Paranoid: Here’s my belief: The Universe is Indifferent. By that I mean it doesn’t care whether I—or my family, or my community, or my country, or even the earth itself—survive or not. It isn’t out to kill me either. It’s just indifferent. So, I’m not paranoid about this. I see cosmic indifference as the way things are. Frankly, I prefer …
Climate Change Now there’s an interesting topic! Of course, there are at least two camps on the climate change thing. One is that the climate is changing and that mankind is causing or at least exacerbating the change. A second camp is that yes, the climate is changing but it’s a natural phenomenon and mankind is not only not causing …
A Story: Here’s a story I find interesting. In a small rural town, there was an old factory building housing many workers. One day, the building simply collapsed trapping many people. Soon a large crowd of town folk gathered. The people were overcome by the plight of their fellow citizens and were weeping and wailing. They could feel the panic of …
Business is a risk: The trick is to figure out how to measure the risk. Then to do what we can to mitigate the risk. And finally to decide if the Return On the Investment (ROI) for taking the risk is positive in our minds. Insurance companies are, of course, in the business of doing just that—measuring risk and calculating …
Pushed Out of the Comfort Zone: Lately, I’ve observed a lot of folks being dragged out of their comfort zones. Some are finding a huge change in our political environment to be unsettling. And some are perplexed over the many issues around perceived changes in our social values. A great deal of discomfort is due to the disruption coming (and …
What is Servant Leadership? I’ve been thinking about the concept of “Servant Leadership.” To me, that term simply means that a leader is there to serve his/her people and teams as a resource. The leader allocates appropriate resources, removes bureaucratic obstacles and actively manages the organization’s culture. What Servant Leadership is Not It is not doing the work of the …
MBA vs. Relationship Business For a long time, I’ve been talking about there being only two kinds of companies. I started out calling them Number Businesses and Family Businesses. That got some blank stares, and a few folks were a bit offended when I referred to their companies as a “Family Business.” They insisted that “No, we run a tight …
The Six Ts The issue of trust in organizations came up several times during the last two months (of the previous year). I am working with a couple of new executives. And so we had not been through the conversation at that point. And I was reminded of this again when I saw a list of the “Six T’s” by …
Puzzle Eons ago, when I was in engineering school, we had an exercise known as “The Black Box.” The idea is simple; the challenge wasn’t always so simple. Inside the box, hidden from our view, was an electronic circuit. There were two variations, a paper exercise where the instructor gave us the input and outputwaveforms, and we had to derive …
Safety I beg your indulgence. I will get to the vacation thing, but first, a few other thoughts to put this all in context. Pundits tell us, I think correctly, that to be great leaders, we need to build a safe environment for our people. That means that everyone is treated with dignity and respect even when they make mistakes …