Originally published on CareerShorts.com where Kimberly has been invited to contribute blogs periodically on global leadership and project management.

Did you know that there are 192 countries recognized by the United Nations and a total of 233 listed on Wikipedia?  You may not even have heard of the smallest ones, some of which have less than 1000 people.  I’ve been fortunate enough to work with human beings from over 50 countries during my career.  Although I’ve discovered many fascinating differences among them, and many delightful common human traits worth celebrating, I’ve also unfortunately found that we share a couple of fundamental tendencies that get in the way of our ability to achieve our goals:

Unclear Goals

Unclear Communication

Unclear Priorities

Read more »

Reposted from http://wholelifewellbeing.com/ where Kimberly has been invited to be a founding blogger for this new site led by Dr. Jerry Wagner, Presidents Office, Director Institute for Wellbeing, Bellevue University, Bellevue, Nebraska.

Over the years I’ve noticed that my sense of wellbeing has more to do with my attitude and interpretation of my circumstances than my circumstances. Certainly some circumstances have made it easier for me to feel a sense of wellbeing, and there have been other circumstances that made a sense of wellbeing more elusive. But lately I’ve come to realize that I could turn any “average” day into either a good day or a bad day just through the stories I tell myself about the day. For example, I’m showering in water clean enough to drink. Should I feel overwhelming gratitude for my good fortune, or should I despair because over 1 billion people don’t even have clean water to drink? I have to admit I often feel both, but what matters is what I do with these interpretations of my circumstances. Read more »

This week I had lunch with a friend of mine who is in his early 30s.  I couldn’t believe it when he told me he wasn’t on Facebook and he wasn’t twittering!  Yup, that’s right, there is still at least one cool, hip, successful high-tech business person in Silicon Valley who is NOT hip-deep in these social networks.  He asked me what benefit they produced, which is kind of like asking which advertising results in sales.  Who knows!  I just know that I have to be swimming in this ocean if I want to catch any fish.  Watching from the beach just doesn’t cut it.

If you’re just playing, join whatever you fancy.  But if you’re in business, here’s my opinion on the bare minimum social media marketing you have to be experimenting with while the whole SMM craze shakes out into what it will become:

1.  Facebook – It’s not just for teenagers, and just because people use it for social reasons doesn’t mean businesses can ignore it.  One of my highest quality contacts in the business world responds promptly to Facebook requests, but never responds when I contact him via email.  You gotta transmit on the frequency people are willing to receive on.  Check out Kimberly Wiefling and Scrappy Women in Business if you want a glimpse into my Facebook world. Read more »

A lot of my work in the past couple of years has been consulting with a company in Tokyo called ALC Education.  It’s the biggest project of my life, with the longest time horizon of anything my A.D.D. brain has ever had to wrap itself around.  The goal of this project is nothing less than planetary transformation, something I’ve had a hankering to work on since my youth, but lacked the personal vision of exactly how to go about it.  All kidding aside, the senior executives who lead this company have told me quite matter-of-factly that they intend to transform the Japanese economy for the better, for the good of the world, through shifting the mindsets of leaders in international Japanese businesses.  When pressed, they estimated that it will take somewhere around a decade to get some traction on this whole mindset shift that will enable their clients to “solve global problems profitably”. Read more »

This past Christmas one of my closest friends gave me a dish towel that says “Being unstable and bitchy is all part of my mystique.”  Knowing that there is truth in sarcasm, and understanding the importance of good communication skills and positive relationships to project success, I’ve decided to recommit myself to improving my relationships through improved communication skills.

Step 1 – Categorize the kinds of conversations I’m having.  I figure that being able to identify the different types of conversations should help me engage in each of them in more appropriate ways.  Here are a few of the most important that I’ve identified, and some guidelines for each: Read more »

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.” - Helen Keller

It’s the beginning of a whole new year and an entirely new decade. What do you want to be saying on Dec. 31, 2019? My wish for you is that you won’t be looking back with regret.  Personally, 10 years from now I intend to be looking back on a decade of surprising breakthroughs and unprecedented progress towards becoming the kind of leader I admire and the kind of human being I aspire to be.  And I sure don’t want the people of this Earth to be facing the same problems then that we’re facing now in this world.  (Nope!  Let’s have new and more exciting problems to tackle in 2020!) Read more »

It’s easy to get stuck.  From time to time it happens to everyone.  One foot nailed to the floor, we go ’round and ’round – full speed ahead, but with no progress.  Eventually we wonder why the scenery looks hauntingly familiar.  If we’re lucky someone will throw a bucket of cold water in our face and shout “What in cripes sake are you doing?!!”  If not, well, we might wake up a decade later and wonder why we’re still struggling with the same issue-infested life we ended the century with.  With 2010 nearly upon us, it’s time to steal a glance in the rear view mirror and do a little reality check.  Does the road ahead look exactly like the one behind?  If so, how are you likin’ it?  If you’re not absolutely jazzed about being alive, eager to leap out of bed and get engaged in the banquet of a day spread out before you, you might want to make a few changes before the clock ticks another tock. Read more »

Thomas Friedman said The World is Flat, and I certainly feel that the business world is getting smaller.  Many companies today are looking overseas for new markets and new customers in order to sustain the profitable growth of their businesses.  New behaviors, skills and thinking are required to succeed globally, and companies must act strategically in order to secure the talented people required to fulfill their increasingly global vision.  This has led many HR departments to pursue what they often call global leadership “training” programs, but you don’t “train” humans to be global leaders.  You train dolphins to do tricks in a swimming pool to earn fish treats.  Read more »

It’s easy to be a cynic, like the person who made this ever-so-uninspiring sign . . . but . . . weird things are happening to me when I travel abroad since President Obama was elected.  I was recently at a local summer festival in Akishima, near Tokyo.  Now, just to give you some idea about the town of Akishima, it’s a good hour’s train ride from the center of Tokyo, and that’s on an express train.  They’ve got a bit of industry there, but it’s fairly “sleepy” as a town compared with Tokyo.  The big attraction for the festival, which was held at the elementary school near the train station, was a raised platform where the townspeople took turns amusing one another by belting out karaoke tunes.  My friend’s 87 year old mother snuck out of the house to go back to the festival after we’d called it quits, and we found her sipping sake and eating noodles with the over-80 crowd in the VIP tent when we finally tracked her down. Read more »