Opinions: Making Change 

It was about three decades ago, and I was attending a conference of the World Business Forum, that year held in Chicago. One of the most engaging speakers was Dr. Margaret Wheatley,…


Opinions: Meaning Matters 

I recently returned to the University of Notre Dame for the annual reunion of the program, the Inspired Leadership Initiative (ILI), where I was a fellow in 2022-2023. The ILI staff have…


Opinions: Working Together

There are people who devote significant hours each week to podcast listening, sometimes while commuting or driving, sometimes while exercising or walking, sometimes while performing less-than fully engaging work or household tasks.…


Welcome to Work

If you’ve ever had the occasion to check into a more upscale hotel, or at least one that portends to be, you know that they work very hard to make that experience…


Changing Brains

I missed NeoCon in June, first time since 1988. It was difficult to break that streak because NeoCon has always been a pleasure for me, not a burden. For those 30-odd years…


Word Choices

A starting point for this column is my confession to an unsurprising bias… I treasure words. They have the power to articulate complex thoughts, to inspire new  and innovative ideas, to capture…


Curating a Life

It has long seemed to me that the notion of work-life balance is a misguided pursuit. Not because some balancing of those realities is neither possible nor desirable, but because the conjoined…


Change Making

Long before it became fashionable to identify the phenomenon of disruption, and especially before it was regarded as bold and innovative to be a disruptor, there were some significant disruptions in the…


Work Tumbler

Ever hear of a rock tumbler? Until recently, me neither, but it turns out to be one of the more common methods and tools for polishing stones. Here’s how it works.  A…


Selling Something Secondary

It wasn’t that long ago that an office furniture dealer had a pretty universal model for their company space. They would have a large showroom where they displayed products in small-footprint settings,…


Going to War

At larger corporations and even some mid-sized companies, it was not uncommon to create distinctly dedicated, often somewhat secluded spaces when a special and important project required the assembly of a designated…