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by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. This post is the third in the series The Mentor's Way, a set of guides for mentors who want to bring out the best in others. Many mentors think their primary job is to give advice to their protégés. While advice can be [...]

by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. In Barney’s (1991) classic article, a company’s competitive advantage comes from how it uses its distinctive resources. To be be valuable to a company, a resource needs to be valuable, rare, inimitable, and not easily substituted. These precious resources may take [...]

by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. We are facing a new reality as the economy improves: acceleration in the retirement of the baby boom generation. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants published a study in 2011 that found that the average baby boomer was postponing retirement for [...]

by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. This post is the first in the series The Mentor's Way, a set of guides for mentors who want to bring out the best in others. The old aphorism, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” [...]

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a nice article on mentoring in a recent issue (click here to read it). In it, I'm quoted at saying that mentoring "shrinks the big organizations." This quote means that a mentoring program has the power to cross boundaries within [...]

Chart a Course by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. This post is the second in the series The Mentor's Way, a set of guides for mentors who want to bring out the best in others. One of the things that separates mentoring from coaching is the time [...]

by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. January continues National Mentoring Month, with the 26th being set aside as "Thank Your Mentor Day." I encourage you to think about the mentors you have had to this point in your career. They may be old bosses with whom you [...]

by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. It has been eleven years since I started working on my first mentoring program at Anheuser-Busch. It was a modest program (twelve mentoring pairs) for the IT organization, and it started me on a course of learning more about mentoring. Over [...]

by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. Over the last ten years, I have trained over 2,000 mentors in formal mentoring programs. In that time, I have tried to understand what keys mentors and protégés need to successfully initiate their partnerships. While there is a lot to cover [...]

The President has declared January as National Mentoring Month. While the mentoring we deal with at The Nemanick Leadership Consulting is more focused on workplace mentoring, it is worth noting that mentoring takes many forms, and is instrumental in the lives of many people. I [...]

by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. When most people think of the idea of mentoring, they usually think of a dyad working together: a more senior mentor and a more junior protégé. This formulation of the mentoring relationship is the most widely used and studied, but there [...]

by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. Mentors are tremendous resources, both for individuals and organizations. Mentors help protégés make connections, think through difficult issues, and set long term goals. Mentors help organizations by guiding junior members, strengthening both knowledge and social capital, and creating commitment among protégés. [...]