1: It was November of 1988, and Terry Looper was on his way to Las Vegas.

Terry owned 10 percent of the company that was about to be sold.

“Once the papers were signed, I should’ve been on top of the world,” he writes in his book Sacred Pace: Four Steps to Hearing God and Aligning Yourself With His Will.

“I was not just a millionaire as I’d always … continue reading

1: “We managers like to talk about change, so much that embracing change has become a cliché of management,” Andy Grove writes in Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

But not all changes are the same.

What Andy calls “a strategic inflection point is not just any change,” he notes. “It compares to change the way Class VI rapids on a … continue reading

1: Then Intel CEO Andy Grove was sitting in a conference room with other members of the Intel team.

The topic? “Evaluations of a certain highly touted new software from a company whose other products we already use,” Andy writes in his legendary business book, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

Intel’s head of Information Technology shared the challenges her team … continue reading

1: “Top-down innovation gets a bad rap,” Panera founder Ron Shaich writes in his terrific book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.

“The popular business press abounds with criticism of initiatives that come tumbling down from the peak of the org chart,” Ron observes.

“And yet, take a closer look at most companies, and you’ll find that organizations are still doing it that way.”

Why is … continue reading

1: “So tell me this,” the young executive asked, “Is Panera almost as good as Donatos?”

“Is he joking?” Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich thought to himself.

It was the early 2000s. Ron was sitting in an executive boardroom at McDonald’s headquarters outside Chicago. Ten years earlier, he had purchased the St. Louis Bread Company and renamed it Panera.

On the other side of the table were members of McDonald’s … continue reading

1: Consider the following two questions:  

“Where did you get married?” vs. “How did you decide on the wedding venue?”

At first glance, the questions seem similar. But if our goal is to start a meaningful conversation, they are worlds apart.

“Where did you get married?” is an example of a “stop sign” question, Sahil Bloom writes in his book The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design … continue reading

1: Floyd Barker was 88 years old. He lived alone in a rustic farmhouse he had shared with his late wife Ruth, who had passed away six years earlier.

“You couldn’t tell from his gregarious smile and inquisitive eyes,” Diane Button writes in her wonderful book What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, but “Floyd was lonely. . .

“He was also dying from kidney failure,” … continue reading

1: It was the early 2000s. Will Guidara, the General Manager of Eleven Madison Park (EMP), “was lucky enough to was lucky enough to live around the corner from Ninth Street Espresso, one of the first serious espresso bars in New York City,” Will writes in his terrific book Unreasonable Hospitality.

The store’s owner, Ken Nye, “was notoriously exacting,” Will notes. He would adjust the coarseness of … continue reading

1: “I’m a fixer,”  Sahil Bloom writes in his book, The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life..

“When people come to me with problems, my bias is to try to fix them.”

Professionally, this can be a good thing.

“But when I bring this bias into my relationships,” Sahil observes, “the results can be decidedly mixed.

“Over the years, my fix-it mentality led … continue reading

1: Psychologist John Gottman can predict who will eventually get divorced a stunning 94 percent of the time.

In a pioneering 1992 study, John and his team interviewed fifty-two married couples.

They asked each couple “a variety of questions about how they met, why they decided to get married, and what changes their relationships had been through and observed them as they took part in a fifteen-minute discussion about a … continue reading