If you want to take your career to the next level, the advice we seek and get usually has a practical bent: network, research the industry and prospective employer, ask for feedback, pursue training and education opportunities, work on being an effective leader. These are all good things, but in this month's Harvard Business Review, psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell shows how understanding brain activity can lead you to a more systemic approach to succeeding and advancing in your career.

Among C-level executives, the CIO role arguably has the most delicate balance to master between the strategic and the operational. According to professor Hayagreeva Rao of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, lumping strategy and operations in one job in the first place may be a fundamental flaw in the design of a job itself.

There's an article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review on career myths for executives. The piece is based on research by Monika Hamori at IE Business School in Madrid including interviews with 14,000 executives and 45 search firms. For IT executives, the most important fallacy Hamori discusses may be the first, that job-hopping helps you advance.

There's a career technique that you may already be using, according to research by Yale School of Management organizational-behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski. Wrzesniewski and her colleagues Justin M. Berg of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Jane E. Dutton of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business have been studying an exercise they call "job crafting." In essence, job crafting is redefining and reconfiguring your job on your own terms and turning into a role that better suits you. The practice allows you to "gain a greater sense of control at work," they write in "Turn the Job Your Have into the Job You Want" in this month's Harvard Business Review. "Perhaps job crafting's best feature is that it's driven by you, not your supervisor."

In "The Productivity Paradox" in the June issue of Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz, author and head of consulting firm The Energy Project, writes about his work with Sony Pictures Entertainment in boosting productivity from the company's workforce. His approach to more effective employees was to focus on managing employees' energy levels with leadership offering tools and support as they set the example with their own actions.

In yesterday's post I discussed the article in the current Harvard Business Review about workplace envy. I focused on individual feelings of envy of others' success. There's a second part of the article, however, that deals with dealing with envy within a team from a manager's perspective. Today I'll share Tanya Menon's and Leigh Thompson's advice on managing envy among your staff.