If all you consume is the most-read list, if all you listen to are the hits, if all you eat is the most popular item on the menu—you're missing out. The web has pushed us to read what everyone else... | Continue reading
There are at least three ways we use the word 'quality' at work: Quality as defined by Deming and Crosby: Meeting spec. If you can reliably, and without drama, deliver precisely what you have promised, this is quality. This is... | Continue reading
But there are plenty of wrong ones. In arithmetic, there's a right answer. And everything else is wrong. But in the work we do, there are, in fact, plenty of creative, useful, generous answers, answers good enough to embrace and... | Continue reading
"Do what I say" vs. "Use your best judgment." "I'm in charge because I have authority" vs. "Take responsibility if you care." "It's simple and easy but ineffective" vs. "It's difficult and a bit complex, but you can handle it... | Continue reading
It's difficult to find the leverage to make a difference. At your job, there are probably people with more experience than you, more domain knowledge than you, even more skills than you. The same is true about your competition. But... | Continue reading
Knowing where 'enough' is. More might be better for awhile, but sooner or later, it can't always be better. Diminishing returns are the law. If we look to advertisers, marketers, bosses, doctors, partners and suppliers to tell us when we've... | Continue reading
Ask someone what they do, and they'll probably talk about where they work. "I work in insurance," or even, "I work for Aetna." Of course, most of the 47,000 people who work for Aetna don't do anything that's specifically insurance-y.... | Continue reading
The most common way to deal with the future is to try to predict it. To be in the right place at the right time with the right skills or investments. A far more successful and reliable approach is to... | Continue reading
People rarely read to the end. And they almost never spend as much time reading your words as you spend writing them. Which makes it ironic that the little phrases we use (in designing a simple form, or when we... | Continue reading
Ask this question often. Several times a day, at least. Endogeneity is a fancy term for confusing cause and effect. For not being clear about causation and correlation. It's one reason why smart people make so many mistakes. We think... | Continue reading
Raymond Loewy coined the term MAYA to describe Most Advanced Yet Acceptable when it came to futuristic design. The thinking goes that people (the amorphous term for the lumpen masses) won't accept something too advanced, so we ought to lower... | Continue reading
Drink enough water and you will cease to be thirsty. And yet, a doubting person can be drowning in facts, but facts won't change a mind that doesn't want to be changed. More facts don't counter more doubt. Someone who... | Continue reading
The work is difficult. Overcoming obstacles, facing rejection, exploring the unknown--many of us need a narrative to fuel our forward motion, something to keep us insisting on the next cycle, on better results, on doing work that matters even more.... | Continue reading
How about, just bullets, just diseases, just starvation? The whole "sticks and stones" canard is really dangerous. When a stone gives you a bruise, it's entirely possible you will completely heal. But when a torrent of words undermine your view... | Continue reading
I know, you might not get the microphone back for a while. And I know, you want to make sure everyone understands precisely what went into your thinking. Not to mention your desire to make sure that everyone who hears... | Continue reading
Tasks, decisions, and initiation... Doing, choosing, and starting... Each of the three adds value, but one is more prized than the others. Tasks are set up for you. Incoming. You use skill and effort to knock em down one at... | Continue reading
That's the labor most of us do now. The work of doing what we don't necessarily feel like doing, the work of being a professional, the work of engaging with others in a way that leads to the best long-term... | Continue reading
Every time Ford increased the productivity of car production (in one three-year period, he lowered labor costs by 66% per car), he also raised wages. Not merely because it's the right thing to do. He did it because well-paid workers... | Continue reading
Our twelfth session of the altMBA workshop is upcoming. We're only going to do it two more times in 2017, and if this is something you're thinking of doing one day, I hope you'll let us know. You can sign... | Continue reading
When six people are trying to split a pizza, some stinginess appears. After all, more for one person is less for the other five. But in interactions that lead to connection, to shared knowledge, to possibility, it's pretty clear that... | Continue reading
Groucho Marx famously said, "I don't want to be a member of any club that would have me." Thanks to our connection economy, the membership rolls are now wide open, but the problem isn't declining. There are so many communities... | Continue reading
If the railroad didn't make it to your town, or if the highway didn't have an exit, or if you were somehow off the beaten path, we wrote you off. Your town was in the middle of nowhere. Now, of... | Continue reading
And it always does. Bad decisions happen for one of two reasons: A. You're in a huge hurry and you can't process all the incoming properly. But more common... B. The repercussions of your decision won't happen for months or... | Continue reading
But what if it was? What if the apparently intractable cultural issues that you take for granted were instead seen as problems on your desk, things you could influence? What if the rules others take for granted are seen by... | Continue reading
