A couple weeks ago I delivering the opening keynote at an agricultural conference. For those of who don’t know, theirs is an industry currently facing significant challenges. A combination of unusually uncooperative weather and unprecedented policy decisions have simultaneously depressed crop supply and prices. Farming is a difficult business, and farmers today are having a…
Somewhere pretty close to 35 years ago this month, I learned how to ride a bicycle. I’d like to pretend that I remember such a pivotal moment in life like it was yesterday, but obviously that’s not true since I don’t even remember exactly when it happened. (Nor do I remember what I did yesterday.)…
This morning I made the mistake that almost all of us make in our first hour of consciousness – I checked my Facebook account and scanned the headlines. Consequently I learned the following: a friend of mine is leaving today for a two-month vacation to Singapore; the United States has a list of 59 terror…
We are bombarded with choices. Right now I’m sitting at a hotel bar in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I’ve got somewhere between 60 and 70 beers I can choose from. That’s just the taps, by the way – I’m not even bothering to look at what they have in bottles. Most of my choices are some…
My wife can’t handle the grocery store. She’s an incredibly intelligent and accomplished person – got her Ph.D in organic chemistry, so you know that I married up – but she goes to pieces whenever I make the mistake of letting her come grocery shopping with me. She looks at everything, goes down every aisle…
A couple weeks ago I was on a plane – shocking, I know – and got into a conversation with a woman returning from a public health conference. The main concern of the attendees was how to combat the proliferation of high-sugar, high-calorie, low-nutrition foods in our schools, primarily (shout-out to my fellow Midwesterners coming)…
First off, I promise this will have some business relevance. I generally don’t write a lot of articles that deal with parenthood, mostly because there are a trillion blogs that do exclusively that and I have no intention of turning into one of them. However, I’ve realized something recently that I think might help all…
So I stumbled across this study about six weeks ago, and ever since I’ve been mentioning it in my keynote presentations. I included then link so that you’d know I wasn’t making this up, but I also don’t expect you to go and read the BBC article I’ve linked to, so here’s the summary: A…
Forgive me for using a title that sounds like a get-rich-quick pitch. “And if you act now I’ll throw in TWO copies of my book for the same price as THREE!” Which would be a terrible deal for you, by the way, but that’s not the point. You’ve probably read a thousand business articles by…
My grandmother died last month. It was not an unexpected thing – she was 95 years old, and her health had been failing very gradually for the past few years. By itself, the knowledge that a loved one has lived a long life and that “it’s their time” doesn’t do much to help us deal…