Recent Blog Articles

Leveling Up in Life - Personal Growth - Clear and Open

Leveling Up in Life

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…

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What We Can Learn from the TSA About Management - Clear and Open

What We Can Learn from the TSA

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…

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What You Missed In High School About Management - Clear and Open

What You Missed In High School About Management

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.…

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Truth as an Asset - Clear and Open

Truth as an Asset

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…

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What Managers Fear the Worst - Clear and Open

What Managers Fear the Most

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…

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How to Make the Right Thing Easy to Do - Clear and Open

How to Make the Right Thing Easy to Do

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…

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Holding Employees Accountable - Blame Descartes

Holding Employees Accountable – Blame Descartes

“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…

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The Freedom Paradox - Millennials in Business

The Freedom Paradox – Millennials in Business

Accountability has been an issue for humans for a long time, but it’s recently becoming stickier for a reason that may make you roll your eyes: Millennials. Hold on, I’m not running them down like so many do. Everything has a light side and a shadow. Generally speaking, millennials are entrepreneurial, highly creative, incredibly positive,…

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How to Inspire People to Rock - Management Tips - Clear and Open

How to Inspire People to Rock

You can change the course of someone’s life by seeing something in them they don’t see themselves, and then showing them they can do something they think they cannot. This is the essence of great mentoring. I spent my summers as a kid at a pool club. Anyone could go in the three foot section,…

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