Finding Clarity in an Ambiguous World
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Signs, Signs, Everywhere There’s Signs
My family hopes I wear a seatbelt. So I was informed yesterday while driving on a Mexican highway to Guanajauto. Turns out my family also wants me to obey the speed limit, not to drive if I’ve been drinking, not to drive tired, and finally to listen to the above mentioned signs. Every overpass contained…
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The Way Things Are
You have to drive through a small river to get to downtown. This is what we realized when we visited a small fishing village turned popular American retirement spot, just north of Puerto Vallarta. A flood knocked out the bridge and so now you have to drive through a shallow 20 foot river that runs…
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When It’s Darkest
When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars Ralph Waldo Emerson I love this quote. Several times over my career, we’ve been blinded by the light. Things seemed perfect. There was nothing that could stop us. This expectation lulled us to sleep and miss the things we should have worked on. These “sure things” turned out…
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Standing On The Shoulders Of Those Who Came Before
As I was walking to catch the bus, it struck me just how much that surrounds us we take for granted. Things that seem so obvious too us they simply blend into the background. We get in our cars, drive on paved roads, stop at stoplights, and know that if we got in an accident…
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Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity
Our organization was overwhelmed with managing changes. We had just made a major product shift and small changes that before had no effect now rippled through the system costing many man hours to manage; many even slipped through the cracks. A friend and I set out to try to understand how the organization was responding…
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Irrefutable Communication
You are in a conversation with your friend, and he says, “Good friends make personal sacrifices for their friends”. Is he talking about you? You begin to wonder, but you can’t just say to him, “I DO make personal sacrifices”. Maybe he wasn’t talking about you. There is no way to refute or address the…
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Consumed by Abundance
Everyday we go toe-to-toe with information overload. Never has so much information been available right at our finger tips. But it isn’t just too much information, it’s too much of a lot of things: food, free time, and entertainment to name a few. Previously, we consumed scarce goods, now we are consumed by abundance. It’s…
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Leadership is not a one man job
“…There is no such thing as the perfect leader… In any great leadership team you find at least four personalities, and you never find all four in a single person… You need a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go… You have to have the classic manager –…
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Celebrating Slow Moving Goals
Slow moving goals are hard to celebrate. It’s easy for a small store to add up the cash at the end of the day and see how much money they made. When you’re selling to other businesses and the process takes a long time, it’s easy to lose perspective and miss the opportunity to see…
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Self Fulfilling Prophesies
There was a group strategy meeting in California that I was planning to go to. Assuming things went well, I knew this would be my final business trip for my current employer. The new company was finishing fundraising so leaving was still over a month away. I still cared very much about seeing this company…
Got any book recommendations?