Blog Archive

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Musings – Part 14

Personality.  For decades, psychologists claimed our personalities are fundamentally unchangeable after about the age of 30 but that our behaviours are malleable. I find that distinction troublesome, largely because my mission is to liberate potential and change lives. If our behaviours are adaptive, surely they must also influence our disposition and character. Psychosomatic medicine has […]

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Becoming Resilient

Resilience is one of the great puzzles of human nature. Whether in the cancer ward, the battlefield or the boardroom, it determines who succeeds and who fails. During my recent hiatus from blog writing, it struck me that the ugly events of the past two years – the pandemic, humanitarian crises, increasing division, anger, violence […]

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How to Mitigate Bias

Bias is the crutch our brains use to simplify our lives and keep us happy. We like to believe we’re in control of our brains and that we act rationally based on our self-interests. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our brain has a mind of its own and the focus of neuroscience is […]

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How to Become Wise

What is wisdom? We often use the word but are hard pressed to define it. Like understanding the true meaning of quality or excellence, it’s a mystery for many – one that inspires both awe and trepidation. Perhaps the confusion arises from seemingly conflicting connotations. It’s certainly a lot more than possessing knowledge. Indeed, most […]

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How to Find a Good Coach

Smart leaders solicit and accept good advice from those they trust to provide it. They understand no one is bright enough, objective enough or experienced enough to consistently know what to do or how best to do it. (Intellectual humility is a sine qua non of leadership.) While many sources of counsel are readily available, […]

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How to Improve Memory

Remembering and forgetting pervade and enable everything we do. Without this involuntary capability we wouldn’t know who we are or what to do next. But our memory is notoriously inaccurate, incomplete and fallible. Some recollections last a few seconds; others last a lifetime. Our brains just aren’t built to remember a lot of important stuff […]

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Musings – Part 13

Courage.  Some equate courage with those who make the ultimate sacrifice. I do not. That is valour. Courage is different. It’s a quality of mind that enables one to confront fear with calm focus and resolve, like getting up every day with the determination to do better. Trying to understand and reconcile beliefs that run […]

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How to Reignite Curiosity

We are born with insatiable curiosity. In our youth, everything was a question as we tried to figure out a world filled with mystery. Paul Harris, an authority on early childhood education, says that between the ages of two and five, children pose over 100 questions an hour – two-thirds of which are efforts to […]

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How to Embrace Failure

Failure is inevitable. It’s the distinguishing feature of economies, businesses, governments and relationships. Almost 98% of all new products fail; 97% of all patents never make money; 90% of oil wells drilled are dry; 80% of venture-capital funded firms go under; 80% of corporate mergers and acquisitions add no new value; 70% of new drugs […]

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The Game of Life: A Live Conversation

Recently, I was interviewed about “the games people play” for an Australian television production. The host was well informed and his questions well researched. Watch below if you have an interest in my answers. Hope you find it enjoyable. Jim You can get your copy of The Game of Life by visiting our Books page, or […]

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How to Manacle a Manipulator

To achieve their unscrupulous objectives, skillful manipulators prey upon our fears, sense of obligation to those we admire or feelings of guilt about what we’ve done. They’re usually quite friendly, sometimes even intimate, when they get what they want. But they use their familiarity with our vulnerabilities to shape their strategies for seeking advantage. That […]

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How to Change your Reality

You stream a new movie on Netflix and the next day discuss it with a friend who also saw it. A particular scene, pivotal to the plot, excites you and you seek her thoughts on it. That’s when you discover you must have watched a different film. She saw details you didn’t even notice, had […]

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How to Think for Yourself

The brain is designed for mimicry – we learn by copying the behaviour of others. This determines in large measure who we are and what we seek in life. We have an innate need to belong. Our mindset is more one of dependency than independency. Early in our lives, we connect with our parents, siblings […]

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Innovating Like Einstein and Disney

I have several heroes whose lives I have studied in depth and whose thinking gives me inspiration and guidance. Among them, for different reasons, are Albert Einstein and Walt Disney. What intrigues and informs me about their remarkable accomplishments is how they each, in their own unique way, approached and solved the problems and addressed […]

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How to Open an Oyster

Oysters are the silent, non-responsive players in the game of life. I chose the label for an obvious reason: when we know how to expertly open them up without damaging their fragile egos, we may discover a pearl and the kind of communication that could lead to more productive encounters in future. For this to […]

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How to Get Lucky

Luck happens.  Just as the reverse is true. Unexpected and unpredictable occurrences we had nothing to do with can be both good and bad. The trick is to know what to do when the good appears and it’s consequential. At least half of smart leadership (or anything else for that matter) is knowing how to […]

