I’m not impressed with intelligence. I say that as someone people often describe as intelligent. Too many people (including myself in the past) consider themselves strong in the abstract ability to solve problems over the activity of solving them. I value execution over ideas. Concrete over abstract. Earned over entitled. Experience over observation. I wasn’t always like this. I used to hold the opposite values—mind over body. Note the difference[…] Keep reading →

If you think leadership is about getting people to do what you want, you’ll develop a strategy to control and change them. I haven’t found much success in trying to change people. If you think leadership is about understanding people and bringing out and supporting them on motivations they already have, you’ll develop a strategy of meeting many people and attracting those with similar or complementary goals. Instead of trying[…] Keep reading →

Look at your body in the mirror. Is the human body not a wonder of evolution? Do you see anything extraneous? I don’t. It seems efficient. What our species didn’t need evolved away. What’s left is essential. Take anything away from the human body and our ancestors might not have survived and you might not have been born. Our ancestors had competition from similar species for the same resources, so[…] Keep reading →

Context: city workers are tearing up the street outside my building. They start jackhammering at 7am and the noise hasn’t let up for the past two weeks. We don’t know why they’re doing it or how long they plan to work. My neighbors and I talk about it. One of my neighbors, an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable woman, keeps talking about how bad it is. At first I commiserated. I ran[…] Keep reading →

“The world you see is not what you think it is.” How many organizations start with this philosophy? It piques your curiosity—“It isn’t?”—to hear what comes next. The next step is the tricky one: “We’ll tell you what it’s really like.” They rarely word it so bluntly, but many organizations start this way. For all I know they’re right. What I do know is that once someone gets you to[…] Keep reading →

Two great posts by others force me to break my pattern of sticking to original work. The first is that if you know me you know I love Calvin and Hobbes. The first new work by Bill Watterson in a long time appears here — “Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did.” The second is one of the best[…] Keep reading →

The other day the New York Times posted an article “Growth Has Been Good for Decades. So Why Hasn’t Poverty Declined?” that began The surest way to fight poverty is to achieve stronger economic growth. That, anyway, is a view embedded in the thinking of a lot of politicians and economists. “The federal government,” Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “needs to remember[…] Keep reading →

If someone wins the lottery or gets something you wish you had, would you feel jealous of them? No, you wouldn’t. If you wish you had something someone else did, you would envy them, which is different from jealousy. Today people use the terms interchangeably, but they describe distinct feelings. I only learned the difference a few years ago when someone pointed it out to me. Since then I’ve become[…] Keep reading →

What happens when you work with a coach? Here is a trend I see with my clients. It’s just my impression, not results from an independent third-party, but I’ll hold myself accountable by asking my clients to review the post to see if I accurately represented them. What clients get coaching for My clients come with a variety of issues they want to improve, nearly all of them professional—wanting to[…] Keep reading →