Thankfully, the balance of the economy is resting quietly, your customers are comfortable with the level of service and quality that you provide, and your competitors are complacent and content with their share of the market. Oh, wait… that’s wrong. The exact opposite is true. Of course things are changing. And quickly. So here’s an [...]
Picture this: your car is stalled beside the road. Luckily, it’s just a dead battery, but there are no jumper cables around. A good Samaritan has offered to “give you a push” so you can get a “push start” for your car. As you get back into your car to shift it into neutral you [...]
In a subtropical forest in Africa a troop of gorillas is in the midst of their daily activities when a twig snaps in the brush. Immediately, all the other gorillas look to the "silverback" – the dominant male gorilla – for direction, protection, and order. They look to the leader for “the meaning” in the [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The first time I saw people shooting pool (playing pocket billiards) I was hooked. Perhaps is was having seen The Hustler with Jackie Gleason as "Minnesota Fats" or maybe it was a manifestation of male adolescence. What a simple and elegant game! The cue ball strikes another ball and it goes into a pocket on the [...]
The business owners and senior managers I know who are really good leaders are frequently tired. It’s a good tired, but tired nonetheless. It’s a lot like the tired you get from a spirited game of tennis, a fairly serious jog or, in my case, a long bike ride. It’s not a “lay down on [...]
