I'm sure you all remember the exercise. Somewhere around third or fourth grade, a teacher stood in front of the class holding a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a knife, and asked you to write instructions for making a sandwich. And you weren't just supposed to think about it...you actually had to write it down, step by step, and precise enough that a stranger could follow it with no assumptions filled in. And then the teacher followed your instructions exactly as written. "Put the...

Leadership & Organizational Responsibility Sometimes it takes leaving an organization to understand just how much trouble it's really in. I saw the warning signs from the inside. Now, I see the full picture from the outside. And what I see are organizations that need to stop. I don't think it's that the mission stopped mattering, but that continuing would do more harm than good. That's a hard sentence to write, and it's even harder to watch leaders refuse to say it themselves. There's a...

It’s early January, which means everyone is making promises to the calendar. Some of them are thoughtful. Some of them are guilt in a trench coat. And most of them get buried somewhere around mid-February, right next to that half-used planner you swore you’d “really stick with this year.” That’s why I think it's important to draw a clear distinction between two things we treat like the same thing: Goals and resolutions. Which, as per the focus of this article - aren’t synonyms. And if you...