If your work or routine needs revitalizing, pack up and go somewhere else. Go to a coffee shop, the public library, a local art center, the park, even a hotel lobby. You might not only get new ideas and new routines, you might also get new customers or contacts.
While generating ideas comes easily for entrepreneurs, discerning which ideas to implement and which to discard does not usually come as easily.
Entrepreneurs like not only to identify new opportunities and threats, new strengths and weaknesses, but also to act on them. They like to shake the snow globe.
Focusing, by definition, will narrow your field of vision. That’s great…if you are on the right path. Not so great if you and your team are trying to solve the wrong problem. How do you and your team keep yourself open not only to new solutions, but also to new problems?
Focus I am an avid photographer, and when taking pictures I am focused on focus. Without focus, the shot is a bust. What do I want in focus? and What do I want out of focus? are questions I ask. A wide aperture provides minimal depth of field (only a small portion of what is in the [...]
How to Prepare for a Meeting The first three steps of meeting preparation are: 1. Set a clear and achievable goal for the meeting How to Prepare for a Meeting: Steps #1 & 2 that is in line with the organization’s vision and mission 2. Choose the appropriate type of meeting: decision-making, informational, motivational, or creative [...]
Leadership is seeing how one small change like using an overhand knot verses and underhand knot to tie your shoe can have massive improvement in performance. Are you peeling back the onion and exploring how small changes can be substantial.
What Is Your Personal Brand? You may not like to think of yourself as a brand, but you are one. Most people think of you as the X Person or the Y Specialist. If they don’t…well, that’s a problem. If people don’t associate you with something distinct and valuable, then they may not hire or [...]
The 5-15 reports is a simple concept. The report should take no more than 5 minutes to read and no more than 15 minutes to write.
But no one captures the profound and paradoxical nature of silence better than silent Buddhist retreat leader Gene Lushtak. Prochnik recounts a story Lushtak told him about Ajahn Chah, the most prominent leader of 20th-century Buddhism: “A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in [...]
In a TED talk, Dan Gilbert asks the audience if they would be happier winning the lottery or becoming paraplegic. If you’re like most, you’d answer lottery winner. And you’d be right…for a while. It turns out that a year after winning the lottery or becoming paraplegic, people are equally happy. This is called impact [...]
In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Divided Attention”), David Glenn examines some of recent scholarly findings about multitasking, including the work done by Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. “Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities,” says Nass. “But there’s evidence that those people are actually [...]
Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King’s College London University, found the IQ of those trying to respond to messages and fulfill work obligations fell by 10 points. That IQ drop is equivalent to losing a night’s sleep or twice the drop seen by those who just smoked marijuana! If you don’t want to appear sleep-deprived [...]
Big ideas are terrific. There’s no harm in thinking big. Acting prematurely on these ideas is the problem. Many visionaries move from start to finish in their minds quickly and skip many of the steps in between necessary for execution. That’s how they wind up trying to boil the ocean. Are you trying to boil [...]
The cobblestones were slick from the mist as we walked beside the canals to see James Taylor play at an intimate gathering in San Marco Piazza, Venice. Had the weather stayed as it had been, the stars would have been sparkling like pin holes through a sheet. Instead, we were paying tourist rates for last [...]
