The Future Belongs to Storytellers

Now more than ever, we need storytellers to pull us out of the swamp of information we’ve created. We need storytellers to help us paint a positive picture of what’s possible on the road ahead.

Do Less, Think More

Two of the most stubbornly erroneous assumptions I find in organizational life is that activity = productivity; and thinking = daydreaming. We tend to pride ourselves on being busy as if it’s a proxy for adding value. It isn’t.

Saying Goodbye to a Friend

At first blush, Mike Van Cleave and I had nothing in common. We met in 1999 working for the same ad agency. When I mentioned I went to Cornell, he asked if I’d spent time at a certain local coffee shop on campus. I said that I hadn’t and that I’d wondered who went in…

Don’t Bite the Hook

Buddhist monk Pema Chodron gave a recorded talk in 2006 titled, Don’t Bite the Hook. It’s about pausing to get our bearings before reacting when something triggers us. I’ve listened to it many times but haven’t recommended it to clients until this year when I recommended it to three of them. For all of them…

New Book Worth a Read

Douglas Rushkoff has written a slap in the face. It’s a loving slap, but a slap nonetheless. And it’s a slap we could all use right now. The essence is this: we humans have created a host of wonderfully freeing advances, but over time they’ve come to enslave and control us–and we need to wake…

A Brief Visit With Einstein

In the early months of 1955, just before Einstein’s sudden death from an aneurysm on April 18th, LIFE Magazine editor William Miller traveled unannounced to Einstein’s home in Princeton, NJ. He was accompanied by his son Pat, a Harvard freshman, and William Hermanns, a poet, scholar and long-time friend of Einstein’s. The reason for the…

Fly High, Dive Deep

I’m currently helping a client think about mentoring in their organization. In the process I’m reviewing Chip Bell and Marshall Goldsmith’s good book Managers as Mentors. In it I came across a piece of advice that Fred Hassan, former Chairman of Shering-Plough and Bausch & Lomb and current Managing Director of Warburg Pincus, received from…

Are You Daydreaming Enough?

Einstein’s theory of relativity started as a daydream about running beside a sunbeam. Newton’s theory of gravity was sparked during a daydream as he saw an apple fall from a tree. JK Rowling was daydreaming on a train when she came up with the idea of Harry Potter. Research and anecdotal evidence are clear; our…