It’s difficult to know what is going on behind the doors at Samsung but you can bet their resilience and its kissing cousin agility are being severely tested. After discovering that their new Galaxy Note 7 (not so) mart phone’s battery caught fire numerous times, they were quick to pull it from the market place. They thought they found the guilty producer and believed they corrected the error that ignited the lithium-ion batteries. Now round two of battery fires have...

One of my clients this past week told me that after a day of meeting with her manager mapping out an end of year plan, she kept working well into the evening hammering out the details of the plan to share with him the next morning. After his review, he told her to take a few days off from the project so she could get a fresh perspective. It seemed as if he thought that her project plan faltered as...

Ever since I wrote a book on career development over 20 years ago, I’ve always coached people on their careers.  I love talking to people about how they can get the most out of their calling. I developed a tradition, early on, that whenever someone would tell me that they had left their job, I would congratulate them. It didn’t matter if they left of their own accord or if they were fired or downsized. Reframing their situation as an...

It’s easy to talk about building resilience when we have time to recover from adversity and difficulty. We can process what happened, build a plan for recovery and look for opportunities to do better the next time. What do you do, however when things don’t go so well in the middle of the day. No one expects their day to be perfect and finding that you lose an important contract, forget to submit a report to your boss, or hear...

My friend Facebooked a new picture of her 9-year-old daughter, Katie with a clarinet in her hand announcing that she was taking on a new challenge in the musical world. Along with her extracurricular activities in Tae-Kwon-Do, computer programming, robotics, and playing with her dog, this youngster has a constant smile on her face especially when challenged with something new to master. I kidded my friend today about “forcing” her daughter to take on all these new projects and she...

We’re concluding our summer holiday in Amsterdam after a wonderful two weeks exploring the Rhine River. One of my observations about my own resilience is that it usually takes me about 4-5 days to really unwind and get into full relaxation mode which means I am not thinking about my regular life. This aspect of resilience, which is tied to how we let go, recharge, and bounce forward can require a meaningful amount of time away from everyday existence such...