Index
2024
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Oct 2024
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Sep 2024Called By Love and Taught By Necessity
Some people begin an entrepreneurial odyssey pursuing the beacon of a distant aspiration; others begin simply by doing what they have to do. 2 min read -
Apr 2024Are You Committed to Meaning What You Say?
In HOW Institute for Society's report on The State of Moral Leadership in Business, Dov Seidman sheds a light on the pervasive demand for moral leadership; the scarce supply of moral leadership as measured by direct experience of a set of key behaviors; and the difference that moral leadership makes to a range of factors that shape effectiveness at work. At every level of every organization, the problem with management is how rare and difficult it is for any of us to demonstrate passionate, complete, relentless commitment to meaning what we say. 7 min read -
Feb 2024The Shape of a Year
In the higher levels of the game of work, we are presented with a question: How can we grow into powers we don’t yet have so that we can accomplish goals currently far beyond our reach and experience, in the course of this reaching and becoming, joy in our unfolding days and a sense of wholeness in our accumulating years? 10 min read
2023
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Aug 2023Money with Meaning
Every now and then, someone who has lived deeply and sought to do hard things sits down and writes a book that systematically shares the body of what they’ve learned. 7 min read -
Jun 2023One Moment in a Decade
Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece looking back at nine moments in Incandescent’s first decade that represented early turning points of learning and growth. Here I’d like to try something harder: to express the past decade as an extension of one conversation. 13 min read -
May 2023Incandescent Turns 10
As Incandescent turns ten, certain moments exemplify this aspiration: experiences of being fully in the flow of what we were meant to do and – equally – turning points at which we grew in some important way, not just learning something new, but entering into a larger world. I’ll share ten of these moments, nine in this post; and one, unpacked more deeply, in the post to follow. 11 min read
2022
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Oct 2022Pursuing a Life's Work
When I first met Ray, he was still early in the process of conceptualizing and planning the transition that he completed last week. 1 min read -
Sep 2022What To Do About Your Worst Relationship at Work
At the beginning of her new book Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People), Amy Gallo writes about a feeling almost all of us shudder to remember. 8 min read -
Mar 2022If You Can Do Only Two Things Right
For years now, as we’ve mapped out the future of Incandescent, there’s often been a moment when Shanti and I turn to each other and say “now, if we could find someone like Traci, they could do this, and that would enable us to….” 7 min read
2021
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Dec 2021On Turning Fifty
A few weeks ago, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday. As part of a day away from my usual routines, I spent the middle of the afternoon browsing Three Lives bookstore. 5 min read -
Oct 2021Snowfall & Strategy
Growing up in the far reaches of northern New England, where the snow often began falling in the late fall and would continue falling through late spring, I often heard of the Inuit’s rich vocabulary to describe snow. 7 min read -
Sep 2021The Art of Undertaking the Impossible
The best entrepreneurs begin with a commitment to something others deem impossible. At its heart, the founder’s stance is about pursuing a goal far beyond one’s grasp, understanding that only on the journey to the goal might the traveler learn the way. 17 min read -
Aug 2021How I Met an Ambassador from My Future, and What She Told Me
A reflection on April Rinne's book "Flux" - a beautiful call for reimagining the future and how we relate to uncertainty. 8 min read -
Jun 2021How to Extract a Wise Decision from a Tangle of Strong Opinions
A major reason many groups make bad decisions is that they don't surface enough diversity of information and perspectives. 3 min read -
May 2021What Does “Becoming More Senior” Really Mean?
In shaping a career, few questions are as important as how to become more senior. But in most companies, "becoming more senior" is mixed up with different questions like the size of the team one manages, the demonstration of prerequisites for a particular job, and the business's ability to afford a compensation package. What does "becoming more senior" really mean? 13 min read -
Apr 2021How Small, Fast Steps Can Drive Impact at Scale
In an environment of rapid change, only those who adapt can succeed. 11 min read -
Apr 2021Why Are We Building This Company?
