What do you do when you wake up in the morning? Do you brush your teeth, take a shower, and eat a bowl of oatmeal? Maybe you go for a run before the rest of the house is up or maybe you press the snooze and lie in bed, going over your day’s goals. Whatever […]

Nearly everyone knows how important sleep is to the body, mind, and spirit. Countless studies have found that a good night’s rest is important for keeping you mentally and physically healthy. And yet, most of us still don’t make good sleep a real priority. While you may not want to admit that lack of sleep […]

The decision to go freelance and break free from the typical nine to five workday was an exciting change. But without the office workday giving me boundaries and keeping me on track, it was easy to get lost in a schedule-less chaos. As my productivity dipped, it became apparent that something needed to change if […]

There is really no way of getting around it: traveling is exhausting. If your professional obligations have you traveling as often as mine do, fighting off travel fatigue can become a job all of its own. As a writer, much of my work focuses on highlighting entrepreneurial solutions to economic and political problems, so I […]

Recently I was sitting in a restaurant in Munich, staring in resignation as my wine glass was refilled another time despite my protestations. It had been a long day of sitting through meetings, punctuated by breaks where we were plied with finger foods and coffee, followed by lunch, and then more sitting, and then after-meeting […]

This article is for people who have spent at least one night sleeping on an airport floor. Perhaps your flight was canceled because of fog and you scrambled to catch the last long shuttle bus home, only to miss that one, too. If you weren’t allowed through screening because the taxi was late and crawled […]

Every year, 64% of Americans plan some sort of getaway vacation. Many people grew up with fond memories of packing up the car and heading to the beach, the lake, or Grandma’s house during the summer months. Sadly, in American culture, the ability to get away is becoming more of a luxury and less of […]

I used to take yearly sabbaticals. For three glorious months each summer my time was more or less my own. I did whatever took my fancy: running around the yard with my siblings, reading books, pestering my parents. You probably did, too. We were little, so the associated learning was not exactly productive. Luckily, sabbaticals […]

Picture this: you’ve been with the same employer for many years and they want to reward your loyalty with the recharge of a sabbatical. Typical sabbaticals can last anywhere from 1-6 months in length, for the sake of this article (and because I’m a teacher that is on sabbatical every summer) we will plug in […]

Anytime a person must gather information, there is no substitute for asking the right questions. Asking the right questions means asking someone to teach you things you do not know, or correcting you if your knowledge is distorted. We see forms of questions all around us: a manager interviews a job applicant, a detective talks […]

Curiosity starts early. Children throw cups from highchairs over and over, testing gravity and their parents. They repeat the same noises and ask the same questions, exploring sound and language. When everything is new, there are countless experiments to run. The answers are awe-inspiring: sunsets, gravity, hula hoops, and bugs. As more and more questions […]

Eight years ago, Craig Ross achieved a career milestone. He became the majority owner, CEO, and president of Verus Global, a leadership development organization based in Littleton, Colorado. There was no time to celebrate because of declining profits and growth. “For the first time in my career, I was asking questions I’d never asked,” Ross says. […]

Solomon was said to be the most successful king that Israel ever had—renowned for his wisdom and his riches. His heir Rehoboam, not so much. Of the 12 tribes of Hebrews that constituted the nation of Israel, 10 revolted under Rehoboam’s reign. Later leaders would manage shaky alliances. But after Rehoboam, it was no longer […]

Your intuition is a lot like Shawn Spencer. If you’re not familiar with the hit TV show Psych, Spencer is a private detective with a twist: he has everyone convinced he is psychic. In fact, his supernatural, detecting power is nothing more than exceptional attention-to-detail. How is this like intuition? Though people are apt to […]

If thou gaze long into an algorithm, the algorithm will also gaze into… well, not exactly thee, right? More like a patchy portrait of your likeness churned out by a mimeograph low on ink—sharply delineated in a few areas, sure, but hazy and obscure in many others. Yet close enough in the broad strokes to […]

You will never make a fully-informed decision. Accept it. The reality is that every choice involves using limited information, can have unforeseen consequences, and, because of conditions that change before your very eyes, may end up being the wrong decision anyway. Then you will have to change your mind. Yet you still can make good […]

My two-year-old is asleep for the third time today. I thought I had developed a clever disciplinary method when I started telling him that cranky kids need naps, and sending him to bed multiple times. Turns out I was being more clever than I knew. Instead of being better behaved, he just keeps going to […]

The intentions are noble: You want to buy a house with a backyard for your kids, pay off debt, or do something to actually justify the $50,000 worth of student loans that feels like a noose around your neck. You vow to work harder than everyone else on your team, to be the first one […]

This past weekend our family had to cancel a special trip to a friend’s lake house that had been circled on the calendar for months. Our initial weekend plans had play and adventure built into them to recharge the grownups, help us finish a busy season well and open our minds up to new possibilities […]

For my first job in Washington, DC, I worked very long hours. One night, a rare dinner date was lined up. “What time do you get off?” my date asked to coordinate. A long, awkward pause followed. “It’s kind of a philosophical question,” I finally admitted. That was fine by me at the time, but […]

When Bryan Stockton was pushed out as CEO of toymaker Mattel, he fingered a complacent company culture for dipping profits. In fact, he went one step further and blamed the lack of innovation on bad meetings. Stockton’s story has been on my mind because I’m releasing a new book today called No Fail Meetings. Meetings […]

As a young leader, I was excited to attend the annual gathering of my professional organization. It promised three days of learning and networking, plus a few business sessions. During the first session, one of my elder colleagues, a man wearing bright red suspenders, rose to ask a question, something about whether a point of […]

Meetings are a necessity. Meetings also often stink. Typically, they are a waste of time. There are too many meetings—and most of them are often poorly-organized, lack coherent agendas, serve to do little more than reaffirm hierarchies than achieve results. As a result, poorly-run meetings cost companies $37 billion a year in lost productivity. Employees […]

I can tell you with some precision the moment I first doubted group brainstorming. This was many moons ago. A medium sized media firm that wanted to grow much larger had engaged my consulting services. They held a company-wide powwow, flying most of the managers and yours truly to corporate headquarters in Darkest Peru. The […]