Decision making is a big part of leadership. As a leader, one is expected to take decisions all the time. Some of these are of a routine nature, while others have the power to change the course of a business. A lot rides on a leader’s decisions. They can impact the livelihood of the staff, […]

Back in 2014, Barack Obama declared that he only focused on making the most-important decisions.  “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make,” he explained. This is understandable. Sometimes we find ourselves beset by the decisions, big and small, that we think have […]

We are a society of list-makers. We gather groups of to-dos and to-don’ts, would-bes and should-bes, and we slap them down on legal pads and post-it notes, fancy journal pages, and stained napkins. Far too often those lists fail to translate to measurable success. It doesn’t have to be this way. When making lists, a little […]

The Coca-Cola Company’s own website admits that it was probably “a day that will live in marketing infamy.” On April 23, 1985, Coke Chairman and CEO Roberto Goizueta announced to 200 reporters that the company would be changing its formula. It would be still be called Coca-Cola, but this “New Coke” would taste better and […]

One of the bigger problems when it comes to rational discussion today is that we don’t quite know what we are comparing. Everybody has heard the cliché that “you cannot compare apples and oranges.” But guess what: We do compare apple and oranges all the time. This usually happens when we go grocery shopping. We […]

The road sign in my home state of Washington read: “Litter and it will hurt.” I didn’t think twice about it, but our guests from nearby Vancouver, British Columbia, mouthed the slogan out loud and could hardly believe their ears. They were traveling with us to a birthday party of a mutual friend. “Of all […]

“Don’t rush me, sonny! You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles,” warned Billy Crystal, costumed up as Miracle Max in the 1987 classic The Princess Bride. In the movie, that was a laugh line, but it’s not a bad way to think about the decisions you make as a leader. For every decision that […]

The Wharton-educated bank executive quits weekend bird-watching excursions after missing a prothonotary warbler (rare orange and yellow-headed songbird) sighting. The tenured physics professor storms out of the kitchen because her batch of gazpacho soup turned out a tad too peppery. First-world problems, to be sure. But they’re also the type of increasingly common complaints hyper-accomplished professionals […]

As a kid who wasn’t allowed to watch television, the focus of my childhood was play. The games are too many to count. There was, for example, a little girl who lived in mirrorland and would possess me if I accidentally touched that shiny, reflective surface at night. She scared the heck out of my […]

Winston Churchill once wrote that “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance”. He knew this well. Even as he warned the world about the threat of totalitarian regimes and led Britain during the Second World War, the statesman crafted many of his more than 500 […]