Anyone can plan something. It’s harder to do it. If things went by plan they’d be easier. If you expected things to go by plan, you’d try more things. The problem is the unforeseen things and recovering from them. The more you can recover from unforeseen things, the more you’ll try. The more you try the more you’ll do. What can you recover from? How much can you recover from?

I’m honored and flattered to have been invited to speak at a friend’s gathering next Sunday, September 20th at her casual soirée in Chelsea, Manhattan, called a FED talk, like a TED talk but with home-made food. I’ll speak and lead exercises in entrepreneurial thinking and behavior, which I consider broader than just entrepreneurship. You can think and act entrepreneurially in a big company, or without funding or the intent[…] Keep reading →

Academia has some serious problems. I give a lot of talks to graduate students on what they can do after graduate school, though the following applies to undergraduates too. Many of them are worried about finding jobs. I grab their attention every time with this question: When I was getting my PhD in physics, I thought the only fields I could go into were academia to become a professor, industry[…] Keep reading →

A reader sent me an article in the New York Times called “Rethinking Work.” It began, “HOW satisfied are we with our jobs?” and continued about polls about job satisfaction and various people’s views on work, implying we should think about work differently—we like work less for money and more for intrinsic reward. The author is a psychology professor. Articles like this come out all the time. I’m glad academics[…] Keep reading →

Over lunch Frances described to me her background. I had wondered how she got started, why when the CEO of Ford, Alan Mulaly, gave her a car, she picked it up near Pittsburgh. She told me about growing up near there and going to the University of Pittsburgh. If I remember right, she didn’t finish. It struck me because she is yet another prominent leader who didn’t graduate college. She’s[…] Keep reading →

The college course catalog fascinated me—hundreds of courses in dozens of subjects from amazing teachers. I wanted to take them all! Choosing four or five course from them was wonderful torture. Choosing which to take wasn’t nearly as hard as choosing which not to. I used to think, “I’ll take these two courses … which will set me up for this major … which will set me up for this[…] Keep reading →

Everyone outside large corporations believes they pay their CEOs more than necessary for their performance, or at least a huge majority. In the latest of a million articles on the topic, “How Much Is a C.E.O. Worth? America’s Confused Approach to Pay,” the New York Times continues to ask ineffective questions about changing anything. Like most articles, it asks “Do corporate chief executives make too much money, or too little?”[…] Keep reading →