A few years ago, I wrote a pair of posts on building entrepreneurial companies. In the time since, those posts have generated a good deal of dialogue and attention, and it feels time to expand on the points I made there, as well as to share in writing more specifics about how we at Incandescent have defined our why. 7 min read -
Feb 2021Welcoming a Partner
Just as childhood was becoming adolescence, I was introduced to a fantasy world called Xanth, created by the novelist Piers Anthony. In Xanth, each person has one unique magical talent. 4 min read
2020
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Dec 2020Making Conversation, As If Our Lives Depend on It
The central work of our lives is conversation. Fred Dust's new book Making Conversation helps us expand the frame of how we have conversations by forcing us to stand in a field of gray and teaching us to see colors. 11 min read -
Nov 2020Relationship Design: A Manifesto
We have made great advances in applying design to how people engage with things and how people engage with software. These advances have improved people’s quality of life—and driven dramatic gains in productivity. The next frontier for design is to focus on a domain even more deeply connected to human flourishing: the domain of relationships. 5 min read -
Sep 2020Solving for the One Big Goal: A Story and a Map
If you strip away any limiting beliefs about what you know how to do, what is the one big goal that you would commit your energy to achieving? 3 min read -
Sep 2020Entering a Larger World
Having written so little in this space in several months, I am writing these words as an open letter—taking a moment to speak at a personal level, before sharing a broader reflection. 8 min read -
Aug 2020Strategy for Social Entrepreneurs in Dynamic Times
How social entrepreneurs can take a different approach toward strategic prioritization, connecting a vision for tomorrow to the agility and focus needed to take action today. 10 min read -
May 2020Learning How to Live
A crystallization of lessons Niko Canner takes from Jacqueline Novogratz's book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution 12 min read -
Mar 2020Thinking Clearly Amidst a Catastrophe
Four principles to guide focus and help us think clearly when it is both the hardest and the most necessary. 18 min read -
Mar 2020Becoming the Perfect Instrument: Podcast with Patrick O’Shaughnessy
Reflections on sitting down with Patrick O’Shaughnessy to record an episode of his podcast, Invest Like the Best. 2 min read -
Feb 2020Turning Toward
How poetry helps us lean into the moments that can shape a life. 3 min read
2019
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Nov 2019Building a Great Professional Services Firm Inside an Enterprise
Thoughts on how to build strategy functions, innovation groups, organizational effectiveness teams, transformation teams, and special ops teams of all kinds. 6 min read -
Oct 2019How to Connect Your Talent Strategy to Your Business Strategy
Talent strategy pinpoints how people, organization and culture position a business to win and defines how to achieve a lasting advantage across these specific dimensions. This post unpacks what makes for a truly extraordinary talent strategy and how that talks directly to business strategy. 7 min read -
Oct 2019Will You Seize the Moment, Will You Weather the Years?
