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…
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,…
A great subject line gets at best twenty percent of viewers this far, and you’re met with: A pithy appeal to one of your biggest problems. You know the one. I know the one. That way you think, “They understand what it’s like to be me.” And then the volume turns up on that pain…
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,…
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” — Eleanor Roosevelt What hard thing is life asking you to do that you haven’t done yet? Confession time: I’m going to tell you what I was avoiding, and still wrestling with. Last autumn, I got a very sweet and tentative email from a coach…
Besides in hearts and minds? More than ever in our history people talk about “improving culture” in and outside of business. Unfortunately, it can’t be done, so there’s a great deal of wasted effort and stagnation. I’ll explain. There’s no such thing as culture, strictly speaking. A culture is the result of a group of…
Excellence is an expression of care. Where there’s a deficit of care, there’s one of competence. Of course, everyone wants to say they care. They know they’re supposed to care, but the truth is shown in actions, not words. It’s observable that most humans care about their own survival, but what puzzles me is how…