Thoughts about commemoration and utility
 
Here in the USA, today, October 8th, is Columbus Day. According to a friend of mine, this commemorates the day that the indigenous people of North America discovered a European sailor wandering around in the Caribbean, hopelessly lost and convinced he had arrived somewhere near India (hence the name West Indies).
Most [...]

A sad truth about organizational life
The real question today is why so many large organizations are full of unhappy people, at all levels, who don’t up sticks and go somewhere else. Is this unhappiness because people have to work at jobs they are afraid of losing, even though they hate what they do? Are they [...]

. . . there’s no innovation without risk
 
The signers of the Declaration of Independence demonstrated tremendous innovation. The reason is because innovation, whether personally, professionally or corporately, requires risk.
Had things turned out differently, our founding fathers would have been hung and their legacy would be as traitors of the crown, not patriots of the [...]

Why trying to win big every time is going to ruin you
One of the problems of today’s obsession with always winning is that it’s impossible. However hard you try, sometimes you are bound to lose. If that causes you stress and frustration, you’re setting yourself up for a good deal of misery. Good enough is [...]

Conventional wisdom too often turns managers into slave drivers
To be accountable means to be liable to give an account of your actions and their results. It should not mean either accepting a duty to deliver those results, come what may; or always carrying the blame if results fall short. We are all accountable for our [...]

My weekly posting on Lifehack.org deals with the feelings some people have that they are dogged in life by bad luck.
Is this truly the cause of their misfortunes? I don’t think so.
Any “luck” has to be random, and the essence of randomness is that it doesn’t conform to any kind of pattern.

Here’s [...]