A reflection on Leo Tilman and General Charles Jacoby's book, Agility, which offers a new way of thinking about enterprise risk and the holistic strategic work that flows from it. 10 min read -
Oct 2019Putting Innovation on a Breakthrough Path
How to navigate the challenges and risks of creating lasting innovation within a company. 4 min read -
Sep 2019What a Book on How to Parent Taught Me about How to Lead
A reflection on how intentional parenting brings us essential lessons for management. 9 min read -
Sep 2019To Achieve a Breakthrough, Step Through the Looking Glass
Exploring two different approaches to how to create breakthrough innovation in organizations. 4 min read -
Aug 2019Building a Network, One Authentic Relationship by One
These nine principles make up a general roadmap to a deeply generous, authentic approach to network development. 7 min read -
Jul 2019Don’t Develop Business, Develop Clients
I’ve noticed two common pathologies at B2B companies I've advised, which I’ve come to view as two opposite forms of departure from an underlying ideal. 8 min read -
May 2019On Human Enterprise
It is rare to achieve anything important without sustained focus. There are two… 4 min read -
Mar 2019Dancing with the Machine
A paradigm shift is now in its early decades: combining human judgment and the power of algorithms to solve complex problems. In no industry is this work of dancing with the machine more central than in financial services. 8 min read -
Jan 2019Shaping a Vision, Shaping a Life
Any entrepreneurial effort requires commitment to a journey that calls to be undertaken as a whole quest, but can be advanced only in stages. Such journeys demand attention to strategy, even as they defy planning. 7 min read -
Jan 2019The Practical Leader's Guide to Culture
We’re living in a time in which it seems almost every corporation has… 6 min read -
Jan 2019The Messy Work of Changing the World
This post concludes our three-part series on systems change by taking us into the heart of the messy, tactical, often seemingly intractable work necessary for the success of any strategy for systems change. 13 min read
2018
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Dec 2018The Art and Strategy of Changing Systems: Part 2
This second post of three on systems change focuses on the dimension of time, and how to navigate the long journeys that are inevitable with any big goal, and forming a “we” that balances cohesion around a shared purpose and a shared path, reach, and sustainability 8 min read -
Dec 2018The Art and Strategy of Changing Systems: Part 1
Traditional strategy puts the institution in the foreground and asks how it can realize the most value. Strategy in service of systems change takes the opposite view, placing a large outcome in the world in the foreground. 13 min read -
Nov 2018In Time of The Breaking of Nations
There are times when the world’s events seem to dwarf the human perspective.… 3 min read -
Nov 2018Built to Last
Twenty years ago, Marc Feigen, Jon Katzenbach and I founded Katzenbach Partners, a firm focused on breakthrough organizational performance. We grew the firm organically, adding an office in Houston led by Kenny Kurtzman, an office in Chicago led first by John Parker and then by Tom Nodine, and an office in San Francisco led by Zia Khan. 10 min read -
Sep 2018Welcome to John Rolander
It represents a major milestone in the development of Incandescent that John… 4 min read -
Aug 2018Learning from Extremes
Most thinking about business draws lessons from extreme cases. When we draw… 4 min read -
Jul 2018Four Foundations for Effective Leadership Teams
Regardless of style, all effective leadership teams need to embody norms that drive them to put the enterprise first when the imperatives of the whole conflict with the imperatives of the part and to do the hard work of confronting what isn’t working and what’s at risk. 5 min read -
Jul 2018Building an Excellent Leadership Team: Six Elements
Perhaps nothing is as important to an organization’s success as the quality of its leadership team and how this team functions together. Few leadership teams, however, have clearly articulated their collective role and few have established the disciplines required to play this role well. 10 min read -
Jun 2018Making Innovation Stick
Entrepreneurial activity happens in pockets. Whether the spark of an advance… 11 min read -
Jun 2018Internal Logic: What Is Our Business For?
All organizations embody an external logic: what value they provide to whom,… 14 min read -
May 2018On Being Stuck
People and companies often flounder without ever achieving the clarity and focus that come with recognizing they’re Stuck. That kind of drift is to be avoided at all costs. Recognize that you’re Stuck and embrace the frustrations that come with the missteps that have brought you to this place. This recognition is the gateway to progress. 14 min read -
May 2018How to Navigate Limitless Work
Many of the people we work with – especially those leading organizations,… 8 min read -
Apr 2018How to Build Teams that Unlock Innovation
In a prior post, we explored the heart of entrepreneurship: the pursuit of… 2 min read -
Feb 2018Red is the Most Important Color in Management
In my last post, I proposed ten principles for managing a company well.… 8 min read -
Feb 2018Ten Principles for How to Run a Company
You’ve invented something that will change the world. But you have weeks left… 5 min read -
Jan 2018How Small a Thought It Takes to Fill a Whole Life
Steve Reich wrote a fourteen-minute “speech melody” called Proverb. Five voices… 4 min read
2017
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Nov 2017The Zen of Work: Hard Focus and Soft Focus
People are wired to respond to rhythms. As we craft and improvise the way we… 2 min read -
Oct 2017The Zen of Meetings
In my post “The Zen of Work: Making Each Moment Count,” I looked at the way… 9 min read -
Sep 2017The Biggest Choice You Don’t Even Know You’re Making
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, and four washed-up recent entrepreneurs… 8 min read -
Aug 2017The Question Every Decision Maker Should Answer First
Who participates in making decisions, and how should each person in the room think about his or her role? 3 min read -
Jul 2017Should We Have Two Leadership Teams?
