I grew up in the shadow of an Amish dairy farm (depending on where the sun was, of course) in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Now, if you’ve spent as much time around the Amish as I have, you know that they’re kind of big on horses. And if you’ve spent as much time around Amish horses as I have, you know that they all have something in common.
Partially as a fashion statement, of course, but mostly so that they ...
Continue Reading →Maybe it’s a business change that we don’t like; a traffic jam when we’re already late; a system or process that feels overly cumbersome. But we all run into obstacles.
And what do we do when that happens? What do we do when we run into that obstacle?
We whine. Grumble. Curse. Complain. Gripe about it to others.
And that’s where most of us stop.
In other words, the entire process for most of us looks like this:
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It’s more than just a corporate buzzword.
It’s the new way of the world.
Amazon did it with retail. Uber did it with transportation. Apple did it with phones and other devices.
Ask any CEO what they fear the most, and you’ll hear a variety of answers. Recession. Talent exodus. Brain drain. All valid concerns. But the one that really keeps them up at night — the one they talk about in the back rooms where nobody else can hear ...
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Do you want to know where breakthrough ideas really come from? I’ll give you a clue: they don’t come from some lightning bolt in the sky.
Breakthrough ideas, almost invariably, are found at the intersection of two or more seemingly unconnected things. What do these intersections look like?
If I were to ask you to name an innovation, what would you say?
Maybe not any of those three. But the odds are that whatever you name would be a biggie. Something groundbreaking and game changing.
And that’s kind of what we think innovation is. Something groundbreaking and game changing. We associate innovation with names like:
And look, there’s no question that these people are innovation rock stars. If there were ...
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I talk about dots a lot. That’s because dots are the key to innovation, creativity, and breakthrough thinking.
Most people get this wrong. They think that breakthrough ideas—the creative innovations that make the competition whimper like scared puppies—are the result of some divine lightning bolt that only strikes the gifted few. This is the common myth. But it’s just that—a myth.
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I’ve been doing homework for the past week or so.
I’ve been doing homework because in a little over a week, I’ll be attending a business development workshop, and the workshop leader gave us the homework assignment. Since I want to get the most out of the workshop (and since the thought of getting in trouble from the teacher triggers upsetting high school memories), I’ve been diligently working.
One part of the homework has been particularly eye-opening.
There are four steps to this ...
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This is going to sound like bragging (because, let’s be honest—it is), but I was recently inducted into the Professional Speaker Hall of Fame. It’s kind of a big deal in my industry, because there are fewer than 185 of us alive on the planet. If we were a species, we’d be endangered.
Here’s the interesting thing that I’ve found about reaching an “elite” level in your profession:
It’s easy ...
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That was the sole message of an acclaimed keynote speech that my colleague Joe Calloway delivered at the annual convention of the National Speakers Association some years ago.
In his speech, Joe encouraged us to look at all the manifold things we had on our respective plates and think about how we could simplify, how we could focus. In short, what could we let go of so that we could really shine at what was left.
About a ...
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In the early days, I would panic.
Friday night. The day before show day. 24 hours from now every seat in the TV studio will be filled, and a million more viewers will be watching the show on television.
And we don’t have a show for them.
It could be any number of reasons: that big piece we’d worked so hard on all week just didn’t come together in editing; the guest we’d booked and promoted canceled earlier today; the perfect monolog we’d ...
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