A good friend told me her New Year’s resolution is giving up gossip. I don’t hear that very often, so it got me thinking. The Oxford Dictionary defines gossip as “casual or unconstrained conversation about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true.” Destructive gossip That negative spin might explain why most leaders respond skeptically to office grapevines. Destructive forms of gossip are all too familiar: Spreading “dirt” and mis

Like most humans, I have a strong bias towards certainty. When my wife became pregnant for the first time, I rushed to a bookstore to purchase three books on how to get ready for a baby. Reading the books calmed me down. I now had confidence that I now knew how to behave in the delivery room, change a diaper, speak in a soothing voice to both baby and mom. Of course, it turned out that I didn’t know much about any of these. In the delivery room, I offered ice chips – a

Regarding the recent government shutdown a couple quotes caught my attention: “We’re very excited. It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it.” –Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on the government shutdown, as quoted by the Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2013 “We are winning…It doesn’t really matter to us” how long the shutdown lasts “because what matters is the end result.” –a senior Obama administration official, quoted anonymously in the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 4, 2013 “Bei