A number of the entrepreneurs we advise have reached the stage of… 13 min read -
May 2017The Zen of Work: Making Each Moment Count
We do our work in two categories of episodes: meetings and work by oneself. Effectiveness in shaping one’s work in these two settings is a great deal of what drives productivity. 5 min read -
May 2017The Education of a Strategist
Great strategists elevate organizations. They see the statue in the marble of… 9 min read -
Apr 2017Achieving Impact on a 1,000-Year Scale
Over the next thousand years, a succession of human societies will determine… 7 min read -
Mar 2017Market Logic of a Business: Seven Fundamental Questions
One of the questions we often see in our work is about whether and how to… 3 min read -
Feb 2017What to Do When Your People Are Leaving
There are few things more unsettling for people-driven businesses like tech… 10 min read -
Jan 2017What Does "Taking Ownership" Really Mean?
As we’ve described in pieces like “Self Management: A New Architecture” and… 3 min read -
Jan 2017Finishing the Work of Founding a Company
Founders often feel their work can never be completed. Or they feel that the… 6 min read
2016
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Dec 2016Why We Invest in Reviews and Rate Performance
GE made headlines with their decision to eliminate ratings. Accenture’s CEO… 14 min read -
Nov 2016How to Revise One’s Thinking
Decisions we make, in business and in life, are a function of the way the evidence we get, the inferences we make from that evidence, the background beliefs that shape our thinking and the way we connect all these inputs to our objectives. 11 min read -
Nov 2016After the Election
I shared the letter below with our team at Incandescent this morning: a… 2 min read -
Oct 2016How We Run Incandescent: Principles and Practices
Over the last three years of building Incandescent, we’ve also been building a… 8 min read -
Sep 2016The Stupidest Thing Smart Executives Say
“Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution!” 6 min read -
Sep 2016Self-Management and the Volunteer Economy at Incandescent
Since the publication of Beyond the Holacracy Hype in HBR this summer, a number… 3 min read -
Aug 2016Micromanagement 101 and Other Recent Adventures
After publishing Beyond the Holacracy Hype in the July-August issue of Harvard… 3 min read -
Aug 2016Encoding My Learning and Teaching: A Personal Reflection
Over the past couple of years, I’ve twice shared my priorities for personal… 9 min read -
Jul 2016Feedback in the Moment
Experience decays. While some experiences stay with us vividly for years, most… 2 min read -
Jun 2016In Harvard Business Review: Self Management Beyond "Visionaries vs. Skeptics"
Late last year, I wrote a four-part series on self management, first laying out… 4 min read -
Jun 2016The "Duck-Rabbit" and the Art of Entrepreneurship
Anyone who has built a company knows what it’s like to flip back and forth… 4 min read -
Jun 2016How to Retain Talent – and How to Lose People the Right Way
Of all the systems relating to talent that I’ve ever had a hand in developing,… 5 min read -
May 2016On Hiring Well, Part 3: Five Disciplines Once the Search is Underway
Perhaps the most frequent barrier to making a great hire is the availability of a seemingly good enough hire close at hand. 13 min read -
Apr 2016On Hiring Well, Part 2: Four Disciplines Before The Search Begins
Companies that excel in building talent generally hire first for the firm, second for the specific role someone plays when they enter. 10 min read -
Apr 2016On Hiring Well
Choices about whom to hire are among the most important choices any company makes. Hiring constitutes “choosing the choosers” of what a company will do and how they will do it, whether at the micro scale of delivering service at a car rental counter or the macro scale of building a new business. 3 min read -
Mar 2016Strategy for Entrepreneurs: Building an Enterprise Over a Series of Eras
The field of strategy has taken shape primarily in the context of large… 10 min read -
Mar 2016Cultures That Yield the Right Divergence
Institutions need both alignment and divergence. Four forms of divergence stand out as essential: confronting mistakes, new solutions to known priorities, parallel efforts to achieve distinct aims, and reframing strategy. 6 min read -