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The Gritty Side of Creativity

Business leaders need to understand that creativity is not the enemy of efficiency. It’s simply the ability to think differently. This can be time-consuming, disruptive or even repugnant in corporate cultures that pride metrics, spreadsheets, speed and bottom-line proficiency. But it’s skills-based hard work. And, in today’s unpredictable, hyper-competitive world, where better, faster and cheaper […]

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How To Be Less Wrong

We all make mistakes. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t learn much. Failure produces resilience, resilience builds character and character is our destiny. We need adversity to find clarity and coherence in our lives – to discover who we are and what we can be. The challenge, of course, is that we don’t much like being […]

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Are You a Super-agreeable?

Super-agreeables are people pleasers – compliant, sweet folks who never want to upset others but who end up doing just that. They lead us to believe they’re in total agreement with our ideas or requests, only to let us down when we expect them to do what they said they would do. These friendly, willing […]

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Musings – Part 12

PLANS.  Why do we believe our plans for the future will succeed and are surprised when they don’t? It’s easy to be hopeful about the consequences of good intentions but impossible to know with precision the outcome of a set of sequential events. We underestimate our presumptions and overestimate our strengths. We misunderstand randomness and […]

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How to Achieve Mastery

What is mastery? It’s not a consequence of genius or talent, though they certainly help. Rather it’s a function of good timing, perseverance and dedicated focus on a particular domain of knowledge. Masters are disciplined, self-directed and highly motivated. Mastery is a journey without end – a life quest – not a destination per se. […]

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How to Tame Tough Guys*

Tough Guys (and Gals) are rebels who have decided the price of pleasing others is simply too high. Their purpose in life is to prove they can get by without anyone’s help – that they can make it through challenging situations quite nicely on their own. They have an aversion to dependence and accommodation and […]

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How to Defang a Bully*

Bullies are contemptuous of their prey. They are generally abusive, abrupt, arbitrary and intimidating. Their tone is one of arrogance and their attack is typically accusatory. They’re stimulated by any sign of submissiveness and their impatience with those who exhibit weakness often manifests in irritation, indignation or anger. They’re “into” power and they use it […]

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How to Say No

Most of us have a hard time saying no, especially to close friends or family members. For some, it’s almost impossible. Like everything else in life, saying no is a skill and perhaps one of the more important we need to master. The ability to say no, when we don’t want to say yes, is […]

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Musings – Part 11

FEAR.  The greatest cause of our anxiety is fear. But fear and anxiety are not the same thing. Anxiety is spurred by uncertainty, by the assumptions and predictions we make about the future in which we have little confidence. If we could forecast events with certitude, we would be much less anxious. We would know […]

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How to Hire the Best

In a relentless effort to achieve sustainable competitive advantage, leaders of the past demonstrated a decided preference for recruiting people with needed technical skills. Twelve years ago, I wrote a blog on this topic emphasizing the lack of appreciation of what are often called “the soft skills.” These include the qualities required for collaboration, adaptability, […]

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Perception vs. Reality

Our brains don’t record what we see; they interpret it to fit our beliefs and desires. And we are unaware of the extent to which or when this happens. We see what we want to see and have been taught to see. Our brains are story tellers: they translate impressions into the language they already understand, […]

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Lying – Part 1

Everyone lies. We do it for a lot of reasons. We sometimes do it to protect ourselves as well as others from embarrassment or hurt feelings. When your cherished grandmother asks you whether you like her famous family-recipe rhubarb pie, and you really don’t, you likely say you do as you struggle with the second helping. […]

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Musings – Part 10

Unprecedented.  The coronavirus pandemic is often described as an unprecedented event. The word means “never done or known before.” Some aspects of COVID-19, like its global scale, likely are. Others are not. Although many choose to ignore the lessons of history, it offers much needed perspectives. As George Santana said 115 years ago, those who […]

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How to Answer When You Don’t Want To

Have you ever been asked a question you would rather not answer? We all have. These are questions that are either too difficult to answer, upsetting or confusing. They might reveal our ignorance or be purposefully intended to annoy, frustrate or make us look (or feel) stupid. People ask them all the time, perhaps innocently, sometimes […]

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How to Avoid Unproductive Arguments

A good debate liberates our thinking. A robust but respectful exchange of views is an act of kindness – one that opens and sharpens our minds and gets us closer to the truth. It ought not be a winner-take-all contest where the primary objective is to prove one is wrong and the other right. Civilized discourse isn’t a measurement of who’s smarter; it’s an opportunity to test and exchange theories about life’s inordinate mysteries and complexities.

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