Your 10,000-Foot View Is Crippling Your Results

Systems thinking is often considered a broad view of all the pieces required to make meaningful change happen. It’s essential to making real change – but when we equate the system with the change, we overlook the individual players. These individual players are crucial to making change happen, and can get lost in the complexity. […]

To Be Strategic, You Must Learn To Rewrite History

If you believe that we can’t and shouldn’t rewrite history, you are wrong. We can and we should rewrite history. Don’t feel bad though, you’re not alone in the belief that history is stagnant and unchangeable, but this belief is wrong. History is not fortified fact that is indisputable. Please, let me explain myself. I’m […]

Why You Suck at Communicating and How To Fix It

The Problem As I See It Don’t get me wrong, it’s not your tone of voice or your body language, it has nothing to do with your delivery and it’s not about your communication style. In fact, there may not even be an issue with the content of your communication. It’s not your message today […]

Are You An Inspiring Leader?

Recently I’ve been intrigued by the question, “How can leaders inspire their people?” Maybe it’s the holiday season, maybe it’s something else, but I have spent the last few weeks trying to answer this question. When I was running my second company, we had a team of outside sales reps. You wouldn’t have heard me […]

Where are the High-Potentials?

It’s one of the biggest challenges businesses face today: how to identify and develop leaders. The common approach for many businesses is to create a system for identifying high-potential employees. Oftentimes, a high-performer is promoted to leadership because he or she is deemed a high-potential employee. But there is a difference between a high-performer and […]

Need to Define Your Strategy? Use a Dictionary

Need to Define Your Strategy? Use a Dictionary Kyle Brost I was working with a business leader recently on some challenges her business was facing. After trying to understand the root cause of her problems, I said, “It sounds like we need to define your strategy” She looked up from her cup of coffee with […]

Driving Value Via Personality

Let’s be honest most people approach personality assessments like reading a book, read it once, remember a couple ideas that resonate and place it on a shelf to gather dust. One question I often hear is, “which personality assessment should we use?” My response is generally the same, if it’s one of the top 5, […]

WHY YOUR INCENTIVE PROGRAM DOESN’T WORK

WHY YOUR INCENTIVE PROGRAM DOESN’T WORK Incentives are an interesting paradigm, we usually start talking about incentives because we want to see more of something; more sales, more resolutions or more widgets. The prevailing belief is that if we pay people more, they will produce more of what we want. However, there are three primary […]

Culture: Your Strategic Ally

A colleague shared an exceptional article with me recently titled “Is Your Culture Built On the Right Foundation?” by Tim Sanders. Anyone who has worked with a strategy consultant has probably heard them say something to the effect of strategy trumps process, but culture trumps strategy; or as Tim Sanders quotes, “Culture eats strategy for […]

At the Edge of Extraordinary

She stepped to the edge, her heart racing and sweat building up on her brow. In that moment, she wasn’t sure if she would jump or simply fall off the edge after passing out. Regardless of how it happened, she was definitely going off the edge! From the time she was a child she had […]

Your Potential is Not Your Past

Seeing the potential in others and ourselves is one of the greatest skills we can learn. Significant research has been done around the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies – both on a social level (see Robert K. Merton) and on an interpersonal level (see Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson).  A self-fulfilling prophecy is a phenomenon that occurs […]

The Mirror of Excuse

There are four inches of fabric separating the two runners. These aren’t just any runners; they are sprinting in perfect unison, with four inches of separation and doing it under an 11 second pace – a pace that is near to the world record. What’s more, one of them is running blind…literally. The four inches […]

Five Steps to Overcome Disappointment

You see it on the horizon like an ominous storm and it’s not long before light and hope are hidden behind the dark clouds of disappointment. Frustration, sadness and dismay wash over you in huge drops of defeat, leaving you hopeless.   Disappointment is defined as, “the feeling of sadness or displeasure caused by the […]

Productivity Increases When You Learn This Secret

Everyone wants more time. More hours in the day. More chances to do what they love, spend time with others, read, learn, more time so they can ride their bike to work instead of driving. Hence the huge number of time management tools out there. But here’s the thing: We can’t manage time, regardless of […]