How aren’t you doing? That’s right, how are you at what you’re not doing? Have you ever been asked that question? I hope so! How well do we choose what to do and what to measure?
Read More
“To the victor belongs the spoils” is the famous quote by New York Senator William Learned Marcy (1786-1857), recited in the U. S. Senate, 25 January 1832. This one sure gets lots of traffic. It brings with it a lot of imagery of the uglier side of politics, graft and an all or nothing perspective. I can recall, as I read world history in high school, images of conquerors doing all the pillaging and other stuff. Certainly, the principle still has legs today, ugly legs at that.
Read More
It has been one year since the economic tsunami swept across our world. There were lots of financial volcanoes bubbling with excitement, building pressure and spilling over. It became very evident that we did not have lots of volcanoes, but rather outlets under a sea of molten financial foundations with unstoppable pressures. In panic, some of the eruptions were temporarily plugged with financial corks, borrowed from our future, but a big one went and blew up. In the Straits of Wall Street, our own Krakatau, aka Lehman Brothers blew its top, exploded and sent a blanket of financial darkness around the world.
Read More
Planning has lots of meanings. Often, planning is a bridge between intent and action. That means once we want to accomplish something, get somewhere, achieve a goal, make a number, change, transform, grow, shrink, acquire, dispose, win, or a myriad of end states, we spend time some effort wrestling with the how to (plan) achieve the aforementioned intent (vision). The vision is described with adjectives and nouns, but the plan needs verbs to have any useful meaning. If the vision is big and farther out than the budget, the plan is often called strategic. If the vision looks out as far as the budget, the plan is often called business. The vision creates provide promise and the plan provides confidence to achieve the promise. Planning is getting harder to do.
Yesterday was Labor Day in the US. When I was growing up, it was usually a milestone close to the end of summer and a signal that back to school was here. The contributions and needs of labor did not weigh into my view or feelings about the day back then. They are a big deal today and weigh heavy.
Read More
Last year I lost a friend to heart disease. He had a stroke that eventually proved fatal.
Read More
I’ve often heard the term, “You are what you eat.” I suspect that some of that may be true. If you’ve read Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” you may conclude that we are more corn than anything else.
Read More
How many times have we crossed the Rubicon, our very own River Rubicon? When Julius Caesar crossed the River Rubicon in 49 BC, it was an act of commitment to war with Rome, a point of no return, a decision to follow through without looking back. It was, in fact a decision that changed the course of history and our world as it is today
Read More
I get really excited when a new idea somehow gets into my head. It may not be original thought, as some of our ideas have been waiting around for millennia or a chance to germinate. Some died an earlier life where circumstances may have starved it. Some were just bad ideas. But when I think I’ve got a good one, I get charged up and stay up all night trying to give it legs.
I always want others to like it and in some way, feed my ego. I have wanted it a lot, so I did not push hard on others to tell me why they did not like it, or seek skeptics for hard-to-take feedback. I’ve been lucky to have learned that my approach was dumb-dumb. My first question should have been, is this worth my time? Then, should I pursue this idea and invest in it? Do I have an understanding of the nature of constraints and obstacles I will need to resolve and overcome? At what point in my development process do certain questions and answers belong? Can I objectively differentiate opportunity from stubbornness or obsession? It’s not nearly as bad as those (in the field of megalomania) who exhibit the attitude with others that, “You just don’t get it. Why can’t you see I’m right all the time?” If we’re lucky, Darwin is taking care of some those guys.
I confess that I find the questions may be to easier ask and more difficult to answer.
Read More
We like symmetry. Most of us do. There is something in our wiring or programming that finds symmetry attractive, pleasing, and embodying some balance that might actually communicate harmony. We see it in the YinYang and the Taoist philosophy. We often characterize justice as a balanced scale, and countless studies have measured our perceptions of beauty among individuals and found facial symmetry the driving attractiveness variable. When we measure and analyze to find meaning in data, there is also an underlying “hope” that we find symmetry. When we see a “normal” distribution, or bell curve, we enter a comfort zone. In fact, I know countless people who work terribly hard at converting data that is not symmetric or normal into a set that is. Some, actually too many, take out data that does not fit the beauty of symmetry, proceed to insult it with names like outliers and dismiss them from our view.
Read More
Your couch. It is mine.
Im a cool paragraph that lives inside of an even cooler modal. Wins
×