Monday Morning Mojo

My canine companion, Sita, was hurt in a conflict with an unknown animal in our backyard two weeks ago. She came into the house with deep lacerations on her front and back leg. She is okay now, after a trip to the emergency room, a ton of antibiotics and some time spent inside the infamous […]

Wu wei is a concept that comes from taoism, and literally translated it means action through non-action. This is often interpreted to mean doing by not doing anything. This interpretation reminds me of managing people, which I did for many years at the World Bank. When there was a minor issue, a manager’s first course

Writing today from up in the sky on my way to Orlando from Chicago. As fortune would have it I am in the midst of 15 days of back-to-back engagements, mostly at home in the DC area, but also in the two cities mentioned above plus Las Vegas. Consulting, as a colleague says, is lumpy.

When I was a little boy my mother earned her PhD studying the precognitive development of blind children. Her graduate work included studying theories of child development. I learned from her that play can be understood as the activities children engage in to make sense of their world and orchestrate important aspects of their own

In my work, I have the great pleasure of meeting true luminaries, ordinary people who have succeeded at extraordinary efforts. Susan Neely is such a leader. Today she is CEO of the American Beverage Association (ABA) and later this summer, she will assume her new position as CEO of the American Council of Life Insurers. During

Buckminster Fuller had a life-changing mystical personal experience that re-oriented and revitalized his life. This incident provided him with a deep sense of purpose. When he recounted it he told others he heard a voice that spoke directly to him and said: “ From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought.

I work with CEOs and executives on strategy and innovation. Since 2009 the vast majority of my clients are association leaders: trade associations and professional societies. Over the last 10 years, I have done a lot of work in strategic planning. So, I distilled my process down to a few short steps. You can download

Have you ever indulged in a novel or binge watched a tv show or picked up a magazine with very little redeeming value? It’s okay to take a mental vacation. In fact, I think they’re good for you. If you’re like me, your life is filled with purpose, many projects that were chosen because you

During my 13 years at the World Bank, I participated in two distinctly different change initiatives, both called Knowledge Management. The first one never took off. The second one changed the organization, and the world, in two short years, demonstrating how a bureaucratic, geographically distributed, multinational, public sector organization can reinvent itself faster than anyone

I have often had the mystical feeling that the real work I do is face-to-face, where I appreciate the people I work with and treat them with warmth and respect. I do actually love all of my clients as people and believe in their purpose as well as their intents. If I had a question