As someone who has been obsessed with truth, beliefs, and values since I was about twelve, I feel qualified to tell you: Your values probably stink. Now, if that didn’t raise your hackles, bear with me. Most leaders, including you, don’t have a clue where to start when creating their company values. And without a…
“For how long have you known that having seventeen people reporting directly to you was a bad idea?” I already knew the answer. As a coach, sometimes I purposefully ask questions I already know the answers to. In this case, I wanted to do two things: Turn up the pain on the situation so my…
The following may offend you—if you feel strongly about your right to not be offended. One of the reasons accountability in business languishes these days is because of how political correctness has gone too far in our world. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m a sensitive person with high standards for maturity and respect. Political…
Welcome to my new look. I hope you like it. Clear and Open is leveling up! And it wouldn’t have happened without some significant failures. That’s what this week’s article is about. Guilty confession time: during my first year of college I was heavily addicted to role-playing games. There were some days where I played…
Here’s a fun story about my own stubborn naiveté, the infamous TSA, and what it means to take ownership of responsibilities. It also helps you save a bunch of time the next time you fly, and since the TSA is too incompetent to communicate their policies proactively, I’m offering my services to them here by…
Talk to any manager long enough and you’ll hear them say something like, “I can’t get my people to….” While I’m prone to rant about the deficiencies of our education system, there’s something most of us already learned that can help. In high school social studies, you probably came across Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development.…
What is your company’s most important asset? Your people? Your brand? Your intellectual property? What if it’s none of these things? What if the most important assert were your culture’s relationship to truth? By this I mean, generally speaking, how honest people are with themselves and others. Honesty is a quality that people tend to…
Right now, somewhere in you, you are suffering. And part of that pain is inevitably a resistance to change. Here, I’m going to tell you the most-resisted change that keeps leaders and managers from success. Your relationship to change and the way your people relate to change is the most important asset you have. It…
First, a crazy thing happened to me after I wrote this. I hope you’ll read to the end where I can tell you. Every day, we’re faced with doing the right thing vs. the easy thing, and it’s easy to see that all the problems in our world can be reduced to when people do…
“I think therefore I am.” Most people have heard this pithy piece of philosophy, but have little idea what it means, much less how it sowed the seeds for myriad management problems. Today, you get to blame the 17th-century French philosopher who coined the phrase, René Descartes, for all your troubles. By understanding what he…