In card magic, there are a number of secret moves, or “sleights,” that all self-respecting magicians must master. I still remember spending hours, days, and weeks practicing maneuvers like the side pass, the Elmsley count, the glide, and many others. I got fairly good, although my professional magician friends can run circles around me. I was a pretty good amateur, but I was never a master.
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It’s graduation season and with it, a great lesson for business leaders!
Those of you who are familiar with the magnificent physical specimen that I have become will find this difficult to believe, but in high school I was a band geek. That’s right. Conestoga Valley High School, marching band, drum section. While the cool guys were running up and down the field getting touchdowns and girls, I was marching up and down the field in spats. Envious, aren’t you?
So being one of the drummers in the marching band was not exactly ...
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If, as a leader, you find that you’re always the smartest person in the room…you need to hire better people!
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Can you be both the leader of, and an equal member of, a work team?
How?
For those of you who are scratching your heads and saying, “What the hell is he talking about?” let me explain.
For 15 years I was the executive producer of a sketch comedy TV show called Almost Live! But for those same 15 years, I was also one of the ...
A friend of mine recently asked me if I could sit in on keyboards with his band for an upcoming gig. I have the night available, so I said sure. A few nights ago I went to a rehearsal so I could meet the other guys in the band and get a feel for the music.
It could have gone better.
Oh, it wasn’t bad, mind you. But it could have gone better. They didn’t show me a set list or any ...
Continue Reading →Because I apparently have trouble saying no, I’ve been a member of several boards of directors (or, in some cases, boards of trustees, although the differences, as far as I could tell, were negligible). Some of these boards were more dysfunctional than others. Eventually I noticed that as the size of the board increased (i.e., number of people), so did the dysfunction. According to the research, the same is true of nearly all work teams.
So now, as a writer, I ...
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So I’m at the gym this morning, lifting a few weights and doing my best to avoid (or at least postpone) decrepitude, and at one point I turned to the person next to me and said, “How come this never gets any easier?” He laughed appreciatively at my joke (in my mind that’s what he did; in reality he looked at me, blinked, and then moved over to a different station across the room), and I went back to my ...
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I got my pilot’s license back in 1984 (which is amazing, because normally they don’t allow 3-year olds to fly airplanes). When the FAA examiner signed my logbook certifying that I was now an official, licensed private pilot, he said something to me that I didn’t take all that seriously at the time. What he said was:
Continue Reading →“This is a license to ...
Do you ever wonder why you’re not getting the results you want with your team? This could be one possible answer.
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