For 20+ years, I lived a life of “least squares regression.”  I even remember the formula, y=a+bx, if you are interested. In far simpler terms than the definition above, a least squares regression helps determine the likely behavior of one variable given changes in another. For instance, we used to find trends in changes to interest rates and existing home sales.

I used to play on some sand dunes in my home town. Whatever is coming to mind when you think of sand dunes, divide that by a hundred.  Not much to look at, really, and not the soft sand, flowing sea grasses of most of the beaches you’ve likely seen. But the small park and the two sets of disconnected piles of sand were everything in our childhood imaginations.

One of my best friends from college, Scot, used to talk about how he wished he had a soundtrack for his life that would play as he meandered through. Before digital music, that was a bit of an impossibility, but now, you could almost cobble together some version of that if you liked.

We are working with a company on the back end of cleaning up an incredible mess.  Unknown to them, two key employees seem to have “quiet quit” many months before they actually left.  Like a college student going through the motions for an entire semester, fooling everyone but themselves, the report card at the end of the term was a sobering reality to those who didn’t know.

I met with a leader of a large company before their annual offsite. We were scripting the event, and I wanted to help him create an introductory statement of where he felt they were and how he thought they were doing. He struggled mightily to say much good about the company's progress over the prior year.

Sometimes when we work with a senior leader with a struggling area of their business, they are forced to make a leadership change. They level all their efforts on getting a proper replacement. But rather than hastily making the new hire, we often ask them to embody the role of the exiting leader for a season as a first step…

While filmmakers Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz visited a friend at a camp for people with developmental challenges, they encountered a man with Down's Syndrome named Zack. They talk about being completely overwhelmed by his love and confidence in his identity…

I am done with marriage. Whatever it used to mean, or the promise it once held, seems long forgotten. It has been reshaped, translated, redefined, and contorted. It doesn’t seem to resemble what we used to know. With a marriage license fee of $81 (in my county), it is the easiest and cheapest contract you can enter into. And not even worth the paper it is written on, with over 50% of those contracts being broken, usually by another far more expensive legal document…

While it has some of the better-known (Batman, Superman, etc.) comic book characters, the DC universe of superhero movies has dramatically underperformed the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).  The thirty-one films of the MCU have grossed $31B while the eleven films of the DC universe grossed only $6B…

Most employers are having trouble finding enough or the right kind of workers.  Work behaviors are being allowed that typically wouldn’t have been tolerated as a result and things that are usually called out are being overlooked.  For most of the high-integrity type leaders we work with, this exacerbates an already existing problem: firing well…

We are all in the process of becoming. Sadly, that is sometimes becoming something worse. But most of the very intentional people I spend time with personally or professionally are aggressively becoming something better. And that isn’t just personally. There is an intentionality about their families and businesses as well…

We are seeing a strange phenomenon among our clients. While they are creating empowering cultures where team members are grown and opportunities for them increase as the companies scale, sometimes they decide to leave. There is often a “grass is greener” experience where the prospect of something better is dangled and they take the bait. Sometimes they should go…

I just finished the book Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. He took Eleven Madison Park (EMP) from mediocrity to the number one rated restaurant in the world with the very rare achievement of three Michelin stars and four stars from TheNew York Times (the highest classification from each organization)…

Okay, so I was one of those. I am one of those. Ironically, being a zealot can actually do a lot of good in ways that aren’t intrinsically bad, but sullied by the motive that drives them. Most of mine were driven by the need for validation and the hopes of convincing my God that I wasn’t as bad a person as I secretly believed I was. I still carry the capacity to be one of those but am working really hard to redeem the more negative aspects. Here are some zealot highlights…

One of the ways I meditate and take in beauty is to listen to really beautiful music. Not just in structure and orchestration, but lyrically as well. One of my favorites has been the music of the Fleet Foxes. In fact, my wife and I just saw them at the new Moody Outdoor Amphitheater in Austin, TX. Really great lyrics not only say something beautiful, but they also open up the possibility to the expression of hundreds of other glorious things…

A member of our team likes to note that I love being an Enneagram 8. And I do. But if you know much about that number, you could understand that it might be surprising that someone is so comfortable with that distinction. I have plumbed the depths of how horrible that number can be and I am beginning to enjoy a bit of what a healthier 8 might look like. For example…

In Stephen Ambrose’s brilliant book on the “easy” company of the 101st Airborne division of the US army and their role in the invasion of Normandy, we meet two contrasting pictures of leadership.

The first, Captain Sobel, is a ruthless, dictatorial, and some would even say, masochistic leader. He is in authority, under his own authority. He is hated universally by all those under his leadership. They secretly contemplate ways to kill him in combat…

Possibly my favorite trailer of all time is from the Superman origin story, “Man of Steel.” Even hearing a few bars at the outset of revisiting this two minutes of video magic made the hair on my arms stand up again. I used to think it was because it was part of the opening of every talk I gave on glory in front of the 1,100 men that have attended the four-day weekends I help host. But I now know it is the result of something far deeper…