Let’s start with the problem. According to The Plastic Pollution Coalition (January 3, 2017) – “It’s National Drinking Straw Day! Each day, more than 500 million plastic straws are used and discarded in the U.S. alone. Plastic straws consistently make the top ten list of items found, according to Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup data. In the last three years, ...

We all have something that makes us extraordinary, and once you figure it out you’re unstoppable! Cutting To The Core If you want to achieve your full potential there is something about yourself that you need to understand intimately and fine tune relentlessly, and it’s something that’s been inside of you all along. It starts with one of my favorite ...

The US Armed Forces has a problem with soldier suicide and depression. In early 2013, the official website of the United States Department of Defense announced the startling statistic that the number of military suicides in 2012 had far exceeded the total of those killed in battle—an average of nearly one a day. A month later came an even more sobering ...

As I visit and observe what I call the “existential festivals” – events like Burning Man, SXSW, TED, Sundance, Bonnaroo, and ArtPrize, for example – I ask myself, “What are people really trying to accomplish here – besides just having fun?” The answer I’ve come away with – after quite a bit of pondering – is that people are trying ...

How well-informed are you about the state of the world? Please try this short quiz. How did you get on? Most well-educated people do badly in this little test. The average person gets only two or three questions right out of 13. This is because we generally hold a distorted view of the world – we see the world as ...

No matter how great an innovation is, it is only useful if people notice it, understand it, desire it, acquire it and use (and reuse) it. To achieve this, we need to understand human perception, motivations, decision making and ultimately, influence behavior. Below, in no particular order, are my favorite eleven books that have taught me about human behavior. Why ...

What Did You Learn From 2017? Around the end of the year, most of us, and our businesses, tend to slow down just a bit from the normal dawn-to-dusk mad dash. We smile a bit more. We wave people in before us in traffic, and let others with less in their shopping carts go first in the grocery store. And ...

The path to success may be paved with dreams but navigating it requires more than wishful thinking. Abdul Kalam, President of India from 2002-2007, loved to talk about dreams. My favorite of his many quotes about them is, “Dream is not the thing you see in sleep, but is that thing that doesn’t let you sleep.” Indeed, I suspect the ...

Creative and collaborative teamwork will only take place if there is a high level of trust among team members. Trust allows members of the team to do three things that produce true collaboration. The first is to be vulnerable with each other, ask stupid questions, and propose stupid ideas. Without this vulnerability, team members are reserved and will keep ideas and insightful questions to ...

A few years back I published an article on LinkedIn on the The 7 Magic Roles for Creating Sustainable Innovation Culture based on my experiences in working for, building and putting to work effective innovation teams. What dawned on me recently is that what made those teams effective (or not) was not so much the roles that we established and ...