As the year 1776 drew to a close, the American experiment was in trouble. In recent months the Colonial forces had suffered much at the hands of the British troops and Hessian mercenaries. They had been routed from Long Island, chased from Manhattan across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Boston, New York and Rhode Island were …
John’s Blog
Level 5 failure
In Good to Great, Jim Collins researched and codified a surprising fact: that leadership matters a great deal in taking organizations from good to great. He said that good-to-great leaders seemed to come from a completely different mold when compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, …
The Organizational Hunger Games
In the movie, The Hunger Games, North America has been destroyed by some unknown apocalyptic event and the nation of Panem exists in its place. Pamen consists of a wealthy Capitol and twelve surrounding, poorer districts. As punishment for a previous rebellion against the Capitol, one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 …
Victims, villains and rescuers
Dudley Do-Right was the hero of a segment of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, a cartoon entertainment show from my youth. Dudley was a dim-witted but cheerfully optimistic Canadian Mountie who was ever trying to apprehend his nemesis, Snidley Whiplash. Dudley was romantically interested in the lovely Nell Fenwick, daughter of Inspector Fenwick, commander of …
Political correctness is killing business
During the morning of February 19, 1945 my father was about to drive a United States Marine Corps amphibious tractor onto the beach at Iwo Jima. This was his third beach assault under enemy fire. As the “amtrac” neared the beach an explosion (mine, mortar, artillery, who knows?) took place under the bow of the …
Who do you trust?
We encounter people in life who give us – with the best of intentions – advice and counsel that is inherently biased. In the 1967 movie, The Graduate, we find Mr. McGuire (actor Walter Brooke) giving recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock (actor Dustin Hoffman) some advice about his future: Most of us have experience or …
3 secrets for improved performance in today’s economy
Times are tough and the economic seas are rough. The future is rife with uncertainty. So, what else is new? We, who are beyond a certain age, have seen much of this before. By the way, that doesn’t make it any less tough or any more certain. Just familiar. And, to be fair, today’s global …
What do your subordinates say about you?
This story is told by David Kirk Hart, former professor at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management. It comes to me by way of my good friend and storyteller, Jim Ericson. “During World War II, a British war correspondent had gone into Normandy. He was particularly disgusted by the fact that the generals were living …
Are you a good lie detector?
According to TIME magazine article “Lies, Lies, Lies” (Oct 5, 1992), “Lies flourish in social uncertainty, when people no longer understand, or agree on, the rules governing their behavior toward one another.” Whew! That was close; I thought I had to bear responsibility for my truthfulness, or lack thereof. TIME made it society’s fault. The …
When you look, what do you see?
Have you seen this email? It has been making the rounds for a while: A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated …
