How To Take Initiative

Making important decisions, acting like a leader, being a person your colleagues can count on to get the job done – all of these are qualities associated with “taking initiative.”  So if there’s a lot of extra initiative lying around, odds are you’d like to take some of it for yourself. Doing so, however, can…

the most important sentence in leadership

The Most Important Sentence in Leadership

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…

What You Can Learn From a Pig Farmer

What You Can Learn from Pig Farmers and Pharmacies

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…

striving for consensus

Is Striving For Consensus Keeping You From Moving Forward?

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…

Setting and Changing Goals

Why We Sometimes Give Up On Our Goals (And Why That’s OK)

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. …