1: “Screw them. We could run a better convenience store than these folks!”

Twenty-one-year-old college student Ron Shaich was mad.  He and his friends had been “escorted” out of the Store 24 convenience store directly across from Clark University, which they attended.

The “beefy security guard . . . had taken one look at the trio of scruffy kids lingering over the ice-cream freezer and decided we were intent on … continue reading

1: “To create anything of value—whether it’s a product, a company, a society, or a life,” Ron Shaich writes in his powerful book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations, “we must push through our default settings.”

How do we do that?

“By living consciously and deliberately, by making the hard choices, and by using tools … to discover what will really matter, again and again.”… continue reading

1: “I learned the most important lesson of my life as my father’s life came to its end,” Ron Shaich writes in his terrific book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.

The year was 1998.  Ron was CEO of Au Bon Pain, a prominent chain of French-inspired bakery-cafés. The following year, the company would change its name to Panera Bread Company.  

“Several years after a … continue reading