When we encounter a situation or problem, we always have an intuitive response to it. You start a business, our intuitive approach is to ask the customer what they want. This is because many of the decisions we make involve other people as our customer – e.g., decisions we make within our companies that impacts our…

Jim Loehr is a performance psychologist and author who has worked with some of the world’s top athletes. Loehr’s philosophy is that one’s success is proportional to the strength of one’s character. And, he believes that character strength can be built the same way we build strength in our muscles, a powerful idea. In Tim…

"The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus." -- Bruce Lee He should know! 🙂 Here is to a successful week i.e. a week like an average week with laser-like focus. Have a great start to the week. Image by Thomas B.

I was playing Monopoly with my nephew and his friends recently. Every time we land on one my nephew's properties, he would scream demanding payment from his opponent. "Pay up, pay up" he would shout, squinting at his card for the amount we owe him. When he lands on "chance card" and the card says…

If you don't have time to do it right, how will you find time to do it over? Haste makes waste. In Swahili: Haraka haraka haina baraka which means hurry hurry has no blessings. Ps: Stalling is even worse than hurrying.

Shrek: Fiona? Are you all right? Princess Fiona: Yes. But, I don’t understand. I’m supposed to be beautiful. Shrek: But you are beautiful. __________________________________________________ This is a beautiful exchange at the end of the movie [Shrek] when Princess Fiona expects to be beautiful – a.k.a. human. Shrek’s response is both simple and profound.

Every day, we sell ourselves in adjectives that sell us short. We define ourselves as: Leader, expert, entrepreneur, communicator, specialist, efficient, experienced, better, faster, cheaper. We have watered down the effort of showing, for the convenience of telling. There is a better way. Don’t just tell us about the features and benefits of your product.…

Often we look for profound in things. We like a profound speaker, a profound author. A TV show that is profound gets more viewership. We look for people, preachers, poets, singers, artists who are profound and will give us goosebumps. No goosebumps, no followers. I woke up this morning asking myself: “So, what is something…

You could choose crowd changer. Changing is far is more difficult and more important than pleasing the crowd. Crowd disturber. Crowd inspirer. Crowd connector. Crowd calmer. And for that matter, you can skip the crowd and just go for: She/he [that one customer, supporter, or fan] mattered to me.

I’m not sure when did we become defensive about customer care. I suspect it might have been when we began to put more distance between the customer and us. In the days when there was a cash register that rang with ‘real money’, when we sold eye-to-eye and transacted hand-to-hand, instead of digitally, we had…

On our journey through the seas of life, the ability to survive bad weather is just as important as honing our ability to predict the weather. It is not enough just to know that there will be difficult days ahead, but it is important to have the ability to deal with. It is not enough…

One of my favourite business interviews by Dave Rubenstein is when he interviewed Warren Buffett, but the second favourite is with Jeff Bezos. In the interview with Jeff Bezos, he starts the interview with this question: ___________________________________________________ David M. Rubenstein: Now, your stock is actually up 70 percent this year. Is there one thing that…