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You Can Help Clean Up The (Social) Environment
Beyond the heated debates about The Green New Deal, renewable energy, and eco-friendly everything lies an environment in which we all exist day to day. It is the social environment, the human community, our cities and towns and social media enclaves, where we interact. This environment has been horribly polluted. It reeks of spoilage. Of […]
Continue ReadingNothing Good Comes From The Erosion of Truth
When did it begin, this kinda, sorta, maybe way of thinking that makes right and wrong nothing more than intellectual exercises? When did we become a nation of slick marketing geniuses at the expense of truth, which is the foundation of capitalism? When did a handshake become a chuckle up the sleeve because some dope […]
Continue ReadingLeadership Secret: Change Without Changing
When it comes to change, most everyone can relate to these sentiments: “I want to be better, but I don’t want to change what makes me comfortable.” “I’m all for change, just don’t make me alter my routines.” That’s the bald truth, though no one would say it just that way. Things that make us […]
Continue ReadingHow Leaders Define and Deal With Conflict
LISTEN NOW: Welcome to the weekly podcast from The Backbone Institute! Today’s discussion: DEALING WITH CONFLICT How do you define conflict? I don’t know many people who really like conflict, but it exists. We tend to lump everything together that makes us uncomfortable and call it conflict, but that’s accurate. Is a Different point of […]
Continue Reading10 Questions Leaders Must Ask Themselves
In good times and bad, people watch leaders for signs that they are worth following. During the best of times, followers have questions, though they may not ask them out loud. In difficult and distressing times, followers are often more vocal, but the real questions still aren’t necessarily asked. Here are ten questions people have […]
Continue ReadingHow Reckless Leadership Leads to Distrust
I was driving home from an entrepreneur’s workshop this afternoon (thank you UW-Parkside, BizStarts Milwaukee, Kauffman Foundation, and selfless experts and coaches), thinking about what it takes to start a business or survive today as an early stage company. The economic and political climates are challenging, to say the least. Breaking into my reverie was […]
Continue ReadingIf You Want Someone to Learn from You, Respect First, Then Teach
I’ve been thinking a lot about schools lately. The debate about whether the Mayor of Milwaukee should take control of the Milwaukee Public School system has raged for a long time with passion on both sides of the issue. Education is a building block of any society. Public education seeks to equip members of a […]
Continue ReadingAre We Measuring Ourselves to Distraction?
… and Tracking Ourselves to Ill Health? We live in a data-gorged world, where most everything can be measured in microns and progress can be tracked real-time. In theory, this rich availability of data should enhance every decision by helping us base judgments on data, not supposition, and logic, not emotion. Unfortunately, this very condition […]
Continue ReadingCommunicate Better by Learning the Power of Language
Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t say something stupid, then act surprised when they’re called on it. Words are powerful communicators of what’s inside a person. And since our society has removed almost all barriers of decorum and appropriateness when it comes to saying what’s on our minds, some people reveal a lot […]
Continue ReadingWhy Truncated Thinking is the Confidence Killer
To all who face a challenging decision or dilemma: Keep on thinking! Truncated thinking is the all-too-common phenomenon in which the thinker encounters an aspect of a decision that is really tough and decides to postpone additional thinking in order to ‘do something more productive.’ To illustrate, let’s say a new product design reaches a […]
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