The holidays are coming, which means you are probably about to argue with some of your relatives. I say that with confidence, because all of us are always only about two or three sentences away from a possible argument with somebody – family, friends, colleagues, the slow person in front of you at the stoplight,…
There are a lot of ways to handle conflict. A popular one is to escalate them by avoiding the contentious subject, shouting at people who disagree with you, and other fun things like that. But if you’d like to, I don’t know, reduce the pain and agony of your next conflict, then active listening is…
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…
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…
I’m not saying anything especially ground-breaking when I say that the last several months have been catastrophic for just about everyone. There’s the pandemic, obviously. But that’s not the only catastrophe I’m referring to. There’s the murder of George Floyd in broad daylight on a busy street, which was not the first time a person…
I’ve been thinking a lot about risk lately. In all fairness, as I near the end of my second month in quarantine I have been thinking a lot about all kinds of things – poetry, weasels, gymnastics, pancakes, mulch, and you get the idea. But as far as business goes, my brain keeps circling back…
Ah, crisis. It’s a fun word to say, but that’s the only fun thing about it. Crisis brings massive uncertainty, and we generally don’t deal well with that. Besides, crises often bring the potential for something significantly negative without offering the potential for something positive. We call it risk when things might end well but…
My wife and I got into an argument this weekend about how we should be spending time with our son. Sounds like fun, right? That sentence might have conjured up images of wild shouting, doors slamming, and the hours of frosty silence that often follow heated arguments. And with good reason, since all of that…
For the past eight years, I have delivered a leadership presentation called Unleash Your Inner Tyrant! at conferences across 48 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and six Latin American countries. In that presentation, I pretend to encourage my audience to engage in all kinds of terrible leadership practices – outsourcing blame, avoiding contact with employees, making…
So in a nutshell, here’s how every funny person is born: