I believe in ghosts. In fact I’ve seen plenty of them haunting corporate America. From the boardroom to the factory floor, professionals are haunted by behaviors that worked for them in the past but are an impediment to success today. I even wrote a book about it.

GHOST STORY is a business fable that has some pretty weird characters: A magpie who hoards information, a green, 8-foot tall Martian who is the ultimate outsider, a 400-pound pig in an admiral's uniform who "protects" staff by keeping them uninformed, and the two-year-old head of IT who speaks "dribble" – to name only a few.

Yet, surprisingly, I have met all of these characters. Of course I’m speaking figuratively. The pig, for example, is the prototypical "command and control" manager whose role in life is to protect people who are unable to absorb what's really going on within the organization. Let them know what's really happening, he insists, and they would panic, freak out, and defect like rats.

And we’ve all met the “techie” who can’t translate what he knows into words the rest of us can understand.

Even the heroine of the story is fighting the ghost of “unconscious competence.” And this is how many women are haunted. Because they “don’t know what they know,” they are less likely to speak up in meetings, less likely to believe that their contributions are valuable, and more likely to personalize failure while externalizing success.

In writing the book, I came to realize that I am as haunted as any of my characters. Under some circumstances, I’ve held the same limiting assumptions and made the same errors. Now that’s scary!

Happy Halloween!