My daughter's boyfriend, post-college, is trapped in a room with me, which is not good. I'm interrogating him. We'll return to him later.

"Empathize with the enemy," said Robert McNamara, former U.S. Secretary of Defense. You'd expect a Defense Secretary to be tough and, well, defensive. But for McNamara, empathy was a major life lesson.

If you ask my wife about my best traits, "flexible" won't be on her list. So I couldn't wait to tell her, one day, what a long-time client said.

"Apparently," I said, "I'm the most flexible consultant she's ever worked with."

"Apparently," my wife said, "she's never had lunch with you."

My wife has a point here. I'm the sort of person who orders salad "with dressing on the side," a tuna sandwich "without extra mayo," and iced tea "with very little ice."

But my client wasn't talking lunch. And she wasn't just complimenting me, she was subtly influencing me. "I value flexibility," she was basically saying. "Keep doing that."

How do you communicate expectations?

"How would you like a job where, when you make a mistake, a big red light goes on and eighteen thousand people boo?" — Hockey Hall of Fame goaltender, Jacques Plante

Imagine your next performance review — they're booing.

Management thinks you screwed up, big-time, so they're taking away half your pay. And they've got a report describing your mistakes — it's over 100 pages.

That's what happened recently to JPMorgan Chase's star CEO, Jamie Dimon.

Mistakes. Who doesn't hate making them?

"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?" Steve Jobs asked John Sculley, then President of PepsiCo. "Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

That's a loaded question. It says, "Look, this job of yours, running PepsiCo, is extremely idiotic. I'm offering something big."

Sculley was persuaded it was big. (Years later, he would call the job a big mistake.)

Do you ever ask loaded questions?

(Read More: Career Advice: How Focused Are You?)

Recently I've been working with managers to run better meetings, while, in my private life, I've been held hostage at bad meetings—the kind where you squirm in your seat—with the dentist.

Is there a connection between good meetings and bad dentistry? Yes! It's about control.

Mistake #1: Too much control. You talk, but no one's engaged.

One day, I asked my dentist why he didn't have a spittoon. I like spittoons. They let you, the patient, sit up once in a while, spit, and take a break.

"Describe yourself," one CEO asks job applicants, "in three words or less."

What would you say? Probably not, "I'm wordy and verbose. Also repetitive."

An engineer is dying to tell her boss: "STOP sending me so many emails!"

Ever try to reform your boss?

You know it's risky. Maybe your boss doesn't want to be changed. Maybe, if there's a problem, your boss thinks the problem is you.

No matter how many times people tell you not to drink too much and photocopy your butt at the office holiday party, some people just won't listen.

Here are some of the most outrageous things people have done at office parties, according to a survey of marketing and advertising executives by staffing firm The Creative Group:

"An employee threw his coworker in a lagoon!"

"A person rode naked on a ferris wheel."

"An employee dressed up as a wrestler."

Feedback is like death -

1) You receive a 360 feedback report, describing what everyone at work really thinks about you.

Your first reaction: shock.

You see yourself one way, others another. That's the human condition.

I used to lead management workshops for a large consulting company, the Forum Corp, that included 360 feedback reports. Before distributing the feedback, we'd warn participants:

"You may not believe it's really your report," we'd say.

Workers confessed to professional-networking site LinkedIn what they always wanted to be when they grew up.

Of course, astronaut is on the list.

Here were the Top 5 dream jobs among the men, according to the survey from LinkedIn :