You, Sir are living in a historic time. Post-truth politics gets carefully manicured through fake news and propagated bigly via an echo chamber. By my guesstimate, everyone’s favorite bête noire is the overuse of the word ‘disruption’. Am I on fleek? There’s no reason to get your dandruff up. During a town hall meeting, Lake…
Even though my mantra is “Words Matter”, I’m constantly learning new things about language. Last week I received an email which contained the phrase “for all intensive purposes”. Of course, the correct phrase is the similar-sounding “for all intents and purposes.” The mistake struck me as both amusing and intriguing, so I tweeted that it…
All I really need to know I learned from Dr. Seuss. With apologies to Robert Fulghum, Dr. Seuss has more life-long lessons than kindergarten. Here are some of my favorites: The best way to learn and expand your horizons is to try new things. I do not like green eggs and ham! I do not…
Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom. -George S. Patton Motivational quotes like that can be inspirational but not very practical. Intellectually we know bad times eventually come to an end. But why is it that some people seem to bounce back more quickly than others? The authors of Stronger: Develop the…
You don’t win by predicting the future; you win by getting the odds right. I heard this provocative quote at a recent conference. As far as I could tell, the speaker was trying to make the point that you don’t need an accurate forecast of the future. Instead you understand the probability of different events…
Seventy years ago this week, Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra made his major league debut for the New York Yankees. Yogi Berra was a fantastic baseball player, arguably the greatest catcher of all time. To give you a sense of his baseball résumé, Yogi played in 15 All-Star Games, won 10 World Series championships, and earned…
One of my management principles is “passion for the mission is not optional.” To me, it’s critical that people believe in what we’re doing. In fact, I think the whole team believing in the mission is more important than having the exact right skills on the team. Culture eats strategy and passion beats talent. In…
When the U.S. Navy chose Mike Abrashoff to become Commander of USS Benfold, the challenges which faced him were seemingly overwhelming. At the time, the Benfold was one of the worst-performing ships in the Navy; a “dysfunctional ship with a sullen crew that resented being there and could not wait to get out of the Navy.”…
Almost immediately after I wrote my post on heteronyms – words spelled identically but with different meanings and pronunciations – I got an email from a reader suggesting I write a follow up on homophones. She pointed out homophones are much more difficult for non-native English speakers. My reader’s logic made sense. Because heteronyms are…
During a recent interview, a non-native English speaker asked me how I have time to write. Unfortunately I misunderstood the question – or maybe I was too tired to think clearly – so I answered something like the following: I read around 30 books per year, mostly when I’m on planes. The interviewer seemed happy…