Every company wants to know how to find and keep highly talented women in the workplace.

American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important.

Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice....Identify a person's strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.

No idea will work if people don't trust your intentions toward them.

As a general rule, people tend to do best what they enjoy doing most.

Too many of the organizations I have observed resemble a farm in Kansas. They have lots of fences and silos as well as a storm cellar.

Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we're taking on too much, but because we're taking on too little of what really strengthens us.