Monday Morning Mojo

Those of you who know me well know that I am not a sports guy. I don’t follow any one sport well enough to talk intelligently about who’s ahead and who’s behind, or a particular team’s recent victories and defeats. Nonetheless, sports has a lot of great analogies and those who do care deeply about […]

Well, this is a Monday Evening Mojo… I am sitting with a client having dinner. We are taking a break from the workshop I designed to create an organizational growth strategy. Everyone is eating around us. Among the clinking silverware, a CEO who runs a national and prestigious organization is telling us a quirky story

If you read this regularly, you know my wife, Laura Baron, is an award-winning singer-songwriter. Last year she won 3 Washington Area Music Awards, including Song of the Year for, A Little Note. The song tells the story of a woman who leaves an abusive relationship to set out on her own and take back

My next book will be a handbook on Grand Challenges for leaders of all stripes. A Grand Challenge is a bold, socially beneficial goal that successfully addresses a systemic and embedded problem through collaboration and joint leadership. It generates new stakeholders and powerful resources for any organization—knowledge, work, support, enthusiasm, time, and money. Grand Challenges

Last Monday I flew to Silicon Valley where I spent 3 days with my good friend, Robbie Baxter. Robbie is a membership guru – she wrote The Membership Economy, which has been the #1 Amazon bestseller in 6 different categories! Robbie introduced me to a number of super smart colleagues in a great variety of

In the fall of 1990 I first met Furman Riley during a men’s retreat. I knew right away he was a wild, creative man: an artist.  I never dreamed he would become my best friend.  Furman was 58 and I was 30. The last 25 years have taken us on a journey that ended up

Last week I shared about my most recent father/son trip with Gabe. Here’s the map of where we went. We started in Seattle, headed over to the Cascades before doubling back to the northwest most corner, then driving through seashores, forests and mountains all the way to San Francisco. One of the great things about

My son, Gabe, and I hit the trail over the last two weeks for the Pacific NorthWest. It was our annual sojourn. I was conscious that next year will likely be his last summer at home before he is off to college. In that sense it was the trip of a lifetime. Of course, in

My son, Gabe, and I are in the Pacific Northwest for our annual father-son trip. We will drive down to San Francisco by the end of the week. We are visiting a couple of colleges on the way. Today we were in practically the most northwestern part of the continental United States. There we spent

To get in shape, you exercise regularly. To improve your diet, it’s almost every meal. Same for your brain. If you want to adjust your own attitude, improve your mental state or shift your consciousness, you do something every day: listen to new speakers, read different writers, let original artists into your life. Our minds