A woman told me last week that her life’s work can’t be translated into business language. Twenty years of trying, she said, and the honest answer is it simply can’t be done. I spent more time obsessing about that response than I meant to. Here’s what I eventually decided. The only way she’s ever reached […]
A colleague of mine, writing a book for millennials, asked me what advice I’d give about living, loving, parenting, and leading courageously. I gave her three things: Think Big, Choose Vintage First, Steward the Planet. This is about the first one. Make sure your entire reason for getting up in the morning is genuinely big. […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about ditching my title. Here’s what happened after I released that opinion piece. Four people read that piece and told me I’d just described their secret sauce. I know all four of them personally. Not one of them had ever crossed my mind as someone I might hire. Here’s […]
I started the 5Cs podcast because I wanted to learn the truth behind the noise around climate change. That sounds simple. It wasn’t. I came from thirty years in the chemical, plastics, and lubricants industries. Businesses built on extraction, every one of them. I knew how to make money. I did not know what was […]
I hired a coach recently. Not to sharpen my strategy or refine my messaging. I hired her to help me find my personality. That probably sounds strange coming from someone who spent four decades standing in front of rooms and running organizations. But here is the truth. For most of those years, I was hiding. […]
This year, the 5Cs podcast went down a few dark alleys and I promised I’d find someone who could help us work through what we’re feeling. I found a fabulous clinical psychologist who does exactly that. And before she comes on, I need to set the stage so to speak this week. I want to […]
Last week was Easter. For Christians, it’s the season of atonement, forgiveness, and renewal. Even if you don’t follow that tradition and you simply feel some kinship with a source greater than yourself, you likely understand forgiveness at its most fundamental level. It has nothing to do with the other person. It has everything to […]
Here is an uncomfortable idea to sit with. The climate crisis is not just a story about oil companies, corrupt politicians, and the occasional billionaire with a superyacht. It is also a story about you. About me. About the completely normal, socially rewarded things we do every single day without a second thought. Stay with […]
Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia and arguably the most powerful man in the current AI revolution, said something quietly devastating to students at Cambridge University recently. “Intelligence is about to be a commodity.” He wasn’t being pessimistic. He was being precise. The thing we’ve spent decades credentialing, testing, and competing over, y’know, our raw […]
I spent decades in boardrooms where the pressure was to DO something. Make the call, launch the initiative, give the board answers we didn’t have yet. The people who cracked under that pressure weren’t less intelligent. They just couldn’t tolerate the feeling of not knowing. So they’d react, pivot, and or overcorrect. They’d do anything […]