Mar 2016Culture: A CEO’s Manifesto
Culture is the fabric of shared patterns of how people act, think and feel that impact collective performance. It’s the grain of how a company’s people perceive their world, pay attention to some things and not others, engage customers, spend money, treat one another. 5 min read -
Feb 2016How to Be an Original
All significant achievement demands a journey beyond precedent. Adam Grant’s Originals is not so much a map for this journey as a curriculum for explorers, preparing the “reader as explorer” to handle the kinds of terrain they can expect to encounter. 6 min read -
Jan 2016The Power of Stepping Back: Conducting Post-Mortems
Nothing is more valuable than maximizing the amount we learn from our… 6 min read -
Jan 2016Worldly Wisdom in 80 Models
As a companion piece to Graham’s Duncan’s post What Do You See?, I’d like to… 3 min read -
Jan 2016You Must Change Your Life
Years turn, and our lives continue the motion they know. We try things, which… 3 min read
2015
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Dec 2015Guest Post: What Do You See?
Graham Duncan, founder of East Rock Capital, is one of the people I’ve most… 3 min read -
Dec 2015Self Management is One Part Architecture, Two Parts Culture
Many discussions of self management focus far too much on architecture and imply a tighter connection between choosing an architecture and producing a culture than is generally the case. In my view, designing the best architecture is at most a third of the battle. The much larger share revolves around the consistent, difficult work required of leaders – formal and informal – to shape a culture in which the ideals of self management get realized and translate into advancement of the organization’s broader goals. 5 min read -
Dec 2015Beyond the Ritual of the Annual Review
Without precision about what an annual review is meant to do, and without a set of mechanisms for goal setting, feedback and reflection that connect up to annual reviews, the year-end review easily becomes an empty ritual. 8 min read -
Nov 2015Self Management: A New Architecture
In the second of four posts on self management, we looked at Holacracy as an… 9 min read -
Nov 2015Try to Praise the Mutilated World
Elaine Scarry writes about how pain “exhausts and displaces all else, until it… 2 min read -
Nov 2015Is Holacracy the Answer?
Of all forms of self-management, perhaps the one getting the most attention now is Holacracy, an “operating system” incubated at Ternary Software, a Pennsylvania-based tech company. I believe the reason Holacracy is receiving so much attention is that it’s a fully-specified answer to the question of what a baseline model for self-management should be. 8 min read -
Nov 2015The Building Blocks of Self Management
What is self management, really? Is there a basic essence—peer-based systems? flatness? dissolution of hierarchy? Or are many widely disparate approaches to building and running organizations living underneath the heading of self management? And—most importantly—what works? 6 min read -
Oct 2015What is Entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled. 2 min read -
Sep 2015Talent, Development, and Achievement
In the field of HR, a great deal of thinking goes into how people perform in specific jobs and into HR practices like performance management and leadership development programs. While these are worthy enough topics, my own thinking begins from a different place: the perspective of an individual looking to achieve a major purpose over a long time frame, either independently or within an institution. I’ve been concerned with three main themes: (1) getting better, (2) becoming more senior, and (3) focus on deeper purpose. 6 min read -
Sep 2015What makes a good job good – getting down to basics
In the most recent quarter, the U.S. economy grew in real terms by 3.7 percent.… 4 min read -
Aug 2015Sasha Dichter’s "Do Button"
When we encounter “great new ideas” of any kind, the very first thing that happens in our minds is a shift from “this has my attention” to “this matters to me.” The do button effects a transmission from “this matters” to a realized action. 6 min read -
