As I age, I gain perspective on the illusion of wealth and status as forms of fulfillment. I don't want my life to be measured by dollars and cents, or the number of books I've authored. Rather, I want to be remembered by the lives that I've touched. I want live a life that counts.

What can science fiction accomplish that management books cannot?

We're awash in data. Here's how to make yours matter.

Without an awareness of your strengths, it's almost impossible for you to lead effectively. We all lead in very different ways, based on our talents and our limitations. Serious problems occur when we think we need to be exactly like the leaders we admire. Doing so takes us out of our natural element and practically eliminates our chances of success.

Although becoming a leader may seem simple, the fact is that there's a lot of consideration that goes into management. You not only have to stay on top of your team, but make sure that you're fostering communication, growth and productivity. Here, we'll take a look at a number of high quality courses that will show you how to take care of these issues and more.

Getting a business education doesn't have to be expensive. An increasing number of colleges, universities and even nonprofit organizations offer free business courses online. Find out how you can sign up for these courses and what you can get from them.

In a world of uncertainty, we could all use a little advice. So we asked a host of influential leaders to share with us the wise words that changed their lives forever.

The co-founder and CEO of the $1 billion company offers advice on how to shape and articulate your vision for your own brand.

All presenters want an engaged, interested, fully attentive audience. For your message to be most effectively received, the audience must hear it. While there are many ways to gain and maintain your audience’s attention during a presentation, getting them actively involved in the message is the best place to start. Here are 12 tactics to get your audiences more involved in your presentation and your message.

Many managers disdain “process” – organizations that put a premium on “the way things have always been done around here” over those that champion bold and rapid decision making. Ironically, as this author states, making the right decision is less important than focusing on how the decision is made – the process. In a compelling argument he makes the case that examining how decisions are made, rather than the decisions themselves, will lead to better decisions.

In today's diverse workplace, your actions and motives are constantly under scrutiny. Time to manage your own professional image before others do it for you. An interview with professor Laura Morgan Roberts.

Of course, failure isn’t an experience to be deliberately sought, and cushioning ourselves against its harshest blows makes perfect sense. But failure isn’t something to be despised or ashamed of, either. That’s not a message we hear a lot about these days. Yet some of history’s most impressive successes started out as big, fat failures. The stories of the world’s most successful failures suggest that what matters most is not whether you win or lose, but how you fail. [Hat Tip to Bruce Lynn]

Happy Brain Storming offers a somewhat poorly written article, but one which is full of useful character trait considerations for evaluating personality. These character traits come after a muddling introduction which you may wish to skim/skip. [Hat Tip to LifeHacker]

Making quality decisions is an intricate tapestry of experience, inquiry, and judgment that converge to form solutions. According to Michael Sacks and Steve Walton, professors at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, there are strategies that can be adopted to make the process more effective.

There are two major job responsibilities of a CEO. One is Chief Strategist. The other is Chief Story Teller. Considering that many people would rather die than speak in public, including CEO’s, comes this concise article detailing the 8P’s of Persuasive Presentations.

The conventional wisdom about "natural" talent is a myth. The real path to great performance is a matter of choice.

In today's uncertain environment, the ability to sell our ideas, points of view, products, services and even our reputation is crucial. Communication and interpersonal skills are now ranked as critical business skills by recruiters, and a flattening out of hierarchies in our interdependent society has led to increased dependence on interactive skills. However, persuasion is often overlooked in current management literature. In their paper, IESE's Brian Leggett and Josep M. Rosanas stress the continued importance of persuasion in running a successful organization and offer practical tips on how to be persuasive.

If you’re like much of today’s workforce, you need to have halfway decent writing skills to succeed at your job. But if you don’t have time to work on those skills, mastering a few basic rules can still make a big difference.

KnowHR offers up their take on the Top 10 Best Presentations Ever.

In the book Click: Ten Truths for Building Extraordinary Relationships, author George C. Fraser says that to build successful business relationships and truly connect or "click" with professional associates, executives need to communicate with passion, build on personal and volunteer ties, and align with individuals whom they admire. Recently, Fraser spoke with Knowledge@Emory about connecting with others, the trials of prejudging, and what to do with all those business cards everyone collects.

Here’s a ten-second method to build better rapport with a customer. I can testify that it works, as I’ve used it literally hundreds of times. It’s a close to a “Jedi Mind Trick” sales technique as I think you’re ever going to find.

Plenty of motivational coaches pledge to boost your efficiency. These are the few who really deliver.

Never make a decision yourself that can be reasonably delegated to a lieutenant and never make a decision today that can be reasonably put off to tomorrow. If these observations fly in the face of conventional wisdom, it is because they are meant to. The author may be a conventional man, but his thoughts about what make a leader effective are original and offer sound - albeit unconventional - advice for success.

How do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced "Mona Lisa" as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, da Vincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?

"A man of extraordinary strength and intelligence may never be more than a failure in society if he doesn't know how to speak in public," noted the writer William Channing in the 19th century. Two centuries later, knowing how to speak in public is a skill increasingly valued in the workplace. The ability to change public perception through a persuasive presentation is considered one of the keys to success in any job. Still, when faced with having to speak in public, many managers panic. You may not be a born public speaker, but as IESE's Brian O'Connor Leggett and Ricardo Velilla assure us in their new book, public speaking is, in fact, something one can learn, and they suggest some tips for successful presentations.