(And Three Ways To Fix It) I’d like to begin by saying that this article isn’t an attack on you or your current leadership training. It’s an attack on leadership training in general, a $150 billion industry which has almost entirely failed to create the better leaders that it continually promises. Recent Gallup polls have…
So innovation is a big buzzword these days. (Do people still say ‘buzzword’? Is buzzword still a buzzword?) Approximately half of the people I did my TED talk with spoke more or less explicitly about the importance of innovation. By comparison, nobody talked about inventing anything new. And why exactly would that be? Isn’t invention…
So I’ve been living in Texas now for three months, which I think is long enough to really appreciate some of the differences between this vaguely hat-shaped state and the mitten-shaped state from which I came. I got a sunburn in December, for example – not a bad one, just mild enough for me to…
Hi. I deliver presentations for a living, primarily because nobody wants to work with me for a full eight hours every day. Sometimes I get invited to lunch, but that’s about as far as it goes. I’ve tried making friends on the plane to and from my presentations, but those stupid noise-cancelling headphones have made…
So in a nutshell, here’s how every funny person is born:
As some of you know, I gave my first TED talk a couple weeks ago. (I wrote it that way on purpose because it implies I’ll do another one someday.) It was a pretty cool experience, primarily because I was surprised by the entire process. After almost a decade of speaking for a living, I…
I was honored to get the opportunity to speak at TEDxNormal a couple of months ago and Mr. TED recently released the videos. My segment from this awesome event focused on leadership and how we can improve employee engagement through some not-so-standard practices. It was a totally different experience for me even though I speak…
Hello, and welcome to the end of another year! You’ve probably unofficially stopped working already, since the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is universally understood to be a time for ‘wrapping things up,’ which is universally understood to mean ‘putting things off for as long as possible.’ This is the perfect time of year to…
OK, so you’re about to start reading a bunch of articles that are going to try to put 2015 into perspective and then make reasonable predictions about what’s going to happen next year. I’m perfectly happy to let others tell you what to expect for the upcoming year. What I want to do is tell…
As some of you may know, my wife is an organic chemist. In case you didn’t have to suffer through organic chemistry in college, it’s the class that makes aspiring doctors say, “I think I might just work in a vineyard instead.” Her doctoral thesis has the impressive distinction of somehow being written in English…