One Free Radical

The only bad decision is one made without all the data present. That puts business owners in a pretty tough situation. As their organizations grow in size, they become fantastically complicated. They can become such a dense cluster of processes and systems that they feel opaque. So what happens when they plan? They can’t achieve […]

Stratification

Most visionaries and business owners that I know are chomping at the bit to try and improve their businesses. That’s smart…dissatisfaction drives innovation. However, it can be pretty hard to find the right place to start. How do you decide which of the hundreds of thousands of systems in your business to improve? The answer […]

Punctuated Progress

I really believe in the power of incremental progress. It’s one of my company values. It’s the name of my weekly show (Wednesdays at 11:45 am Mountain Time on Facebook). It’s how we find evidence that we’re fulfilling our dreams. However, there are times a whole bunch of incremental progress in different areas will come […]

Actions Aren’t the Point

Working IN a system is very different than working ON a system. Business owners have to do both of these things simultaneously. But if they want to grow and scale, they need to spend more time doing the latter instead of the former. Think about it: working IN a system keeps it running. It produces […]

Twenty Years of Work

I’ve had a lot of experience with being unhappy with the status quo. If you’re any kind of visionary, you’ll know what I mean. Where others can get complacent, we’re always trying to improve. Where others will say it’s “good enough,” we’re trying to perfect it. It’s that kind of attitude that gives us our […]

The Art of Being Dissatisfied

I really, really don’t want to wait. But I will, because waiting is the right thing to do. The funny thing is that there are a lot of business owners out there rushing and hustling and in a persistent state of urgency…but if they slowed down for a moment, they’d got more work done. How […]

Short Term Pain Mitigation

Keep your hands off that marshmallow. Here’s a quick explanation if you don’t know what I’m talking about: in the 60s there was an experiment done at Stanford involving delayed gratification. A group of children were each given marshmallows and told that, if they resisted the temptation to eat them immediately, they’d get another. Later […]