I have my first flight coming up since my experiment with not buying food that requires throwing packaging away, as told in Avoiding food packaging Buying no food with packaging, eighteen days and counting Bought first food with packaging after 2.5 weeks Restaurants make “entertainment for your mouth,” designed for profit, not health. Same with packaged food. Eating at restaurants seems weirder the more healthily I eat. Same with pre-prepared[…] Keep reading →
Who doesn’t like good news on a holiday? A few months ago a long-term coaching client (and friend), Tina Powell, left her job to act on her dream to start her own company, based on my favorite reason to start a company: an underserved market niche. She is a financial advisor and is starting SheCapital, an automated investment platform for women. Yet more to her credit, she’s starting it without[…] Keep reading →
It must be one of the most profitable innovations ever: to remove the nutritional part of foods and selling the mostly sugar that remains. Fruit juice, table sugar, white flour, corn syrup, agave nectar, and so on. What’s left tastes sweeter. It lasts longer on the shelf because it lacks nutrition for the life forms that would decompose it. It motivates people to consume more of it. Without fiber, it[…] Keep reading →
I detest the myth that you need a great idea to start a venture. Believing it inhibits people from pursuing their passions. Successful people don’t believe it, at least not that I know of. Among my ways to undermine the myth is to show how most great ideas didn’t start as great ideas. Let’s look at some successes that looked like sure failures at first. Google started as a search[…] Keep reading →
Years ago no schools taught entrepreneurship. Some enterprising people had the idea to create business plan competitions to motivate entrepreneurially-minded people to create business plans. I applaud their idea and its implementation at the time. Business plan competitions filled a gap in academia by promoting action and learning by doing. That was generations ago. The academic gap no longer exists. Today business plan competitions are an academic distraction from business[…] Keep reading →
Do you like business success? Then read “Going the Distance,” in Columbia Business School’s alumni magazine, on how sports contribute to business success in an interview of me. Here is part of the interview, to whet your appetite: Skills mastered through endurance sports fuel success in business, says marathoner and serial entrepreneur Joshua Spodek ’06. […] First things first: why run? One of the attractions of running is that there’s[…] Keep reading →
You are reading my two-thousandth blog post. Here’s the list of all of them. I’ve posted daily since January 2011, plus twice daily around my North Korea trips since that content seemed different. Why? I write for two main reasons, one related to content, the other to process. The content reason is that writing helps me develop thoughts and ideas. When I started I thought I’d run out of ideas.[…] Keep reading →
The more I work in American universities, the more I see their decision-making and leadership behind the scenes. The more I learn about student-focused project-based learning connecting students’ lives to what the schools are trying to teach and move away from more abstract academic approaches, the more I see alternatives to the education I got that I think serve students’ and society’s interests more. I care about students in schools[…] Keep reading →
“Nice guys finish last.” Alone, this thought has probably condemned many men and women to abandon being nice. Accurate or not, combined with another belief, that the alternative to being nice is to be a jerk, further condemns people to being jerks. Jerks—people with one type of poor relationship skills—even when materially successful, seem likely to face emptiness in intimacy, what many consider the most important parts of their lives.[…] Keep reading →
