Grey's Anatomy and other prime time shows get great ratings from sexually pairing employees with their bosses. However, television should not be your role model for office relationships. Trysts and other special relationships between bosses and their assistants and consultants happen frequently but they are not only potentially legally hazardous, but can also impact the morale and productivity of the entire office.

Core Values that are imbedded into an organization’s culture can help to: Clarify the behaviors that everyone is expected to uphold at work; Provide a framework for decision-making and agreements about how people are expected to interact with each other; Raise people’s awareness about individual behaviors and how collective interactions influence perceptions by others and customers; And manage performance expectations of all employees, including new staff who may become acquainted with Core Values as part of their orientation process.

How do we, as good citizens, help keep one another safe, as did the street vendors in Times Square, without becoming hyper-vigilant and paranoid? We need to balance our sense of denial that "this can't happen to me," with being mindfully vigilant. How do we do this when the face of the enemy is almost impossible to recognize? It could be a car, a plane, or a friendly looking person with a bomb strapped to him or her.

Why does it matter if there is confusion about Vision and Mission statements, or if they are written in a certain way? For the same reasons it is fundamental and valuable for any organization to have a strategic plan as a roadmap for success, it is important to develop a plan around a clearly defined and well written Vision and Mission. Both serve important, yet different roles as core elements of a strategic plan.

Today's fast-paced world provides ample obstacles to listening. A historically recent roadblock to listening is what my colleague, M.E. Hart calls the ADD (Attention Distraction Device). ADDs can include TVs, blackberries, iPods, computers, and other technologies that allow us to email, text, chat, and IM, to increase our productivity and keep us connected. These are fantastic inventions and save us a lot of time, but they can distract us from being good conversationalists.

Many great speakers have experienced the audience “dead zone.” Facilitating large group interaction calls for a very different skill set than giving a speech or meeting with a small group. It requires reading the group, scanning the non-verbals of the participants, and creating a safe environment for interaction.

“He just snapped.” “He went off the deep end.” These are terms commonly used by family, friends, neighbors, and TV pundits who describe people like John Patrick Bedell, the person who shot two police officers, at the Pentagon on March 4.

Information sharing is the cornerstone of threat assessment and violence prevention. It hasn’t been working too well.

Are digital natives and digital immigrants different in how they use technology? Are their brains different? Do they think differently? Can one group multitask better than the other? The debate is healthy and vital to understanding how we incorporate technology into our daily lives and how we respond to the consequences.

Is it possible to train yourself for crises and stressful events the way law enforcement and the military do? Understanding and harnessing the impact of adrenaline can help.