Study after study have shown the downside of a cluttered environment. It restricts your brain’s capacity to focus and process information. A messy desk is distracting. It can even produce guilt, shame, anxiety, and, at extremes, anger. All in all, most studies support the idea of keeping a neat, organized environment–especially in the office. Yes, …

As elders are always telling younger people, experience is the best teacher. But if you can take in a life lesson without putting yourself through difficulty–if you can benefit from someone else’s experience instead of your own–so much the better. Here are seven such lessons that it would be great if you didn’t have to learn it the hard way.  1. …

A CEO client shared with me last week that one of his longtime supervisors recently “lost it” at work, which is out of character. He is usually a happy, calm, reliable team member, but on this particular day, he “blew up” about his workload. My client talked with him but grew impatient. He told this employee …

Steve Jobs helped create wildly popular products that changed entire industries. (Hello, mobile devices. Howdy, music business.) But while he definitely believed in his own ideas and the power of technology, he believed even more strongly in harnessing the ideas, the creativity, and the power of people. Here’s Jobs from a 1989 Inc. interview: I …

Many LinkedIn users invest hours into making their profiles look professional. They scour the thesaurus looking for a verb to describe their work experience and they tediously list every professional accomplishment they’ve ever achieved. Yet, many of those same people put little effort into their profile pictures. They use a candid shot from a smartphone …