It doesn’t really matter, does it? All of your bad habits (and some of your good ones) exist to fill that hole, or to protect it from being seen. And as long as our mission is to fill the hol…

The smallest group that could possibly sustain you in your work… If you could pick the members of this audience, who would you choose? Their dreams, their worldviews, their energy, all up to …

Traffic at work isn’t just a metaphor. It’s real. We get stuck. Surrounded by people who are just as stuck. It can seem like progress is at a crawl. And then, we see a different way. So…

Words like חמץ and kx’āhã don’t appear in English. These words, like thousands of others, include sounds that aren’t part of the normal spoken range of the language. We don’…

Resilience is what happens when we’re able to move forward even when things don’t fit together the way we expect. And tolerances are an engineer’s measurement of how well the part…

Some people, every time they engage with others, are an energy drain. They take persuading, cajoling and enthusiasm to get going, and require ever more of it to keep going. And some people are a fa…

That is where breakthroughs lie. If you keep poking around the expected, it’s unlikely you’ll be surprised by what you find.

…because ‘breaking things’ isn’t the point of your work. How about, “Move fast and make things better,” or “Move fast and create possibility”? The re…

When your day gets made, how long does it last? A made day–is that different from a normal day? Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a made hour or, if we’re going to be quite t…

It’s not that difficult to write a headline that people click on. But a headline that people click on is rarely one that earns trust, sustained attention or action. Which means that if you…

“I can’t afford it.” “I don’t have the time.” …almost always means, “this is not a priority.” When we care, it’s amazing how much we can get done. One way to choose to care …

The world is better because industrialism made it better. The world is worse because industrialism made it worse. When a factory makes something that people want, they buy it. When a competitor imp…

Rarely true. “Everyone loves it.” “No one wants to be my friend…” More effective and accurate to replace these words with, “someone.”

If you believe in the benefits of the free market, then the logical conclusion is to oppose policies that a market-dominating monopoly decides are in their best interest. Adam Smith and his descend…

…doing things that they don’t understand, for managers who have no sense of strategy, in an organization that measures all the wrong things. Everyone involved unable to honestly answer …

Broken systems get worse when we confuse the loud voices with the important ones. Spend a lot of time listening to the loudest complaints and you will elevate those voices to importance, because yo…

Every year, Audi, Ford, GM and the rest of the auto companies bring concept cars to the big shows. These swooping, modern, magical cars are in stark contrast to the cars that are actually for sale.…

All day we interact with others. And sometimes, they’re bots. Perhaps you’re in a chat room, and after a few Eliza-quality backs and forths, you realize that this helpful voice isn̵…

How much of your inbox activity is initiated by you? What percentage of your email threads started with an email you wrote? And how much is spent replying to others? And finally, how often are you …

That doesn’t mean I don’t like you. The difference is critical. It’s impossible to be a productive professional if you insist on conjoining them. Here are two useful things to con…

I’m sitting on a black couch in the lobby of a nice theater. The couch is cracked and peeling, with seven strips of black gaffer’s tape holding it together. And you don’t have to …

If it’s an obligation, then you don’t have a choice. Pretending you do is simply a way to create frustration. Free yourself to simply do what you have to do. On the other hand, if you d…

At some point, grown ups get tired of the feeling that accompanies growth and learning. We start calling that feeling, “incompetence.” We’re not good at the new software, we resis…