I’m a linguist and developmental strategist. My work centers on the impact of culture on commerce.
I’m particularly interested in our struggle to use technology and all things digital to support rather than destroy community and collaboration. Since 2006, I’ve been working with people who want to build sustainable businesses.
STRATEGY
To truly Change the World, you Must First Change the Narrative — To build the future, our collective job is to pay attention and implement. Which means getting better at the kind of story we embrace.
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Fast Gets all our Attention. Slow has all the Power — This is important and often overlooked: what got you here, won’t work (as well) or be sustainable in the future. It’s valid when you go from individual contributor to manager as it does to go from today’s success to tomorrow’s.
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How Remote Work will Impact your Company’s Strategy — There’s a physical revolution going on, and it will change how people live, learn, and work.
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Why Short Term Advantage Leads you Down Blind Alleys — It’s counter intuitive, but by standing for something specific and focusing on it early on, you build a stronger position later. When it matters.
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Opportunity is in the Gap Between What you Know and What you Don’t — Prevailing culture rewards people with answers. Yet, the longer you can hold yourself in the space between what you take for granted and what could be next, the more you can learn about potential futures. That’s where the opportunity is.
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What Worries you The Most that is Not Getting Enough Attention? — While the bottom line ideology is satisfying, as it provides tremendous clarity, companies are under increased social pressure to do the right things, along with doing things right.
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How to Help People Make New Choices — Any time you find a place where people are struggling, you can find an opening for something new.
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Stop Chasing your Tail. Make New Sense of What’s Happening — There’s a simple tool you can use to get more of what you want. It can get you clarity, answers and next steps. That tool is asking questions to engage in conversation.
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Why Complex Business Models Collapse — When the experience of dealing with a system becomes too much, we opt out.
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How we Choose and Differentiate Based on Seeing What isn’t There — Users and buyers do have strategies, even when they’re not aware of them. Organizations and brand strategies should go beyond the obvious — competing on the shelf and in the market — and get to the heart of what matters to customers by seeing what isn’t there.
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Habits, #Fail, and Speeding Tickets: the Value of Motivation — In a world filled with external stimulation and prompts to act, becoming more aware of and awakening our intrinsic motivation can help us gain clarity on the type of information and experiences we seek.
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Mastering the Art of Persuasion — Persuasion is the art of getting others to see things the way we do. It’s an art entrepreneurs need in spades to recruit collaborators, customers, capital, and communities. We’re all entrepreneurs to a certain extent, because we’re all called to make the case for resources, funds, the time of peers and customers.
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Narrative Clarity: The Importance of Scope — They are the immutable truths behind a business strategy that make it work even as the business model may evolve over time.
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How to Evaluate Value — Ranking and status are typically the things we pursue first. We want to rank high as members of a group, which is determined socially. Status is an intentional style derived by temporary behavior. But it’s power we’re after, both psychological and emotional empowerment.
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How we Live Fast and Slow — An automatic response to information and situations often serves us just fine in many situations. Human behavior is not mathematical. Yet, in our strategy discussions we focus mostly on the things that we can represent numerically. Instinct is grossly undervalued.
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The Difference Between Strategy and Operational Effectiveness — Strategy is a signal that there is a future state that is desirable to a person, group, or organization and it’s a catalyst for making choices and trade-offs to get there.
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The difference between innovation and strategy — Learning to differentiate concepts starts with defining the terms we use to describe them.
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On Strategizing — The system to running a sustainable business depends on making dynamic choices. It stems more from the ability to co-ordinate what is at hand for longer term viability than a set of fixed objectives with an end.
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Networking as a Practice — Networking is a lot more than a business strategy to advance our professional position. It’s also a way to test our ideas, to practice what it feels like to be in conversation with them… and engage with others.
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Compound Effects in Influence — We all want to be around for a long time. But we’re called to make decisions every day, all day long. How do we build for endurance when we can’t see that far?
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The Consequences of Limited Rationality, Social Preferences, and Lack of Self-Control — Behavioral economists study how the context of decisions interacts with our expanded understanding of human psychology. Many of the tools used by behavioral economists are about helping people make the choices they already want to make. This is key. In other words, they help us go from intention to action.