Aug 2015Growing Our Team at Incandescent
The formative era for any firm is important not only because it establishes the… 4 min read -
Jul 2015Always Be Practicing Something
The speed of our learning is a function of the cumulative impact of what we’re able to learn from every episode of work. Sometimes we can accelerate development by adding “episodes of reflection” to “episodes of doing.” However, “episodes of doing” will always be the majority of the time we spend at work, so it is important that we leverage them well as fuel for learning. 3 min read -
Jul 2015Guest Post: Elise Waxenberg’s Advice from an Intern
The last time I was an intern was nearly 10 years ago, when I was an undergrad working in New York for a magazine and banking about $10 an hour. Now as an MBA student, I’m getting the unusual chance to reincarnate as a summer intern again, and to figure out how to make the most of what can be an excellent experience to learn and try something new. 4 min read -
Jul 2015Josh Waitzkin on "Slowing Down Time"
The differences between those who achieve greatly and their peers are evident… 4 min read -
Jul 2015Advice to an Intern
I’ve heard from many readers how useful they found Advice to a Student, which lays out an extremely demanding regimen for someone thinking about pursuing a first job in management consulting. This piece tries to answer a parallel question: what are the disciplines that, applied well, will help an intern in any field get the most out of his or her experience? 8 min read -
Jun 2015What I Need to Learn Next
Last year, I shared with my team and publicly on this blog what I needed to… 5 min read -
Jun 2015Founder & COO: Pulling Out the Tangles
Highly creative founder-CEOs almost inevitably reach a point where they want or need their companies to run better. Often, this leads to the hiring of a Chief Operating Officer. Perhaps no single pair in organizational life is as hard to manage as the founder/CEO and COO relationship. 8 min read -
Jun 2015On Working for the Wrong Boss
You’ve been living with this for a couple of years. You have a job that’s… 6 min read -
Jun 2015Admit Ignorance! Ask Dumb Questions!
Page 72 of Andrew Roberts’ new biography of Napoleon paints a compelling… 7 min read -
Jun 2015Who Are the Social Impact "Billionaires"?
In our recent post Economics in a World Where Everyone Matters Equally, we… 5 min read -
May 2015Time is the Medium in Which We Sculpt Achievement
Time is the medium in which we sculpt achievement. The longer the horizon of… 4 min read -
May 2015How Economic Progress Happens
As one looks more closely at this IROI “sweet spot,” with staggeringly high returns and relatively low risks, another variable stands out as important, which might be termed “tractability.” 5 min read -
Apr 2015Economics in a World Where Everyone Matters Equally
Let’s imagine a metric, perhaps hard to measure but easy to conceptualize: the total surplus, as captured by all stakeholders in an endeavor. This could be expressed as a percentage annual return on the total investment made, including both the capital invested directly in the enterprise as well as investments made by other stakeholders. We’ll call this this “integrated return on investment,” or IROI. 4 min read -
Apr 2015How to Run a Company
Most companies aren’t run any particular way. There’s a kind of default Fortune… 4 min read -
Apr 2015Elliott Jaques, Jackson Pollock and Seeing the Size of People and Problems
Elliott Jaques, best known for coining the term “mid-life crisis,” is also a… 4 min read -
Mar 2015Going with One’s Grain
People differ. Great achievement rarely goes against the grain of an… 6 min read -
Mar 2015The World’s Best Customer Experience Executive
I recently wrote about how difficult it is to differentiate a company on the… 4 min read -
Mar 2015How to Think About the Future
Yogi Berra said, “Prediction is very hard, especially about the… 5 min read -
Mar 2015Stop Being a Ghost!
I’ve been grateful for the many comments I’ve received on the Living Two… 2 min read -
Feb 2015Democracy as Problem Solving
Near the end of his 2008 book Democracy as Problem Solving, Xavier de Souza… 6 min read -
Feb 2015Is "Customer Centricity" a Strategy?
