One of the most underused and undervalued tools in a leader's toolkit is the element of surprise. It is fun, really; you can lie in wait in your office with the lights out, and when someone walks in, yell, "BOO!" All kidding aside, the idea of surprise can often be used not just as a culture builder but as a robust tool for building unique and effective relationships inside and outside your organization.

Organizational challenges are undeniable realities. They can be negative, such as declining profits, or they can be positive, such as lack of focus during a hyper-growth period. Regardless of what they are...

We all have 99 problems, but solving them should not be one.

The most challenging part of navigating the environment that is the interwebs is understanding how your business fits in. I offer here four simple things that you can do to figure out what you should be doing on the web—and through them, you can create a set of criteria to make an intelligent strategic decision about how to spend your web marketing budget.

Why would AI be any different? Will some jobs go away? Sure, but it stands to reason that new categories of jobs will replace them. Why not embrace AI, especially generative AI, which we used to create most of the website (including research for many of our posts)?

Whether you are the senior leader in your organization, someone with empowered organizational influence, or rank-and-file on your team, here are five truisms that will help you change culture – or do something enough like it.

I am a fan of (some of) the music of the enigmatic band (whoismgmt.com), and while the use of their moniker is somewhat of an SEO experiment, this post is not about them. It is about three observations about management I would like to share.

Because, you know, clichés exist for a reason - they, after all, are based in truth (or at the very least describe reality). If that is the case, then why do so many writers/bloggers/pundits out there do so much to speak out against the use of clichés (simply do a search for the word cliché, and you will see as many posts about avoiding them as anything else)?

As a matter of course, everyone, every day, is faced with a series of decisions. A constant onslaught of decision points interweaves the fabric of our lives. It starts at the first dawn of consciousness and ends with its last flicker. The very moment we experience lucidity is the very moment we have to make a decision.

In the most iconic scene in the movie "Se7en," Brad Pitt's David Mills reacts to receiving a box from the antagonist by hauntingly saying, "What's in the box?" This scene can be a gripping analogy for a CEO delving into the underside of their organization's culture. Like the suspense surrounding that fateful box, leaders embark on a nerve-wracking journey when they conduct a 360-degree internal audit of organizational culture.

Sometimes, when we look at competing ideologies of organizations, we can easily fall into the trap of considering those ideologies as absolute or a binary construct. If we like one, we can’t like the other. So, let’s dive into two of the more critical voices in organizational culture: Edgar Schein and Peter Drucker, the heavyweight champs (as it were).

I have been on a never-ending quest to be more personally productive. From using note capture services to pen-to-digital tools to creating my own format for daily notes to using Obsidian, I am constantly tinkering with things.