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The View from the Cheap Seats Can Ruin Everything

“Is the view pretty good from the cheap seats AJ? In the 1995 film, The American President, Michael Douglas plays President Andrew Shepherd facing a tough challenger for re-election.  His Chief of Staff and long-time campaign manager, AJ, played by Martin Sheen, advises the President to take on the.

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Telling Isn’t Coaching

Do you ever wish you could simply tell your people what to do and then have them actually do it. We’ve all been there.  Sometimes telling people works.  More often than not, if you want to improve your team, coaching is required. A lot of people in business like.

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The Case for Emotional Decision-making

Do you make big decisions using logic, or emotion? We’ve been taught not to let emotions cloud our decision-making. But there’s a big difference between making an emotional decision and making a rash decision. As humans, it’s impossible to strip emotion from our decision-making. Nor would you want to..

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Are You Wearing Yourself Out in Your Own Business?

If you’re an entrepreneur, odds are, you’re tired. People often become entrepreneurs because they want more freedom. Yet in the quest to make money, many entrepreneurs work longer hours and treat themselves worse than any boss would. As both the doer and the supervisor, the entrepreneur gets two jobs,.

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Four Ways to Improve Your Resilience Muscles

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it’s the courage to continue that counts.” It was inspirational when Winston Churchill said it.  But for most of us, mustering the courage to go on in the face of failure is not easy. My ancestors braved war and famine, but.

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Emotions Are a Source of Power

“Buck up. Quit being so emotional.” If you haven’t heard it, you may have said it. We’ve long been taught that emotions are a source of weakness. Getting emotional is often perceived as an indicator we’re not in control. But what if we’ve been thinking about this all wrong?.

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The Real Reason Wells Fargo Fails the Noble Purpose Test

When the CEO said, “Cross-selling is the centerpiece of our strategy,” I knew they were doomed to fail. Wells Fargo is back in the news, and no one should be surprised. When then CEO John Stumpf told the sales team cross-selling was the number one goal, he opened the.

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Why Case Studies Don’t Work and What to Do Instead

Do you want people to care about your cause, idea or product? A client of mine, we’ll call him Don, was struggling to get funding for his startup. He had a promising software product; he’d done a test market; he had the data.  People liked his presentation. Yet he.

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Why Wine Costs More with a Story

The hand blown bottle was labeled with the year 1787 and the word “Lafitte,” a top French vineyard, etched into the glass. The wine was taken from a bricked-up cellar in Paris hundreds of years ago. It eventually became one of most expensive bottles of wine ever sold. Also.

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Three Ways to Bring Back Courtesy

If you’re feeling like the workplace (and the world in general) is becoming more crass, you’re not alone. According to Harvard Business Review polls, 98% of people report experiencing uncivil behavior at work. Half say they are treated rudely at least once a week, double the number who reported.

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