In March, You Can Have Your Pi and Eat Cheese Doodles Too

Today’s Friday Fun Fact… St. Patty’s Day is right around the corner.  It’s time to break out the corned beef and cabbage –  that is assuming that you are not too full from eating pie this past Thursday.  Wednesday, March 14th was Worldwide Pi Day.  And while we may celebrate this auspicious occasion by consuming […]

What is Leverage…Really?

Today’s Wednesday Work Wisdom… I recently attended a training class where the instructor was telling professional speakers how they could leverage their content as a way of making money in their sleep. The reality is, the focus was really on how to make products, not how to make money. Let’s face it, at the end […]

Avoid Target Fixation (transcription)

Here is the transcription of my Monday Morning Movie… Although I’ve never been in the military, I’ve worked with military groups. There is a term that I believe they use called “Target Fixation.” Target Fixation basically means that if you focus too much on a target, you might end up hitting that target. If you […]

Avoid Target Fixation

Today’s Monday Morning Movie… The military knows the dangers of something called “target fixation.” This is where you overly focus on the enemy, and as a result you subconsciously end up crashing right into them. The same thing occurs in business. When we focus on the enemy (the competition) we subconsciously end up replicating what they […]

Real-World Know-It-Alls

Today’s Friday Fun Fact… We all have knowledge that has allowed us to excel in different areas of our life.  But as I had discussed in my Monday Morning Movie, sometimes this knowledge can be the very thing that gets in the way of our success. But if managed properly, intelligence can be leverage to […]

Are You Playing With a Full Deck?

Today’s Wednesday Work Wisdom… Personality Poker is a tool I developed for helping organizations play with a full deck; enabling them to have a good balance of complementary styles. Why? Because opposites don’t attract. As a result, organizations naturally homogenize around one particular style.  (See my article, “Your Organizations is a Cult” for more on […]

Stop Being a Know-it-All (transcription)

Here’s the transcription of my Monday Morning Movie… Today, I want to talk about the power of, and importance of, being open to new ideas and feedback. I just spent a weekend at a conference. It was a bunch of people learning about the speaking profession. I’ve been speaking for 20 years, and I’ve had […]

Stop Being a Know-it-All

Today’s Monday Morning Movie… As an expert, or someone who is highly experienced in a particular field, it can be difficult to get advice from others. We have the bad habit of positioning ourselves as the individual who has seen it and done it all. But this can limit our ability to receive valuable input. […]

Beam Me Up, Scotty

In my Monday Morning Movie, I talked about the Power of Positive Constraints and how implementing structure can help us become more creative. Shortly after posting the video, a friend of mine, Brad Kolar, offered up a perfect example of an innovation derived from the Power of Positive Constraints:  The teleportation machine used in the […]

Types of Crowdsourcing

Today’s Wednesday Work Wisdom… Yesterday I spoke at an event called Crowdopolis. The topic was crowdsourcing. This has become one of the hot buzzwords in business. Companies of all sizes are dipping their toes into crowdsourcing. But what is it really? Well, crowdsourcing is a lot of different things and can’t easily by lumped into one small […]