I was in bed when my wife came in and told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I remember walking into the living room and staring at the screen, trying to understand what I was seeing. I think the first thing I said is, “where’s the other tower?” I couldn’t see it [...]

More opportunities there for regret.My problem with most of these projects still exists and wasn’t really addressed by the film: despite the laudable environmental purpose, the projects are not economic and don’t pay for themselves…. It’s feel-good marketing that seems totally ineffective in addressing the problems so effectively demonstrated by Inconvenient Truth.In the film, Gore shows there are only two industrialized countries that have have not ratified the Kyoto Accord: the United States and Australia.

I heard of the following rules from Dorothy Bowman who was my HR director years ago. Dorothy had experience in the federal bureaucratic wars (Navy if I recall correctly), but the rules work almost anywhere:

If it doesn’t say you can’t, you can.
It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.
Proceed until apprehended!

The rules work beautifully, but there [...]

Years ago I attended the Aviara Golf Academy trying to improve my game. Well, I’m still not a good golfer, though it’s not their fault. They taught me a lot.

One lesson had to do with control. We all want to hit the ball far and we all want to hit it straight. As a relatively [...]

A few years ago, a colleague and I were in a conference room discussing Jack Welch’s Values vs. Production model. I drew the following diagram on the white board and explained how the model worked:

We talked about how to apply this model in our company. We discussed the performance of each of our top managers [...]

A few years ago, I happened upon a Jack Welch interview on C-Span while flipping channels. Jack was asked, “How do you evaluate people at GE?” Note that this was before publication of his autobiography (Jack, Straight From The Gut). Before I knew much more about him than his role as CEO of one of [...]