"Flattery will get you nowhere," goes the saying. It turns out it's not true, but it takes a smooth operator to use flattery to advance one's career. In this area, IT managers might take a cue from lawyers and sales executives, according to Ithai Stern, assistant professor of management and organizations at the University of Chicago's Kellogg School of Management. More than executives with functional backgrounds including engineering, those with people-oriented backgrounds such as sales or law are better at ingratiating themselves effectively, Stern told Kellogg Insight.

In the workplace, as in life, there is a dividing line. On one side of the line is awareness of and sensitivity to our colleagues. On the other side there's an elevated sense of our impact on others' feelings while our own emotions are steeled against the criticism of these same colleagues.

Is the word "regret" ever used in a positive context? The word is defined in most senses as "sorrow" over a circumstance or one's own, presumably, grave failure or error. When we regret something, unless we use the word in the social sense, it's usually something major, with consequences: "I regret not mentoring my top people better because I think that's what cost me the promotion" (more on this example later). By contrast, people generally don't regret forgetting to return a borrowed pen. Other common uses of the word imply extreme, often permanent, damage done, as in the threat "You'll regret this!" When someone claims to have "no regrets," there's a kind of satisfaction or pride implicit in the statement, as if regret were a sign that one has really blown it. Regret, it seems, is the one feeling you don't want to leave any situation with.

McKinsey on "the new normal" for CIOs

McKinsey & Co. held its annual online IT survey from October 13 to October 26, 2009, with responses from 444 executives representing all industries, regions, and company sizes.

As we all know, there's a lot of information out there-from magazines to blogs, there is more content than anyone could possibly consume in a lifetime. I don't even have time to read Page Six anymore, which says a lot. Sure, a maddening percentage of it is either garbage or recycled garbage. The problem is that a lot of it is stuff you could use. The biggest worry is of missing something useful that you didn't realize you needed to know.

"We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom."  

-Stephen Vincent Benet, Litany for Dictatorships, 1935