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Long-term for Results: Fads vs Trends — If we want the stuff that makes history, we want to tell the fads from the trends. To learn the difference we may resort to tactics like Ulysses with the sirens — minimize temptation by making a binding promise to hold ourselves to our purpose long enough to vet and validate an event.
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How to Ask Better Questions — Our questions reveal our real intent more than we suspect. “The questions we ask aren’t going to predict the future. They will create the future.” Uncovering purpose is a grounding force as we face exponential change.
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Urgent vs. Important — There’s no time limit for important, and it is something we decide and drive. Hence when we talk about doing important work, what we’re saying is work that matters, that puts us in flow. Important is planned.
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The Secret Lives of Talks — A comprehensive collection of resources to help you learn the art of moving others.
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Why it’s Important (for Marketers) to Write well — Communication is how businesses become human again and look to the future. Good stories change us, they stop the clock and earn our favor.
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How to Become a Confident, Independent, and Wise Decision-Maker — In times of rapid change, the value of independent thinking decreases and copying becomes efficient to manage risk. How do we practice wise decision-making?
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How to Design a Conversation of Impact — The critical factor in designing for impact is to be very clear up front on the kind of conversations you want to have and communicate it to participants.
CULTURE
Tests for Value — I’ve been paying attention to the properties that bring about positive change. That, to me, is the core concept of value. Reliable tests for value will include the right capitals and engines.
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How the thee Most Common Ideas on Trust are Flawed — how do you build trust given that three of the most common ideas on trust are flawed?
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Cultural Curiosity: the Power of Simple Questions — Culture has power over our behaviors.
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How Modern Marketing Prays on Insecurity and Why Long-Term Success Centers on Culture — Modern marketing has capitalized on human insecurities. But if you think it’s a recent development of modern society, think again. You can reliably go all the way back to the lower Middle Ages to find the origins of corporate marketing.
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Are we Living at a Moment when Significant Change is Possible? — Studying only the things that seem to be loudest or biggest cuts you off opportunity. Anything can give you a better sense of what’s going on.
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What’s the New Narrative? Habit-Forming Approaches to Resilience — The most important part leaders can play is to define the challenges, build new fair guidelines that take needs into account, and communicate with clarity.
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Role of Culture in Influencing how we Make Decisions — The relationship between our personal and professional culture is a conversation where we make trade offs.
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The Nexus of Content, Commerce, and Culture — Constant exposure to a certain kind of environment interacts with and changes our nature.
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Is Culture a Choice? — We’re wrestling with the truth as we make decisions, or should be. This includes important decisions at national level.
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Why is Culture Important? — Culture is a synthesis of things, and the undercurrent of how people connect with the world in a specific place. It’s part of the infrastructure of civilization and we’ll see a little later here how it changes.
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How to Practice a a Culture of Innovation — Our thinking is often the product of mainstream culture. Culture and cultural signals or norms influence us greatly. Cultures are designed to both embrace and resist change, based on compatibility, readiness, and speed.
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How Netonomics will Replace Destructive Economies of Scale — Technology has accelerated the scope, scale, and importance of another kind of network that is just as old, but less known until recently. This type of network is based less on mutual interest and more on “mutual interests,” plural. Interests include both things people are interested in AND things they value.
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Designing a Culture to Dissolve Problems — Culture is not a homogeneous system. There may be significant differences between groups and departments as well as management levels.
What it Takes to Bring Something New to the World — What it takes to make an idea happen doesn’t challenge only existing limiting frames in general—it challenges us in the process.
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The Three Pillars of Persuasive Speech: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos — The art of persuasion is as old as human kind… and it’s still effective today.
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Working on the Right Things is What Makes Knowledge Work Effective — When we develop our knowledge we become more effective thinkers, and that enables us to evaluate and thus measure trade offs better from data.
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Getting in Early, Inventing How it’s Done — The beauty of communication is that conversation is ever evolving, we can invent new creative ways to connect, and we are still in the early days of social networks.
