Business leaders can’t help themselves. You hear a problem, and you immediately want to fix it. But there’s a hidden trap that you don’t see. — Business leaders can’t help themselves. You hear a problem, and you immediately want to fix it. You’re wired to reduce friction and risk to keep the train on the tracks. But there’s a hidden trap you don’t see. You listen for the problems you know how to solve.

To be honest, I find it much easier (and a lot more fun) to talk and write about planning than to do the tedious work. — “Thinking about the future seems so burdensome sometimes.” That comment from Jose, a loyal weekly email reader and commenter, made me laugh. In last week’s email, I shared a simple approach to making more of your big ideas happen next year. To be honest, I find it much easier (and…

“I really respect Jason for leaving in the middle of the day to pickup his girls from school”, our client said. — “I really respect Jason for leaving in the middle of the day to pickup his girls from school”, our client said. It was 2:00, an early end of the school day. This unexpected comment made me hit pause. Our client is a devoted father of 8 and grandfather to 12…

Prices don’t reflect the value of your services. — Should you publicly post your products and services pricing? It’s a practice that has strong opinions on both sides. Our product or service is complicated. How can we reduce it to a single price? If we openly publish our prices, our competitors will underbid us. Our prospective clients will think…

One of the great things about a new client is learning from them. It’s easy to make assumptions about what a client knows. Sometimes we’re wrong. — How It Started Our new client “Sam” is the kind of business leader we love to work with. “Sam” acquired an existing company and asked us to make sense of the mystery equipment, chirping battery backup, tangled cables, software, and services he inherited.

Every idea isn’t a winner. — “How did we ever get along without Amazon?”. That was last week’s happy hour casual comment that kicked off a fun conversation. Just to be clear. This isn’t a stamp of approval on Amazon’s labor practices or their crushing of small businesses. …

His reason for making a change made sense and his action-taking admirable. But his problem wasn’t platform. — What to share in this week’s post had me thinking in circles. If you could see my notes, my wait, no this, not that, idea dump, you would laugh. They were a mess. A Writer’s Problem I kept coming back to an email I received earlier in the week from Todd. He is…

What they have are make-it-happen habits that we can all learn to adopt too. — We all start every day with one thing in common. We have 24 hours, 1440 minutes, 86,400 seconds in our day. Think about those people you admire, the ones who seem to have unlimited energy and focus. They make amazing things happen day in and day out. …

No matter what product or service we provide, our customers have preconceived — and sometimes misguided — expectations about what they will receive for us. — LinkedIn comments can often be more entertaining and insightful than the original post. I stumbled across this comment recently, and I couldn’t help but laugh – “If people will just read my more than 4,000 blog posts, they’ll find all the answers they need.” Just to be clear, I’m…