Category: Professional growth

Professional growth is about learning the rules of the game called business. These are all the subjects that you can learn in an MBA program: marketing, finance, sales, accounting, corporate strategy. Without these skills playing with big stakes is impossible, because it would be like playing a chess with no pieces.

The main topics in this category include:

Marketing
Sales
Accounting
Finance
Competitive Analysis and Strategy

The four pillars

I consider this step a bit more advanced than personal growth. You are welcome to improve all four pillars in parallel but the foundations learnt in personal growth are very important also for this category.

To continue to the detailed post about professional growth, click here.

Nine Actionable Steps to Improve Your Attitude About Life

Have you ever wished you lived someone else’s life? Someone who looks happy all the time, nothing bothers them, and they always smile. Someone who weathers every storm, keeps their cool during stressful situation, and generally performs better. Well guess what? It is not about the person, or the life, or the circumstances, the key is your attitude about life.

This article will give you nine simple and actionable steps to improve your attitude about life starting today. You will not become that person overnight, but it will happen gradually.

How to Win the Competition for Knowledge

Knowledge is the modern arena and mental models are the modern weapons. The prize is wining the competition, becoming successful.

Whether you like it or not, most of you are competing for knowledge. The professions where there is no need to constantly acquire new knowledge are limited, not really valued, and not well-paid, even though some are still essential. Change is rapid, all-encompassing, and … inevitable. Knowledge (and the ability to learn) is a superpower.

I recently read Jim Kwik’s book Unlimited (link to Goodreads). Below I have digested the book into six steps that will help you enable your mind for unlimited knowledge.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.
Henry Ford

How to Explain Project Management to Grade 1

Project management is like creating a plan to build a lego set in stages with different teams building the separate parts.

Today I am going to try to explain project management to my kid’s class of Grade 1 students. This is part of their social studies class and I am sure you could only imagine a few fields more boring that project management (at least for kids, I love my job). I have been preparing for three weeks and I feel stressed out, because these brilliant young kids ask tough questions. Like, for example, why did I pick this job, what I like the most and so on.

I remember when I started preparing the presentation, I had the idea to actually publish the outcome as a post. I am not expecting that any of you is actually a six-year-old, but I hope that you will enjoy the story that I have prepared for them.

By the end of the article, I hope that you will have a framework for simplifying future similar conversations. Ana go-to resource for sharing more information about projects, milestones, reports, and testing with your children.

People Management 101

Getting into people management as a first-time manager is all about planning, learning, preparation, execution and reflection.

Getting into people management is probably one of the most coveted steps in anyone’s career. It is also the step met with the most anxiety and maybe sometimes fear. Many people usually describe it as hitting a wall. If you get into people management you need to change your whole paradigm. Most of the qualities and skills that made you successful as an individual contributor (IC) will not be entirely applicable in your new situation.

The goal of this article is to give you a framework for the first few weeks after becoming a people manager. It is about what you need to drop and what you need to develop when getting into people management.

How to Gracefully Move to a New Team

Moving to a new team can be a win-win situation. Your old team gets to grow a new person in your footsteps and you get to grow in a new role.

Sooner or later in your career you will need to move to a new team for a variety of reasons. Additional responsibilities, new challenges, internal reorganizations. Most probably, you will need to do this multiple times in your career. The more gracefully you handle this, the better the overall results will be. And by gracefully I mean that you need to leave your old team in order, close down the professional relationships that you build in way that shows mutual respect.

In this article you will learn a few of the things that I do when I am joining a new team. I have also tried the burn the bridges technique and I must admit it has its applications, but I prefer the graceful way.