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The concept of “craftsmanship” or being a craftsman (or an “artist”) has been a strong recurring theme for me this year. Godin talks about it in Linchpin. Pressfield talks about being a “professional” or “artist”. Graeme pointed me to an article from Robin Sharma (“60 Tips for a Stunningly Great Life”) where number 3 is [...]

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I have been jamming at work. Lots of change. Lots of busy. Got myself promoted. I’ve been stressing about not having posted anything recently. I just finished reading a great piece from Knowledge@Wharton about the leadership lessons from Shakespeare’s “Henry V” – that of the famous “band of brothers” quote. If you haven’t seen the [...]

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Zen Habits offered up a brief guide to life on Monday. You may consider this a little off topic for this blog. I will argue. Part of being a good leader is finding balance. less TV, more reading less shopping, more outdoors less clutter, more space less rush, more slowness less consuming, more creating less [...]

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Over the last week, our intern and our receptionist left to go back to school. MBA and undergrad respectively. Neither school was teaching either of these smart, high upside, people the skills that they need to be developing and nurturing TODAY. To me, those skills are: Networking. Personal Marketing. Skill Evolution and Development. Networking – Its [...]

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I love when science validates my (several forms of) crazy. As many of you know, I seem to have some kind of mild fixation on shaking hands. I tend to rant about it. I talked to my 9 year old daughter about it yesterday as a matter of fact. (She gave someone a limp handshake. [...]

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The Keys To Unlocking Your Most Successful Career by Joann S. Lublin from the July 6, 2010 WSJ online is possibly the best article I have read all year about managing your career. Great, great stuff. Five simple lessons. 1. Network effectively. I already love Lublin. You’ve seen me rant about this before. She recommends [...]

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Last week, I started as series of posts detailing my thoughts on how I would fix or turn around a business operation. Inspired by a promising MBA student that is doing an internship with us, I thought I would take a stab at a scenario she threw at me. Last week-ish we talked about financials. [...]

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We have an intern working with us. She is getting her MBA. She still has that new car smell on her. By that I mean – she hasn’t become bitter and jaded. She is still full of the possibility that most business problems are easy to fix. If only we applied ourselves. She’s taken to [...]

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Caught a post on Personal Branding Blog re: the essential skills we need to have in order to succeed in this “new world”. Very critical, very forward thinking. Here’s the list (hit the link to see the post in full): Social media and web 2.0 know how. (Aren’t we past 2.0 yet?) The ability to [...]

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Just read  a July 8th article from Knowledge@Wharton: Caught in the Middle: Rising Unemployment Takes Its Toll on Older Managers that will cause you to lose some sleep. Especially if you are believing the hype that “it is getting better out there.” It isn’t. And it won’t. The opening paragraph sets the pace: U.S. recessions [...]

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