuana is no longer considered a men

The clanking of weights. The thump of bass from a Bluetooth speaker. The squeak of sneakers on rubber mats. People sucking wind and...

This post was originally published in 2017 and updated in 2026. Employers accommodate their employees’ work & home responsibilities to win the War for Talent Maybe you saw the story about Fifth Third announcing a concierge service for new moms. It's either a genius move by a savvy company intent on hanging on to valuable employees or it’s another egregious example of coddling millennials. Wait, millennials? Aren’t millennials, like, just graduating from college? Aren’t they

Not that long ago, an idea began to circulate that the U.S. economy was going to run out of workers. Consulting firms began pushing the...

This post was originally published in 2017 and updated in 2026. Not too long ago, I attended a networking luncheon where the speaker talked about the successes and challenges of taking over her family’s business and growing it into a multi-state enterprise with 500+ employees. She was candid when she revealed her three greatest challenges: lack of confidence—a foible not uncommon in women; lack of practical business experience—though she was a college graduate, she was young;

Are you OK with limiting your already tight candidate pool with unnecessary and irrelevant criteria? Maybe you saw the tweet on Friday by...

Research shows that candidates who are different from an otherwise homogenous group of finalists stand little chance of getting hired,...

Why it’s important to be considered on a list of great places to work. And what to do if you weren’t. Columbus CEO magazine released its...

Thinking about work-from-home policies

“Competition for talent is fierce,” says Andrea Applegate, president of Applegate Talent Strategies. Over two decades of experience on...

Corporate social responsibility has been added to the growing list of demands that investors, customers and employees present to companies.

Lessons about culture and core values from Astronaut Mike Massimino's autobiography

This post was originally published in 2017 and updated in 2026. Organizations are built on the work of people who don’t get paid very much, don’t receive sufficient respect and are understandably wary of the promises they’ve been hearing for years. Calling these folks the bottom of the org chart doesn’t help. Imagine that throughout your career you were paid as little as legally possible, the last to be hired and the first to be laid off. Imagine that the boss gets more vac

A piece from Fistful of Talent talking about Uber's culture under CEO Travis Kalanick

What happens if we get rid of the rules and replace them with trust and communication?

Asking yourself three simple questions each week can help you avoid the false hustle It’s easy to be busy; it’s hard to be productive....

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a resignation is just a resignation. It’s true. There are occasions when people leave your company for benign and justifiable reasons: pursuing an opportunity one would be foolish to pass up; following one’s spouse for a new job in a faraway city; opting out of the workforce to care for a new baby or an elderly family member. It doesn’t matter how great the job is or how awesome your company is, they need to leave. But more often than n

What does it mean to structure your jobs so employees can accommodate both their home and work responsibilities -- and how this differs from work-life balance in important ways.

AC/DC brought the rock to my hometown over the Labor Day weekend.