Emma Gannon, with a focus on new careers. Talking lawyers. On marketing with the insightful Sonia Simone on Rainmaker. Elin Barton on thin ice. Reid and June have a new podcast about scale. How we solved the altMBA with The... | Continue reading
This is not the same as reality. But without belief in the possibility, your reality is going to be severely curtailed. We must avoid the temptation to begin with an analysis of what's easy, or what's probable, or even likely.... | Continue reading
Fear's a dream killer. It puts people into suspended animation, holding their breath, paralyzed and unable to move forward. Fear is present in many education settings, because fear's a cheap way to ensure compliance. "Do this," the teacher threatens, "or... | Continue reading
A sailboat without a sail might float. For a long time, in fact. But without a sail, it can't go anywhere, can't fulfill its function. Floating is insufficient. | Continue reading
The boom emoji gets a lot of play. It happened. It worked. We won. Boom. The tree emoji, on the other hand, celebrates the patient and generous acts of planting seeds, watering them, caring for them, and then, in a... | Continue reading
We all have them. By the time we get this far, we've got bangs and bruises, things that don't work quite right, experiences that have shaped us, sometimes for the worse. It starts early. We're all born with them and... | Continue reading
The local market has a sign that says, "There was a $500 Lotto winner here..." A cursory knowledge of statistics will help you see that this doesn't matter. It doesn't make it more likely or less likely that they'll have... | Continue reading
The reason it's difficult to learn something new is that it will change you into someone who disagrees with the person you used to be. And we're not organized for that. The filter bubble and our lack of curiosity about... | Continue reading
You've been wronged. The service was terrible. You went unseen, disrespected and abused. You didn't get your money's worth. The software is sloppy, the people were rude, the entire experience was lousy. A letter to the organization is called for.... | Continue reading
Can you make change happen? For the last five months, I’ve been hard at work at something you might be interested in. The full details are here. The video explains what we're building together. Enrollment is open today, and closes... | Continue reading
Modern marketing, the craft of getting ideas to spread, has split. On one side are the roboticists. They test and measure and do what works. They do it with no interest in how people decide or what they believe or... | Continue reading
About half of all the bananas consumed worldwide come from the same tree. Not the same type of tree. The very same tree. The Cavendish, which has no seeds, is propagated by grafting or cloning. Which means that they're all... | Continue reading
Repainting your house the same color it already was feels like a waste. It's a lot of effort merely to keep things as they are. But if you don't do it, time and entropy kick in and the house starts... | Continue reading
The rest is mechanics. We're not wired to walk in someone else's shoes, it's not our first instinct. Showing up with empathy is difficult, hard to outsource and will wear you out. But it's precisely what we need from you. | Continue reading
Look around for a second. Those bedrock institutions, the foundational supports you take for granted--they rarely last forever. Nurturing and investing in the things we need and count on needs to be higher on the agenda. Things that appear to... | Continue reading
That's the key insight of the peer-to-peer connection economy. Anyone can reach out, anyone can lead, anyone can pick someone else. But if you wait for anyone, it's unlikely to happen. It begins with you. | Continue reading
Is that a habit? If your instinct is to publish, to share, to instruct, to give away, to engage and to put it into the world, then 'save as draft' is a rare thing. On the other hand, if you... | Continue reading
Six missions after Apollo 11 amazed the world by going to the moon, Apollo 17 was the last trip. It fell off the cultural radar. Flying to the moon, driving around and getting back safely wasn't interesting enough, apparently. And... | Continue reading
This is a significant bug in our culture and a glitch in our DNA. When we're on the spot, giving a speech, or pulled over by a cop, we get nervous. We sweat, talk too fast, constrict our throat, avoid... | Continue reading
To countless teenagers who had the wrong teacher in high school, it means, "a boring collection of right answers, categorized by topic." Once we discover that some things we were taught aren't black and white any more (Pluto, DDT, infant... | Continue reading
... is before it's given. The best time to campaign is before the election. And the best time to keep a customer is before he leaves. | Continue reading
We get what we invest in. The time we spend comes back, with interest. If you practice five minutes of new, difficult banjo music every day, you'll become a better banjo player. If you spend a little bit more time... | Continue reading
It's easy to say that, "the industry is to blame," or "the industry doesn't understand this." But because no one is charge, because there's no coherent enforcement method, this is merely a shorthand. There is no industry, no economy, no... | Continue reading
One clue that someone doesn't understand a problem is that they need a large number of variables and factors to explain it. On the other hand, turning a complex situation into something overly simple is an even more common way... | Continue reading