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"When I discovered Warren Buffett, a light went on in my head. It did not take me long to realize that I wanted a life that was more like his than mine.
Determined to transform my life, I began a long journey of discovery. It lead to my having a charity lunch with Warren Buffett at Smith & Wollensky's in 2008, but it also came with many costly mistakes and hard earned, but valuable lessons. [...]
Today, I might not quite tap dance to work as well as Warren Buffett does, but I've gotten a lot better.
My suggestion to you: lighten up. Stop working so hard and focusing on the money and your next promotion all the time. Start having fun while you work instead. That joy will show in your eyes, and the promotion and that raise will take care of themselves, along with career and life success."
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"Growing up, most of us had to learn how to defend ourselves and think for ourselves. And, if you were anything like me, you had to learn the hard way—paying the consequences for bad decisions (and, for me, there were many). As parents, we try to remove every struggle we endured growing up, so they don't have to struggle the way we did, and yet those hard times and struggles are most likely exactly what made us who we are today. It is our responsibility just to help see them through those struggles and help them learn and grow from them. The same can be said for business today. And, in business, most of our employees are not as good as they could be—not because of our love for them or our desire to make their lives better than ours, but for the exact opposite reason. It is because most of the time we think they are not worth the effort to really coach them."
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"There is a common myth, told and retold, from the boardrooms of industry-dominating behemoths to the opinion columns and business pages of newspapers and magazines. It's a myth that litters the internet, and strikes fear in the heart of many an established executive. While it may seem like reality to many, this myth is actually more like a distortion of reality, often caused by a kind of inadvertent, self-imposed blindness—a willful, if unintentional, shoe gaze of sorts. The myth goes like this: large, established organizations can't get breakthrough innovations on their own. Breakthrough innovations, it says, are the domain of feisty, scrappy, nimble startups.
Companies that once graced headlines as models of homegrown innovation, once they reach a certain point, it seems, often believe themselves incapable of developing the types of innovations that disrupt markets or even create entire new ones—the kinds of innovations that can radically change the outlook of a company, or even the world, when successful. If it is, in fact, a myth, then why does it feel so real to so many? And what can be done to avoid the seemingly inevitable drought of innovation that comes along with building and cementing the apparatus of an established organization?"
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"Why does society tend to work in opposition to we if we is clearly a superior strategy? Why don't human beings make stronger moves to get past me ... ? Because psychologically and historically, me is a durable way to survive and succeed. Politics and business are competitive and capitalistic. Head-to-head, me appears to be the most viable strategy. But perception isn't reality.
Social science and history expose me as a less steady way to survive, and a fragile way to thrive. And when me leaves work and goes home, stakes can get even higher. Emotions are closer to the surface. Love is deeper. Commitments are stronger. Me collapses entirely as a carryover strategy from boardrooms to living rooms."
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"The blinding rate of innovation over the past few decades has turned yesterday's 'impossible' into today's 'of course.' But one area has experienced a near complete lack of innovation over that same time period: the ways executives manage and problem solve have barely changed. In fact, management innovation has done little to nothing to ease the burden of dealing with the growing complexity and decreasing resources that most large companies face.
The key to innovating management practices lies with two old terms that frankly are now rather tired, due in no small part to the fact that so few companies do either of them well for extended periods of time. Those two terms, inextricably linked, are employee engagement, without which you will not succeed at the second, which is continuous improvement."
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