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Mercer Management Consulting

Book (Not So) Short: Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure

Book (Not So) Short:  Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End.  Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full. The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements…

Doing Well by Doing Good

I went to an amazing event this weekend. One of my close friends, Raj Vinnakota, started an education foundation about 7 years ago in Washington, D.C., called the SEED Foundation. The foundation’s first venture is the nation’s first urban public charter boarding school, located in the Anacostia section of town and dedicated to providing a college prep environment for kids who otherwise might not even finish high school in the inner city of D.C. The school has had a tremendous amount of national recognition, from Oprah, to Time, to Good Morning America, to Newsweek. The school has now been up and running for six years, starting with a group of seventh graders back in 1998, and this Saturday, that first…