The last few weeks I’ve been as limp as a lettuce leaf that had stayed a few weeks too long in the fridge. This is not unusual. It is what happens if / when I do back to back events / workshops/ etc. I end up putting so much energy into the world to be [...]
Tag Archives | personal mastery
What Ideas Are You Fighting For?
Leadership always operates at two levels. There is the immediate and perhaps even pragmatic stuff of leadership – who is in charge, what responsibilities do they own, what defines the shape of their arena. We spend a lot of time paying attention to this stuff, in all domains – work, economies, and especially now during [...]
Courage Does Not Roar
Today, I was in a room full of remarkable people, making a list of what qualities make someone remarkable. The predictable elements were listed: Hard-working Resourceful Creative Intelligent/ Smart Organized… After 15 or so elements were listed on the post-it board… courageous was added to the list. When you are courageous (or fearless, bold – [...]
Kill the Meetings
After coming off a 6-month sabbatical from Apple, I returned to work at about 5:30 am, cleared my inbox by 8 a.m. (hey, it was 1994 – this was still humanly possible, back then). By 8:30, I was sitting bright and cheery in the conference room for the regular weekly kickoff meeting that our work [...]
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
When we invite people over at the house, we notice many of our friends have an interesting way of talking about themselves. “I suck at that”. “No way can my company grow given these market conditions” “I’ll never make it”. “It’s never gonna happen because of (these million, ever changing reasons)” “Every time I try [...]
Resentment, Resilience and Rebounding
“It’s them, not me”. That’s effectively what Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo (YHOO), has been saying in the few days since she’s been fired. Well, she said it more “colorfully” than that to Fortune’s Patricia Sellers: “These people f—ed me over,” she says, in her first interview since her dismissal from the CEO role [...]
The Kick In the Pants
I felt his foot so far up my butt that I could practically taste the leather. All the way from Oakland to our end destination of Los Gatos, he went on and on. And when traffic hit us, and slowed us down to a crawl, I almost wept from the agony of more time on [...]
The Seasons
This weekend traditionally marks the threshold between the summer of rest, and the fall of new fruition. When people lived on farms, the lore goes, you knew what season you were in. You were either doing the hard work of planting your seeds, or tending them as they grew, or celebrating the harvest itself and [...]
And, Who Are You?
The quiet and art-filled office space overlooking majestic oak trees, the joy of working with Mike Mace, the significant source of income for our family. These were things I thought of when I thought of what I was losing when shutting down Rubicon. What I didn’t think of until it happened was this: when you [...]
First Days
The walk to school this crisp morning involved little girls dressed in some very stylish ballerina-style sequined skirts, incredibly crisp white shirts with clean new shoes, and a palpable exuberance. Kids who were grunting at each other at the end of last year were hugging with joy at their reunion. But besides those few moments, [...]