As 2022 draws to a close, there are two issues that seem to have completely dominated the year – supply chain, and labor shortage. Those have been the two key drivers at pretty much every conference I have attended this year. Fixing the supply chain is beyond my ability. But dealing with our persistent labor…
At its most basic, effective leadership consists of two key components. One of them is the human element – that’s the part where you’re showing and telling the people who work for you that you’re glad they’re there. This is the piece of leadership that gets the most attention, because there are an endless number…
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about my job is the opportunity to meet people living in places I would otherwise probably never go, doing things I know almost nothing about. It’s given me a chance to see a much broader cross-section of the world than I think most jobs allow for, and my…
Last month, something happened to me at an event that hasn’t happened in well over a decade. I wish it were something cool like audience members throwing money and candy at me as they cheered “Bravo!” and “Encore!” But that’s never happened, and probably never will. No, this thing was far more mundane, and far…
Recently my wife and I were in Barcelona, visiting her family and 87 of their closest friends. (Not quite, but there were a lot of people.) We were outside, it was a beautiful day, and it was time to decide where to have dinner. The only thing everyone agreed on was that we wanted to…
In the last several months I’ve spoken at a few dozen conferences. And at every single one of them – big ones, small ones, and basically every industry there is – the people at those conferences have been talking about exactly two things: supply chain, and the labor shortage. Your company probably is, too. Those…
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I also wanted to be a builder (which was my Lego-inspired term for ‘construction worker’), and I also wanted to dig up dinosaurs. I have done none of those things, and it’s perfectly OK. I chose a different path, and I’m happy with it. …
To be fair, there are probably more than three things all employees want. Most employees would probably take a million dollars if you felt like giving it to them. Or a jetski, the ability to talk to animals, telekinetic powers – the list goes on. But in this article we’re going to talk about three…
Every minute, approximately 765,000 articles about leadership are written. That’s only a slight exaggeration, because we are collectively obsessed with the notion of leadership. But I run across relatively few articles that contrast a leadership mindset against some of the other mindsets that are equally critical to a company’s success, and so I thought it…
Recently somebody got mad at me for something they shouldn’t have. That’s not just my opinion, either; they even agreed with me that they were mad about something else and took their anger out on me. However, they didn’t apologize for getting mad at me when they shouldn’t have. And it’s bugging me. It’s still…