Uncategorized

The Pause That Refreshes

The pause that refreshes. Coca Cola first introduced this marketing slogan more than 80 years ago. If you ask me, they were way ahead of their time. More and more I’m recommending to clients and keynote audiences to take time out of their busy day to pause and refresh. Only I’m not referring to drinking…

Read More ›

Play With Your Brain Over the Holidays

The holidays offer a much-needed opportunity to relax, spend some time with the family, and reflect upon the true meaning of the season. They’re also a great time to engage in an enjoyable and useful activity that I talk about throughout the year – playing with your brain. Playing with your brain relieves stress. It…

Read More ›

Appreciating the Best of the Best

2013 is drawing to a close and it has been one heck of a year.  My husband and I settled into a new home in Denver this year.  Our daughter had her fourth knee surgery and continues her college journey.  She is now a junior.  Our son graduated from college and got his first ‘real’…

Read More ›

Why Winning is So Hard

News flash – winning is hard! If you don’t think so, just ask the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens, who got spanked by my Broncos on this season’s NFL opener.  Of course, they didn’t plan to lose that game. In fact, they had every intention of winning. But sometimes things don’t go according to…

Read More ›

A Tale of Gut-Wrenching (Literally!) Innovation

Logan Ebert was born without most of his esophagus, the tube through which food travels from the mouth to the stomach. From day one, this healthy, happy teenager who just graduated from high school had to be fed through an artificial tube just to stay alive. When his parents began researching “esophageal atresia,” as the…

Read More ›

Are Dumb Rules Killing Innovation in Your Company?

Innovation is the process of coming up with new ideas and/or putting together existing ideas, products or services in new and different ways to achieve value. In order to do that, we sometimes have to first get rid of the obstacles that are getting in the way. One quick and simple method for eliminating barriers…

Read More ›

Five Strategies for Managing Risk in Your Business

Is the U.S. losing its competitive edge?A recent article on wsj.com suggests we might be – at least when it comes to pushing the envelope in the business world. According to Risk-Averse Culture Infects U.S. Workers, Entrepreneurs, the level of risk-taking in our society is currently on the downswing. The article points to four long-running…

Read More ›

The Six Drivers of Innovation and Change

I ran across an interesting article the other day – “The Driving Forces of Change” (http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2013/07/18/the-driving-forces-of-change/). It discusses six major forces driving innovation and change in today’s world: 1. Commoditization. The constant pressure to drive prices and margins lower. 2. Digital revolution. New technologies level the playing field by giving small companies the same computational…

Read More ›

Zombie Management: 5 Tips to Keep Your Team from Going Brain Dead

Have you seen the latest Zombie apocalypse movie, World War Z? Sure, it’s way over the top (what Zombie movie isn’t?). But it’s a lot of fun, as long as you don’t expect too much. And I came away intrigued with one of the concepts in the movie. The main character, Gerry (played by Brad…

Read More ›

It’s Time to Engage with Employee Engagement

Time for me to get up on the soapbox again. I recently came across a survey conducted by SilkRoad, a “leading provider of cloud-based, social talent management solutions.” In other words, they do the human resources thing. Their survey polled nearly 800 HR professionals on a number of issues related to engaging and energizing employees…

Read More ›

Time For An Education System Makeover

Education budgets at the national, state, and local levels have all taken huge hits over the past few years. And while we all want our schools to have sufficient funding to educate our children, more money is not the magic bullet solution for what our educational system needs. The truth is, our educational system is…

Read More ›

Everything You Wanted to Know About Christmas (but were afraid to Google)

Did you know that Christmas — this country’s most cherished Christian holiday — has its roots in pagan festivals such as Saturnalia, the Kalends (a precursor to the 12 days of Christmas), and Deus Sol Invictus (birthday of the unconquerable sun)? According to historians, in ancient times these celebrations all took place around this time…

Read More ›