Ideas are free, execution is priceless.

Hostage negotiation consultants who run bank robbery prevention trainings have a mantra. Ignore human nature at your own peril. One of the tactics they teach to tellers is to disclose personal information. If your bank is being held up, and the robbers start shoving you across the room, introduce yourself. Repeat your name over and over again. Humanize yourself and condition the robbers to know who you are. It…

One of my core arguments for why everyone should wear nametags is, dishonest and uncivil behavior becomes more difficult to do. With nametags, we give others the gift of security by letting them know who they’re dealing with. There’s nothing to hide behind. Our identity is always verified. There’s a social construct that forces us to sign our work and take a stand for our identity. There is no…

Kohn’s seminal book stands as the definitive critique of competition. Contrary to accepted wisdom, he explains, competition is not basic to human nature. When life become an endless succession of contests, when our work is structured upon the need to be better than, and when our time is spent busy struggling to outdo others, we are actually poisoning our relationships and holding ourselves back from doing our best. And…

Graves, a pioneer in human consciousness theory, explained that we are always engaged in the process of becoming something more than we were, and not yet what we will be. When challenges come up that we can’t solve at our present level of being, he says, we make a leap to a newer, higher order system biologically, psychologically, socially and spiritually. He dubbed this theory spiral dynamics, since the psychology of…

Institutions, organizations and bureaucracies of any kind seek the same thing. People who comply, not grow. Which makes sense from an operational perspective. Compliance is extremely easy to measure, test, teach and scale. That’s what any of us would be doing if we ran a multimillion or billion dollar organization. Buckminster, the legendary innovator and visionary, once observed that governments, religions and businesses would find it devastating to their…