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How to Create More by Getting Better at it — If everything has been said and done before, it hasn’t been said and done by us. In the same way we bring to life an original combination of the same ingredients and our own spin on them – genetics and environment – what we bring to the process and product of creativity is ours alone.
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What is Creativity? — From writing to prototyping, research and analysis to service design, creativity helps widen options and play with ideas to drive better decision making.
Why Cognitive Empathy Matters and How it Works in Tandem with Reason — Cognitive empathy, or our conscious ability to understand someone else’s perspective is a uniquely powerful —if often overlooked— tool for transforming and improving societies.
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Why Good Disagreement is Central to Progress — Why certain human thought patterns —like conflict avoidance and selective blindness— lead organizations and managers astray.
How to Identify the Best Opportunities to Make an Impact — Our degree of impact depends on our ability to discover, assess or evaluate, and take effective action. It comes down to our ability to make good decisions.
MINDSET
Why Productivity is Such a Big Deal — There’s a kind of busy that is harder to detect—confusing reporting, reading, and sharing the news with getting things done.
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How to Argue and Win Every Time — Do you have something to say? Could you benefit from improving how you argue your case? Are you looking for something concrete to help you?
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Mental Models and Innovation — We rarely recognize innovation while it’s happening. Instead, innovation is often a label applied after the fact, when the results are clear and the new convention has become established.
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The Positive Approach to Success — Our belief that we can fix anything, that there’s a right answer to any problem or challenge makes us overlook all the things that are right with a situation.
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The Three Kinds of Feedback and our Triggers — We live in the tension between being and becoming. For any significant growth to occur, we want to develop greater awareness of our impact on others, because that is the system that feeds back wisdom to us.
Five Characteristics of a Critical Thinker — These abilities are critical in business ― and extremely useful in life. When we are able to suspend judgment long enough to negotiate meaning in a conversation, for example, our relationships benefit in the long term.
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The Effects of Groupthink — Our social nature and the need to belong prompt us to find our tribe. The problem is when we get too close… and closed to the rest.
Why Projects Fail — It’s not enough to manage the tasks, we must manage ourselves in the act of choosing to learn from our mistakes and missteps with the benefit of hindsight and the power of communication with the right intent.
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Have Smarter Conversations, Get More Done — To be effective with conversation, we want to do meticulous research, network our thoughts and ideas prior to meeting with someone. Preparation is a sign of respect and professionalism… if we requite it of the other party, we meet the opportunity with care on our side.
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How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means — Technology applications have expanded well beyond the Web, yet many of the tools we use today still connect us to it as they link us to each other. The planet itself is becoming a vast computer made of billions of interconnected processors and sensors.
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How to Listen, for a Change — Although most of us acknowledge the importance of listening to improve our understanding, learn new things, and enjoy new experiences, when it comes to the actual doing, we fall short. Yet listening is a vital skill to lead a meaningful life.
How to Stop Sabotaging Ourselves by Learning to Recognize our Ignorance — We should learn to value reaching an understanding of the limits of what we know, understanding how far our circle of competence stretches, and becoming more humble about what we still need to figure out.
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How to Operate within the Tension Between Knowing and Learning — Self-knowledge invites humility, and that is a good starting combination for learning. The more we engage in questioning the better we may become at developing self explanatory answers for ourselves of what we need to learn next.
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The View from Somewhere — The philosophical aspect of point of view is perspective. In their work, Heraclitus and Parmenides discussed the relation between “appearance” and reality —as in what is appearance, what is reality, and the relationships between the two.
The Universal Language of Human Relationships — Any relationship we enter into occupies our mind and uses our energy. What happens to our energy when we engage in give and take with others?
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Tools for Thinking Better — Seven tools for thinking and critical reasoning.
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What Makes a Good Life? — Where should we invest our energy and time? How do we decide what makes a good life?
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The most valuable skill that nobody teaches is how to listen — People tell me I am a deep listener; in many situations this is vital to learning.
The Art of Asking — How do we ask each other for help? When can we ask? How often? Who’s allowed to ask?
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How to Learn to Think Better — It’s not enough to know or become aware of something to change our behavior. It takes practice to learn new mental habits.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You — An exploration of the differences between finding the right work and working right and the importance of deep work to develop skills.