An interview with Sylvia Ann Hewlett, President, Center for Work-Life Policy

This prominent author of "Blink" has a profound idea that we need to think in term of the capitalization of their potential. We tend to miss he point of massive achievements. The barriers that people face doing their best are economic,attitudinal, or logistical rather than matters of talent or innate abilities. We capitalize things like football when we should be focusing on other things..

You can make business complex if you want, but it doesn't need to be. Many like ideas but get frozen. The author thinks it's all about "doing".. what some would call 'execution'. Be absolutely convinced. Go for it! Be competitive. There are lots of good people out there though wasting their time since they don't have great products. Invest in people who aren't good, but only if their product is competitive and you can jump in and make a difference.

One thing that drives people crazy in organizations is that the rules of the game seem always to be changing. This happens wherever you're trying to satisfy customers, and customers feel 'empowered' to keep changing the criteria that should apply to the work they want you to do for them. Here the problem is that of a designer who works with representatives who have busy-body managers. But the shifting standards for professional and knowledge work abound, and not only around services where goals and standards aren't clearly articulated ahead of time.

People get all tied up in what is meant by 'goals'. How specific does one need to be? Are they simply dreams put on paper? What's called "SMART" goals seem to be a focus in much organizational behavior practice these days. It's felt that unless there is pretty sufficient specificity and capacity to measure -- unless goals are actionable, then planning may not be very helpful. How does one know when their goals are SMART? What could you do to help others set goals which are... SMART?