We generally don’t like chaos. It’s confusing, unpredictable, and frequently destructive. We much prefer order, especially in business. We make plans, execute them, and expect to achieve measurable results. The more controllable and predictable, the better.
But as Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote, “The...
Let’s join two ideas together and see what we get.
Idea One - The other day I was wondering about the speed we’re actually traveling when we’re sitting still. It’s a wonderful feeling, sitting still. Rather quiet and restful. We notice everything around us is still, too –our papers and books and...
“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest . . .”
From The Boxer by Paul Simon
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of a feedback loop. It’s a simple idea with profound implications. In its basic form, a feedback loop is outcome information that’s...
“Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you would have rather talked.” Mark Twain
My brother and I went fishing the other morning and met a guy at the boat ramp who wasn’t familiar with the waters. With a friendly smile, he asked if we could tell him how to fish that section...
“You can’t hit and think at the same time.” Yogi Berra
I’ll cut to the chase: The secret of life is living in the moment. It’s making fast friends with the present and fully investing your thoughts, feelings, and actions in what is happening now.
Nothing new,...
Here's a quote to consider:
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Neale Walsch
I can’t really say that life begins at the end of my comfort zone, but it...
So much of the time we're flying blind. Or, more accurately, we're on autopilot. We think our thoughts, feel our feelings, and perform our actions without examining how thoughts and feelings affect one another or how together they determine our actions. That's how we humans have evolved and the process works very well - until it...
Trust is the foundation of a healthy relationship, whether at work or in our personal lives. But we give family and friends more wiggle room because the purpose of those relationships is more about love and camaraderie than production. A friend who’s perpetually late yet fun once he arrives is endearing. A teenager who finishes...
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, 'All people are created equal'. Except they're not.
Of course, Jefferson meant that all people have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this sense, yes – all people are equal, or should be in a healthy democracy. But we needn’t look hard to see how...
Many of the visible hurdles in creating a more diverse workforce have been approached, if not cleared. There are many more women and minorities in management and the gaps in pay are decreasing over time. Harassment issues are on the radar screens of most organizations. Ethnic and gender jokes are heard less frequently in lunchrooms...
According to Albert Einstein, everyone’s favorite genius, “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.” This is an eloquent way of saying tough problems require outside-the-box thinking. Then, from the world of neuroscience, there’s the recent discovery that REM sleep (the dream...
Actually, bosses don’t fit into just two buckets, good and bad. There are plenty of in-between buckets, but let’s keep it simple for the sake of discussion. We’ve all had a good boss or two – hopefully. We’ve also had some bad bosses – unfortunately. I have to admit my fascination with bad bosses...
We’ve all dealt with meeting management and read lists such as “The 5 Steps to More Productive Meetings” or “7 Ways to Keep Meetings on Track”. That’s all useful information, but in my experience the biggest meeting killer is examplitis.
People like to share stories and emphasize...
Dave, my father-in-law, was a Mr. Fix-It. He looked at something, figured out how it fit together, and checked to see if it needed maintenance or repair. One evening, he and I arrived at my parents’ home at the same time and greeted one other in the driveway. My parents lived on a hillside overlooking a beautiful valley with...