Showing Post from: Essays
Does Your Tribe Support You or Own You?
We were delivering an especially large Inspired Work Program. After the first lunch, a group of men came walking in together. They were laughing. They had come up with the “Jewish Mother’s Hierarchy of Acceptable Career Choices.”This narrow range of possibilities was based on how one mother’s eyebrows responded when the […]
The Five Steps All of Us Use to Kill Off Change
Business media sends out articles every single day about the acceleration of change, about changing technology impacting each and every one of us. But, little is said about how to change ourselves. Learning how to change ourselves is one of the single most valuable of life experiences. For many, […]
Tired of Mediocre Outcomes? The New Standard
In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy urged Americans to think about how we measure what makes a country great in new ways. He said the Gross National Product doesn’t measure the health of our children, the beauty of our poetry, our courage, our wisdom, or our compassion. He said, “It measures […]
Einstein Draws a Circle and I Don’t Know My Ass From a Hole in the Ground
This morning, someone close to me said the two most valuable phrases a person can say are, “I need help” and “I don’t know.” When I started leading The Inspired Work Program in 1990, I was thrown into an existential crisis. Growing up with a white-male-pissed-off God had given […]
Fear of Success is a Big Fat Ugly Lie
Early this morning, I woke up and thought of how frightening it would be to pay all my bills, buy a spectacular beach home in the Malibu Colony and purchase a brand-new Azimut 77S foot yacht with a crew of two. My mind wandered towards getting up and visiting Amazon […]
The Democratic Solution to Engagement
One of the fundamental reasons so many well-intentioned employee engagement initiatives fail is rooted in how we treat the organizational elite. The majority of learning and development dollars are directed towards executive leadership and high potentials, while everyone else gets little or nothing. Rinse & Repeat. True, measurable and sustainable […]
America, Kindergarten for Apprenticeships
Time has proven that we learn nothing of value by studying dysfunction. Our most valuable lessons are earned by studying success, even if that success represents a small portion of our culture. This past year, Donald Trump announced a $200 million dollar budget to provide funding for apprenticeships. Unfortunately, […]
The Middle-Class is Not What We Are Losing
These days much is being made about the disappearance of our middle-class. Unfortunately, framing what is occurring as an economic issue distracts many of us from the real truth.We are not witnessing the elimination of the middle-class, we are eliminating task workers. This is a seismic shift so frightening that […]
Why Active Learners Own the World
We used to derive our security from a job. Today we find our security from growth. Virtually anyone in this country can access almost any information they need 24-hours-a-day. And yet, a wide range of studies indicate that America is less intelligent than just 20 years ago. At the […]
How Can Work Become Your Greatest Relationship?
When I launched Inspired Work in 1990, I didn’t have a particularly fulfilling relationship towards work. While I was financially successful, my work wasn’t particularly rewarding or meaningful. I believe this is the norm for many of us. In fact, many parents present a black-or-white approach to family career development by […]