Before you design your next web site or plan your next campaign, you may want to consider whether your perception of reality matches that of your donors or constituents.

If you’ve ever seen a therapist or family counselor, you may have filled out a genogram. I filled one out in graduate school for a class, and it was an eye opener.

I started my business on April 1, 2000. I swept together our savings, took out a home equity loan, and resigned from my day job. And then promptly took a ten day vacation. Hey, I’m a free agent, as Fast Company, the magazine, breathlessly championed during those years. Whoopee! The stock market was at its […]

There’s an age-old principle that to grow, an organization must first change or begin to change its culture. The question “How do we grow?” is often “How do we change the firm’s culture to grow?” The answer is rarely as simply as pouring the coals to marketing or sales. But the word culture itself is […]

I’m not a celebrity. But I have received fan mail. Out-of-the-blue letters from a few of my Instagram (IG) followers. As a side job — what I call a jobby (a job that’s hobby-heavy) — I sell antiques. Since its inception, my IG gallery has attracted nearly 10,000 followers. My followers are retrophiliacs, people for […]

Several years ago, Harvard Business Review interviewed Gautam Mukunda, who is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.” Based on his research, he says you can put leaders into two buckets: filtered leaders and unfiltered leaders. Filtered leaders are groomed by the so-called succession plan and do […]

I can play a muffled version of the first seven bars of Led Zeppelin‘s Stairway to Heaven as well as most below average guitarists at the area guitar shop. I have always been a Jimmy Page wannabe. But Robert Plant is my model for this phase of my working life. I’ve often heard the “first […]

A friend and mentor, Swede Roskam, recently passed away. He was in his mid eighties, but lived like he was eternal. His death came as a surprise. One of his last emails was to my son at college, asking him to lunch the week Christian was home for spring break. Swede had a way of […]