Amazon link This book is an excellent primer on its full title: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference, and Why It Matters. As somebody who generally had an intuitive feel for strategy throughout my career, and has had difficulty trying to explain how to see what I see, I appreciated Rumelt’s systematic explanation, and will […]
Category: coaching
You don’t have the answer
One of my pet peeves is when people tell me what I should do. Normally, this is because they did something that worked for them, and they want to tell me I should also do it. I generally don’t want such advice for a variety of reasons: I don’t want the same thing that they […]
Building a Community of Alignment
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead In my first post on alignment, I wrote “Alignment is the art and craft of creating or identifying a unifying purpose and a set of elements or parts, and then […]
100 Hours
Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you what you value. Our most precious and irreplaceable resource is time. We have approximately 100 hours each week to spend after sleep and basic self-care. How we spend those 100 hours is an observable expression of our values and priorities that can often be at odds with […]
2021 Year in Review
2021 was quite a year. Let’s start this review post by listing off a few significant events in my priority areas of family and coaching: Our second child was born in the spring. She exhibits intense curiosity, with a desire to be where the action is – she has serious FOMO! Meanwhile, our first child […]
Creating Alignment with Others
I’ve described leadership as the art of identifying gaps between what is and what could be, and mobilizing others to address them. In the alignment series thus far, I have been addressing the identifying gaps part of leadership in identifying your own gaps for personal development, identifying an aspiration to orient your actions, and identifying […]
The Present Moment Is Everything You Need
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl “Be present now” was one of the maxims I included in my personal operating system a few years ago, and I’m starting to think it […]
Spiritual debt
If we have a short-term cost to cover, we sometimes take on a loan to spread that cost over a longer period, and then make regular payments to pay off the monetary debt we owe. Engineering organizations have the concept of technical debt, where a feature is coded in a slipshod way to get it […]
Alignment to Reality
“Are you able to be with this exactly the way it is with no agenda to change it?” I learned this powerful question in Steve March’s Aletheia Coaching training, and it continues to knock my socks off as a tool to help me discover when I am not fully present and accepting of reality as […]
Alignment with Aspiration
Find out who you are, and do it on purpose. — Dolly Parton In my ongoing series on alignment, I’ve described how I think alignment can be more powerful than hierarchical power, and why it can be challenging to find alignment within oneself. In this post, I want to expand on finding a purpose for […]