Nothing like a double whammy to start the week off right. In this case, it concerns my little fable, The Shibumi Strategy. First, my publisher informed me that it had won a gold medal in the Axiom Book Awards. Very cool. It may not have broken sales records, but a recognition of quality is always reinforcing, and I can now brag “hat trick,” since all three of my books have now garnered some sort of …
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Banish Judgement, Boost Creativity
One of my favorite books of all time is Creativity in Business, written by Stanford Business School professors Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, who taught one of the most popular courses by the same name. In the book the introduce the “Voice of Judgment” (VOJ). Steven Pressfield, in his books The War of Art and Do The Work, refers to it as “Resistance.” Your VOJ will stop your creativity cold. It comes in two basic …
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There’s No Such Thing as an Empty Day
Don’t discard seemingly empty days. Treasure them, collect, store them, because they really aren’t. (empty, that is!)
How to Sell a Big Idea: The Power of Curiosity
This column orginally appeared HERE on OPEN Forum Idea Hub. As I watched Steve Jobs introduce the iPad2 last week, I was reminded of his masterful introduction, and the incredible aftermath, of his 2007 demonstration of the very first iPhone. If you recall, this was hailed as the most hyped hi tech gizmo in history. But to hype something means to push it heavily through marketing and media, and that’s not what Apple did. In …
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Reflection: The Art of Hansei
Around this time of year, most of us, and our businesses, tend to slow down just a bit from the normal dawn-to-dusk mad dash. We smile a bit more. We wave people in before us in traffic, and let others with less in their shopping carts go first in the grocery store. And we reflect. When I was working with Toyota, I learned the art of hansei (pronounced hahn-say). Hansei is the Japanese word for …
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