Monday Morning Mojo

Sunday was my son’s 18th birthday – a real milestone on the road to adulthood. In about 6 months he’ll be setting off for college. This transition is filled with a mixture of emotions. My wife and I are sad to see him off, but happy that he is high-spirited and excited about the next […]

After running CEO groups for 12 years, I launched a class for tomorrow’s CEOs earlier this month. It was at the suggestion of a couple of the CEOs I work with regularly. The class went spectacularly well. I encouraged and enlivened by the spirits of the participants. Eager, hungry, thoughtful, smart. There is nothing like

When you make the committment to transform your body, you go to the gym.  But, it’s not a one-shot deal. You go regularly.  Physical fitness takes consistent effort and sustained action.  It’s the same with mindset. That is why people read devotionals, religious texts with daily passages. Every day they focus their minds on spiritual

Issy Sharp, the Canadian hotelier, noted in the early days of his career that there were two types of hotels in Canada, his homeland. The first type was small, with a limited number of rooms. These little facilities provided highly customized service to their guests. As there were only a few rooms it was easy

Take a particular goal you are working on – could be personal or professional. Most people plot out what it’s going to take to get from here to there, but that doesn’t take into account all of the bottlenecks, exceptional circumstances, deviations, obstacles or logjams that are part of life. If you want to blast

The well-known story that illustrates the above point is Apple releasing the first iPhone while the iPod was still so popular, essentially cannibalizing their bestseller to sell something else. And the rationale, someone was going to take out the iPod, so Apple figured it ought to be them. You see they wanted the next bestseller

When CVS went tobacco free they were chided by Wall Street and the media. How they could be so stupid as to give up a multi-billion dollar revenue line? But CVS knew something that Wall Street apparently didn’t – America had already given up tobacco usage!  In November 1998 the four largest United States tobacco

There are so many ways our world can use assistance, from energy to water to food to space exploration to the environment to mental health to…  the list appears endless. And there are ways to choose where to focus your efforts so as to push the frontier towards health, well-being, improved distribution, and healthy alternatives.

When I was working for Steve Denning at the World Bank, and we were kicking off Knowledge Management in the mid-90s, I remember reading a copy of The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge, all about Learning Organizations. I got very excited and showed it to Steve. Two weeks later we were sitting around a table

If you know what you want, you will experience those rare moments when life opens up and you suddenly have a clear shot at getting it. Of course, it’s mostly not like that! Achieving ambitious goals takes a clear understanding of the result you want, a good plan, the ability to execute, course correction and