I’m sure you’ve heard some version of this. You’ve read it in a dozen books, you’ve heard it in a dozen motivational speeches. (And, by the way, if that last part is true, congratulations on surviving a dozen motivational speeches.)
“If you keep doing what you’ve always been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.”
I’d like to respectfully disagree. Actually, I’d like to vehemently ...
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A recent article in The Wall Street Journal talks about leadership and creativity (one of my favorite topics, and the focus of my keynote program The Emmy Effect: How to Develop and Lead Award Winning Talent and Teams). In the article, author Justin Brady says:
[quote]Most leaders talk about creativity (or its cousin, innovation) without understanding what it is and how it happens. The process of real creativity is messy, chaotic, sometimes even disgusting, and ... Continue Reading →I’m a geek.
How much of a geek? I am a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM). Need I say more? IBM has a monthly magazine called The Linking Ring, and there’s a regular column that reviews magic tricks, books, and apparatus. In the most recent issue there is a product review that ends with this sentence:
[quote style=”boxed”]So if you are looking for a fake egg that compresses into a relatively small space and pops back into its ... Continue Reading →Posted by:
In the current (May 2013) issue of Harvard Business Review, there’s an article called Creating the Best Workplace on Earth. In it the authors talk about what employees really need to be their most productive. Among the six factors they identify is this one: employees need an environment where they can discover and magnify their strengths. In other ...
As I’m writing this, I’m listening to the 60s channel on SiriusXM. It’s a channel I listen to a lot. That particular era is kind of my musical “home base.” It’s the music I tend to gravitate to — it’s my default. (I’ve heard it said that the music we tend to gravitate to is ...
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When I tell people that, as a motivational speaker, I work with, and speak for, organizations that want their people to play a bigger game and produce unreasonable results, the first question I get is, “What do you mean by unreasonable? Isn’t that kind of negative?”
To answer that, let’s first take a look at what reasonable results might look like. When I look up the word “reasonable” in ...
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I don’t know what world you live in. I mean that literally. I don’t know what business you’re in, what your customers think of you, how people treat you–I don’t know any of those things. I don’t know what world you live in. But one thing that I do know, with certainty, is this:
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“Change is hard.”
“People hate change.”
“Change stresses me out.”
Bull.
As a professional keynote speaker, I’m on the road a lot. I speak to associations, organizations, and businesses across the country, and everywhere I go I hear people whining about change.
“Things are changing too fast.”
“I don’t adapt to change well.”
“Change is HAAAAAARRRRRDDDDD!”
None of it’s true, and I can prove ...
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I was at an event recently where one business speaker asserted that there were four words you should never tell a customer: “I can’t do that.” And he had some very good reasons for this assertion:
Your competitors love it when you tell a customer, “I can’t do that.”
It’s music to their ears.
When you tell a customer, “I can’t do that,” you’re giving them an excuse to look elsewhere, and you’re opening a window of ...
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