“In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.” ~ Peter Drucker What would happen if your business volume doubled? What if you had twice as many clients?Twice as many projects?Twice as many invoices?Twice as many employees? Does this sound like a dream come true, or a nightmare? I had a coach who…
“A man must shape himself to a new mark directly [once] the old one goes into the ground.” ~Ernest Shackleton I love the story of Ernest Shackleton. An Antarctic explorer who never made it to the South Pole. He returned from a failed quest only to see someone else make it to the pole 3…
So, we’ve been through some things the last year or so, right? I had a boss once who told us, “Never let a good crisis go to waste!” He knew that there are always opportunities in a crisis. We’ve been navigating a priceless crisis the last year or so! Do we have some room to…
I know we’re all looking forward to turning the page on 2020. It’s been a year. But things don’t automatically improve just because we change the calendar, right? If you want 2021 to be different from 2020, you need to take different actions and make different decisions. It’s not automatic; you have to make it…
Yes, I love it when I can plan my budget for the year and then month-by-month tick off achievement after achievement. That feels great; it builds my confidence and makes me feel so smart! But I don’t learn much during those times. When everything is going great, I tend to get a little cocky and…
I sat down today to write about uncertainty, but I’m not making much progress. Why? Well, I’m not sure what to say . On the one hand, we’ve been living with a lot of uncertainty all year. Uncertainty about our health and the health of those we care about. Uncertainty about our businesses, what’s changing…
Let’s say we were sitting in your strategic planning meeting this time last year, and we were planning out your strategy for 2020. Now imagine that I stood up in that meeting and said, 2020 is going to be a unique year! There will be a global crisis so severe that the government is going…
Running my own business produced some of the best days of my life, and some of the worst. I’ve won big deals and then lost them again. I’ve hired the perfect person who would transform my business only to have them accept a counter-offer. I’ve sent an offer out to my list that got a great response,…
2020 started with protests in Hong Kong, then bushfires in Australia. In the US, we had impeachment hearings and an over 1000 point drop in the stock market. Then came COVID and shutdown/quarantine, which sent millions of workers into a long work-from-home (with children “e-learning”) experiment. That was just the first quarter. Since then, we’ve…
The world turned upside down in the last three months. I have one friend who says it’s like, we’re living in 1918, 1929 and 1968. But all in two months! It’s a crazy time. It’s almost impossible for me to predict the future. Will we have more COVID cases and shut everything down again? Will…