Is execution more difficult than strategy? Nine out of ten business leaders say “yes.” If you are a leader with operational or production responsibility, you may feel an even higher sense of frustration when it comes to execution. In the early 2000s, a group of us at Franklin Covey began working on the methodology known […]

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 […]

With divorce rates hovering between 40 and 50 percent, experts spend countless hours discussing the reasons why so many Americans can’t make their marriages work. Arguments over money, sex, and kids are perennial fire starters. But there’s another issue that is critically important—especially for husbands and wives with demanding careers. Courtney Barbee credits the success […]

The patience of Job; the patience of a saint; a “fruit of the Holy Spirit”; a virtue. “He that have Patience, can have what he will,” predicted Poor Richard’s Almanack way back in 1736. As you might expect from that august build up, a lack of patience has also been associated with societal rot and […]

Erin Winick helped speed the progress of technology in America, and now she has mixed feelings about it. As an intern at a Southern California company, Winick worked with a 30-year professional maker of complicated molds to implement a 3-D printing process. The long-time employee offered great insights into the costs and dimensions of making […]

Even if you don’t consider yourself a “reader,” you read all the time. Signs, instructions, articles, bills, blogs, newspaper headlines and grocery lists all depend on literacy. Literature is the icing on the cake. Reading permeates so much of our lives, and yet human civilization has only been literate for a tiny sliver of our […]

There’s no more fascinating or scrutinized topic in American history than presidential leadership. So much is at stake in a president’s decisions. And yet presidents are mere mortals. Though they have teams of advisors and the best resources at their disposal, they’re just as prone as the rest of us to making short-sighted choices. When […]

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 […]

You are often your own worst enemy. It starts with the words out of your mouth and the voices in your head. From telling yourself that you aren’t knowledgeable enough to take on a new challenge to the nagging doubts about important career moves, the negative words in your mind are obstacles to the success […]

The idea of self-talk elicits images of less-than-sane people muttering to themselves as they stumble about less-than-safe streets. I try not to look like that when I talk to myself. In theory, this means ensuring my internal monologue is actually internal when other people are about. In practice, people are always sneaking around corners and […]