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Winning new business it not always the royal road to growth. In fact, sometimes it’s the last thing a company needs right now. Particularly if the team already has too much on their plates. Trying to accommodate new clients that they can’t even service isn’t good for anybody. The trouble is, we’re all human and sometimes we get greedy. Prospective clients flatter us by saying that they’ve heard great…

In an organization, being a leader involves more than simply finding solutions for problems within your direct responsibilities. It also involves addressing the problems that might impact everything that relates to your overall work experience. That’s the impact of systems thinking. By seeing and respecting the contextual structures that underlie complex situations, you can share observations and suggest ideas for creating improvement across the entire organization. Even if they…

Dilbert’s human resources manager once told him that it was a burden to remember his name, so from now on, he would refer to him as either buddy or big guy. The employee responded, how about I just get a nametag? Then you could just read it. To which his manager replied, do I look like I have that kind of time? Interestingly enough, sixteen years later, that iconic…

Systems thinkers look at the whole, not just the parts. They judge the worth of a system based on its end to end effectiveness, rather than on how efficiently individual parts operate. Ackoff, the organizational theorist, consultant and professor, was one of the pioneers it the field of systems thinking. One of his notable rants was about the fallacy of efficiency. He said the righter we do the wrong…

Nametags are my favorite accessory, but also my favorite analogy. If there is a particular idea, story or experience that needs to be conveyed in an interesting and persuasive way, my default linguistic tool is to refer to it as a nametag. If an idea is sticky and playful and human and disarming, that’s a nametag. If there is a person who makes a small, simple effort to connect…

Phenomenology is the study of consciousness. How things appear in our own subjective, direct experience. Husserl, the founding father of this discipline, said that the number one job of the phenomenologist is to describe. To denote any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to our experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. What’s beautiful about this philosophy is, it’s wildly…

Motivation doesn’t happen to us, it happens in us. Which means the question we should ask ourselves is, what is the cost of inaction? After all, if the pain of staying the same doesn’t outweigh the pain of change, then we will never create a strong enough reason to motivate ourselves. It’s the simple calculus of human motivation. People rarely do anything about their pain until it gets to…

Not all business is good business. Firing clients is a healthy practice for any company that wants to grow. But it should be done for the right reasons. Like when there’s too big a gap between the client needs and the firm’s abilities. Then it makes sense to part ways amicably. Or when the client is no longer lucrative for your business. Time to move on. Or maybe the client…

Caltech scientists recently did the impossible. Researchers were able to generate a ring of plasma in midair using only a stream of high pressured water and a crystal plate. The charge was thinner than human hair and was blasted from a nozzle that struck at about one thousand feet per second. They literally captured lightning in a bottle. Wow, isn’t that amazing? What we thought was just an old…

End times are not a matter of if, but when. And the moment god chimes the armageddon bell, you need a way to protect the future of those left behind. That’s why my new business idea is to launch an eschatological insurance company that will send policy holders notifications in the event of the rapture. If you are non responsive, our agents will deploy an end times care team…