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The Golden Days of Higher Education
It’s been about a decade since I set foot in a college classroom. So it seems appropriate that now, as I start looking at courses to audit at Harvard this semester, is when I run into William...
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Learning ignorance
The older I get the more fascinated I become with what we as a society do not know. I only recently realized that we know things because someone decided to ask a question and go about finding an...
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Confusing complexity for difficulty
“How long does it take you to prepare one of your speeches?” asked a friend of President Wilson not long ago. “That depends on the length of the speech,” answered the President. “If it is a ten-minute...
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Email writing class
I’d like to see email writing offered as a class somewhere. Email is tough because you need to say a lot in very few words, otherwise it won’t be read. In some ways, it’s a new kind of writing. A short...
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A lack of intimacy
“The great leaders—and I’ve seen this for over 40 years—always start with the big customer problem that needs solving and determine if there are better ways of accomplishing this than those which...
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The Code Book
For Christmas my brother gave me a copy of The Code Book, by Simon Singh, and I’ve already finished it. The book was published 15 years ago, but that doesn’t really matter. Cryptography and...
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Sidestepping the hindsight approach
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about leadership, mostly guided by the syllabi of various leadership classes at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and I have a particular skepticism towards...
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Is purpose built-in?
I avoid using the phrase “my purpose,” because it implies that a purpose is something you just…get to have. Like a muse. It takes the ownership away from it. If you’re going to talk about your...
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Work is theatre
The above excerpt is from an article titled “A Leader’s guide to innovation in the experience economy,” in a journal called Strategy & Leadership. The article shares a pretty thoughtful set of...
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Spillover disruption: hotels and Uber
In May, we are visiting my brother in law for his graduate school graduation in Nashville. We figured things would be busy or expensive in May, so we decided to book our travel plans early. After...
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