Happy Independence. Now Question It. Happy Independence — to those who are actually free and sovereign. Living in a free country does not mean you are free. We may be free from outsiders. Their influence may not be. That's not a slogan. It's worth sitting with,...
Success Success attracts people. Failure repels them. That's the illusion we carry — that people are drawn to us, or pull away from us. They are not. There is nothing about us that changes from Tuesday to Wednesday. What changes is our success and our failure. Our...
Why It's So Hard to Start With the End in Mind? Everyone has heard the advice. Start with the end in mind. Picture where you want to land, then work backward. It sounds obvious once someone says it out loud — and almost nobody actually does it. I don't think that's a...
Who is Actually Leading When I Lead? A program director I know once snapped at his project manager in a steering committee meeting over a two-day delay in a status update. It was a small thing. The room went quiet the way rooms do when the reaction doesn't match the...
The Reward Never Stops Costing You Something clicked on a scrap of paper this morning: no wonder we are too busy. We're not just chasing rewards. We're preserving them. And that second job never ends. Here's the pattern underneath most of what we call success: Effort...
There Is No Greatness in Serving Your Own For the people we care about, we give our resources and ourselves. We think about them when they're not in the room. We plan for them. We set aside what we've built so they can pressure-test it, prosper from it, evolve past...
You Cannot Be Told to Be Authentic A general manager I worked alongside used to open steering committee meetings by asking the hard question first. "Before we start, what are we not saying in this room?" It made people uncomfortable. It also made the program better,...
The Cost of Not Knowing What You Need I keep a small note to myself: the cost of not knowing what you need. Most of what I want to write about today sits underneath that one line. Go-live is not the goal. Every ERP program I've been near treats the go-live date like...