Archives: Ghost Posts

There is a scene in Anger Management where Jack Nicholson’s character asks Adam Sandler’s character to tell the group about himself. Dave begins with familiar answers: his work, his interests, the facts of his life. But the question keeps coming back. “Who are you?” The more he tries to answer, the more frustrated he becomes.I understand his…

A capable professional can apply for dozens of positions and receive rejection after rejection. It is tempting to conclude that something is wrong with the candidate. Often, that is not the case. Hiring is not a pure assessment of talent. It is a matching process shaped by competition, timing, incomplete information, and organizational risk.The first…

There is a popular saying that arguing with an irrational person is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over the pieces, makes a mess of the board, and then struts around as though it has won.The saying is often associated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, although he did not write it. What Bonhoeffer did…

A senior executive I worked for, and have great respect for, once said, “I don’t like heroes. They die young.”He was pointing to a fundamental management principle: organizations should not be designed around heroics.In sports, clutch performance is what happens when the game is on the line: less time, greater consequence, fewer opportunities to recover.…

Change is rarely resisted simply because people do not want to change.More often, something is missing.The Lippitt–Knoster model offers a useful way to think about this. Successful change requires five things to come together: vision, skills, incentives, resources, and an action plan. Remove any one of them, and the organization begins to behave differently.Without vision,…

Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken is often interpreted as a celebration of choosing the unconventional path-the courage to take the road others did not.But the poem is more subtle than that.Frost tells us that the two roads were really quite similar. Both were attractive. Both were possible. And both disappeared into a future the traveler could…

Occam’s Razor is one of the most useful principles of reasoning: when several explanations can account for something, begin with the simplest one. Do not introduce complexity until the evidence requires it.There is wisdom in this. In business, when sales fall, a product fails, a customer complains, or a project slips, we can quickly construct…

I recently came across a line in an advertisement that stayed with me long after I had forgotten the product it was trying to sell: “Built for those who are still writing their story.” It resonated because it captured something fundamental about leadership. The best leaders are not those who believe they have arrived. They are those…

There is something deeply compelling about men who walked into the unknown not for conquest, but for understanding. One such figure was Alexander Burnes, the Scottish explorer whose book Travels into Bokhara became one of the great accounts of Central Asia during the nineteenth century.Burnes traveled through lands that, at the time, were barely understood…

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but…