Soft Skills - Ask a Wharton MBA
Develop Soft Skills – Work Smart & Live More
With my new job, I have had many opportunities to learn useful and simple presentation tips. In the last 3 months, I attended two conferences and three Town Hall presentations led by senior leaders. Each one was memorable in its own way. In this article, I summarized four simple presentation tips I learned from watching how these leaders engaged my attention during their presentations. ...
It is critical to your mental and physical health to know How to Stop Thinking about Work. This post is written for my benefit and yours, if you find yourself in a similar situation.
During the last six weeks, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about work. I love my new job, and theoretically I am only working about 40 hours a week, 8:30 am to about 5:30pm, Monday through Friday. I don’t take my computer home, and I only look at my work phone at home to check on my meeting schedule for the next day. ...
Stanford Professor Carol Dweck developed this concept in her 2006 book – Mindset – The New Psychology for Success. In there, she provides the following Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset definitions:
“In a fixed mindset, students believe that their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset, students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think that everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they that believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.” ...
A month ago, every morning at 5 AM, I found myself consumed by worry. As the head of a newly created digital experience strategy team, I inherited two team members to help build our capabilities. Three weeks in, I realized they both had significant gaps in skill, experience, and motivation necessary to produce the high-quality output I envision. ...
Two weeks ago, I heard Ed Gilligan, the President of American Express (AMEX), speak at a Leadership Conference in Arizona. After listening to him for an hour, I said to myself – “I want to work for him!” His speech was the highlight of the conference. Even though I didn’t know Ed, I had a glimpse of the type of leader he is through the stories he shared. ...
Every presenters have one common goal – keep the audience’s attention. That’s why it’s important to use effective presenting tips to engage your audience. The last thing you want from your audience during a presentation is a yawn. Or nodding off. Or fiddling with their mobile phones. You don’t want a scene that puts your hours and hours of preparation down the drain. You want people to absorb your main points and have a remarkable experience during your talk. ...
Last week, Sarah, a fellow Wharton classmate, asked me this question: “How do I find my next career opportunity if I am a generalist? Do I need to figure out what function I want to specialize in first?.” Here is the background of Sarah’s story.
Sarah loves working with people and she has worked in a varieties of roles leading many teams from marketing, HR, to project management and operations in the last 15 years. Now she is wondering whether she is focused enough to keep progressing in the current company and how to find the next career opportunity. ...