One of the biggest and most frequent mistakes of top managers in big companies… 3 min read -
Jan 2015Living Two Stories: What to Do About Not Knowing What We Want
Have two provisional goals: one goal should be a story that can be pursued right now, a story that feels realistic to take action on more or less each day. And another provisional goal should encompass the exploration that matters most. Call this “living two stories.” 8 min read -
Jan 2015Beyond "The Dream of Safety"
Leap Before You Look The sense of danger must not disappear: The way is… 2 min read -
Jan 2015Deliberate Practice in the Making of Large Things
Where a practice session in sports or music might last a couple of hours, a… 6 min read -
Jan 2015My Unlikeliest Favorite Business Book
I spend most of my time thinking about how to run companies well. Of course a… 8 min read -
Jan 2015Beginnings
My daughter Minh was born on December 10th. I watch her quiet in contentment;… 4 min read
2014
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Dec 2014What Makes Practice Deliberate
Influence helps to transmit the ways of seeing and working that accelerate… 3 min read -
Nov 2014Mixing Power Right
Jeremy Heimans, cofounder and CEO of Purpose, a social business that builds… 4 min read -
Nov 2014On and Against Striving
I have always been someone whose work is mostly about striving. My clients are… 2 min read -
Nov 2014Shaping Our Influences, as They Shape Us
Any influence both shapes and limits. The sculptor Giacometti described how… 2 min read -
Oct 2014Three Lines to a Bird: Reflections on My Own Priorities for Professional Development
In the middle of the year, in parallel to our mid-year review process at… 7 min read -
Oct 2014Strategy and Myth
Rereading Peter Schwartz’s classic The Art of the Long View recently, I came… 3 min read -
Oct 2014A Life that Emanates from a System of Ideas
None of us are truly self-made, but when it comes to shaping capacity to… 3 min read -
Oct 2014A Short Guide to Achieving Big Things
I recently had the opportunity to give a workshop for World Economic Forum… 8 min read -
Oct 2014Work and Life: One More Truth
Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams look at a great deal of data on the life… 3 min read -
Oct 2014Building Sand Castles against the Tide, Building Cathedrals on Sand
The measure of one’s achievement is the biggest idea one can arrive at and… 2 min read -
Oct 2014Ying’s Story: A Macro-Miniature
We know that within a decade or so, China will be the world’s largest economy.… 4 min read -
Oct 2014Aravind and the Choice of Great Achievement
Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, known as Dr. V, was an entrepreneur and… 3 min read -
Oct 2014Crazy is a Compliment: Reflections on Entrepreneurship as an Ethos
About halfway through her new book, Crazy is a Compliment: The Power of Zigging… 4 min read -
Sep 2014Advice to a Student
I have spent the better part of twenty years in strategy consulting; I began at… 10 min read -
Sep 2014Revisiting Strategy One Year Out
Last year, we had the honor to work with the team at Solutions Journalism… 9 min read -
Sep 2014Working from the Mind’s Eye
On a flight back from South Africa, reading John Reader’s panoramic Africa: A… 3 min read -
Sep 2014Setting strategy: 6 Cs
In “What Does It Mean to Have a Clear Strategy?” I articulated a definition of… 3 min read -
Aug 2014What Does it Mean to Have a Clear Strategy?
Too often companies treat the crux of “having a strategy” as a formal question… 3 min read -
Aug 2014When Is No Hierarchy Best?
All too many companies think they will be great by accident. It is unlikely… 4 min read -
Aug 2014Watching Others go to Work
In a meeting with my friend Jennifer McCrea, she described standing on the… 3 min read -
Aug 2014Macro-Miniatures
How can we see the way large forces shape the world? Social sciences give us… 2 min read -
Aug 2014On Human Enterprise
Human achievement can reach as far as our ability, individually and… 2 min read