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When John Coltrane plays the melody early in the track Harmonique, you can hear some of the notes crack. Of course, Coltrane was completely capable of playing these notes the traditional way. And yet he didn’t. It’s this effort and…

That’s when we find out how well you make decisions. When you don’t have the resources to do it the usual way, that’s when you show us how resourceful you are. And when you don’t know if it’s going to…

Of course you can. What else are you going to argue with? Failure can’t argue with you, because it knows that it didn’t work. The art of staying successful is in being open to having the argument. Great organizations fail…

There are all sorts of actions we can take to earn points. We can earn points with our spouse, with a boss, with a customer… "Wow, you get extra points for that." The question one might ask is, "what good…

Sometimes, we can’t measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that’s much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation. TV advertisers, for example, could never tell which viewers would be impacted by an ad, so…

How much of your time and effort goes into protecting yourself from the things you fear?
And how much is spent serving your muse and your tribe and your potential?

The first time was youthful bravery–I was playing hockey with people far better than I (not older, merely better) and they slammed me into the boards. That’s something almost heroic, at least when you’re twelve. No, the second time was…

When my friend Elly taught in a middle school, he never hung out in the teacher’s room. He told me he couldn’t bear the badmouthing of students, the whining and the blaming. Of course, not all teachers are like this….

Here’s what political marketers learn from people who don’t vote: Nothing. If you don’t vote because you’re disappointed with your choices, disgusted by tactics like lying and spin, or merely turned off by the process, you’ve opted out of the…

In the industrial age, the boss defines a good job as one that meets spec. If you do what you are told, on time and on budget, it’s a good job. A bad job, then, is one that requires repair…