Online Books
-
The Drama-Free Office
Imagine that your organization is a play and that you’re an actor on the stage. My job is to come in and sit in the audience and observe what’s going on on the stage. You could actually choose at any point to say for this moment, for this meeting, for this board meeting, for this event, I’m going to come sit in the audience too. I might choose to stay there, to stay as an observer or I might choose to say, this is an excellent play, I’m going to jump right back in and keep my same lines. Or more frequently, once you step outside you can start to notice, you know what, the relationship between those two other actors, that’s not as polished as it could be. I wonder if we reposition them slightly or you might really write some of the lines in the play so that it goes more smoothly or that it more actively conveys the point that you’re trying to get across. The big idea is once you know that you’re in it could you step outside it on purpose — then make a change and then intentionally step back in differently.
-
How to Market to People Not Like You
In any business there is going to be a core group of customers that you know are going to buy your vehicle or buy your product. So in this case let’s say convertible, you would say, people who are fun loving, people who like the outdoors, people who possibly are childless. Let’s face it a convertible is not a really practical choice for a family of six people. Maybe there are some things like that need to be considered. But beyond that, I would start asking some diagnostic questions of who else? Who else could need this or want this vehicle and who is the person that we’re not getting? Once that target group has been identified, I firmly believe that the answer to everything lies in consumer research and it doesn’t have to be expensive.
-
Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences
What we usually do if someone comes and they have a bad presentation, we try to find the kernel and the essence of the idea and we try to define the audience journey which is this new way of believing and behaving, this transformation you’re trying to do with them. And then what we do is we’ll build a story framework around what they’re trying to do because people don’t usually fall asleep during conversations and they don’t usually fall asleep when someone is telling a story, like they’re very alert.
-
Transcendence
When I wrote my book Transcendence it was clear in my mind that this was not a how-to book. First to x then to y then to z. It’s not a how-to book. It’s a why-to book. What do I mean by that? I mean that all of us value our time tremendously. We had so many things we can do with our time and time is so finite that if we’re going to devote 20 minutes twice a day to something we better very sure that this is something very worthwhile.
-
Transcendental Meditation
Many meditations try and provide, bring a calm to the mind, a peace to the mind by trying to manipulate the surface, to stop waves on the surface of the ocean. Stop your mind from thinking. Clear your mind of thoughts, calm somehow that surface. It’s a very difficult thing to do particularly for anybody who has got a lot going on in their life but anybody. Waves, thoughts, are natural on the surface but the mind has deep within this as I said this calm.
-
Little Voice Mastery
Your job as a leader is to be able to see the brilliance in somebody else and to expect a miracle out of them, to expect a breakthrough out of them because I have an incredible level of certainty that I know that they’re going to do it. They don’t, I do. As long as I continue to hold their toes to the fire – and we have a very strict set of rules like celebrate all wins. It’s called a code of honor. No lay blame or justification, no finger pointing. If you have a problem you got to go direct. You can’t go behind people’s backs. Be on time. All these things that they all agree to.
-
The Dragonfly Effect
The quicker a read you can make something the more impactful and the shorter form the more likely you are to get people to the next step. No one reads paragraphs anymore. It’s almost like oil hitting water. When my eye hits a page and it’s a long paragraph, it’s almost like I can’t get into it. I can’t read it because it hasn’t been formatted, it hasn’t been broken down. I don’t have pull quotes. I just think about that as a metaphor for better or worse our lives have given us less attention to devote to things that we don’t already know are valuable to us. For someone who is seeking to grab someone’s attention to pull them into something new, it’s absolutely imperative to get it down to something that speaks to people and speaks to them really quickly and impactfully.
-
Disciplined Dreaming
I think that the great entrepreneurs that I have seen tend to be a life-long learners. And their curiosity again is continuous. It doesn't end the day they graduate college. You know, the way people consumed media is very different right now that it used to be. So I mean, I've shown some simple read, there's tons of great plugs, you know, the program that you have are obviously fantastic and so I just think that the more. knowledge that the an entrepreneur can so can the more heads up they are to the world, the more their gonna prosper. Yeah you always hear that expression that people are “heads down”. But when you’re heads down on a project, what do you see? You see nothing more than your TO DO list. But when you’re heads up, you’ve taken the world around you. You get closer to your customers, You see your competitors and what they’re doing. You notice technology trends. I think that entrepreneurs tend to be curious, tends to be heads up, and the great entrepreneurs are always learning.
-
Fixing The Game
Kind of the sad thing about it is that I don’t think it’s very inspiring for anybody to wake up in the morning everyday and saying my job is to maximize shareholder value. Who are these people? What relationship do you have to them? They’re held by fiduciaries who trade. Their stocks repeatedly don’t hold on to them, not for long periods of time. They don’t have to have a relationship with you. How on Earth could that be inspiring to anybody?
-
Today We Are Rich
When you look back on your life, you’re going to see highs and lows. When it comes to the highs, dissect the why. But even when it comes to the lows, cherish them as a gift because even criticism or being taken advantage of when you recognize it, it’s a gift. Because if it doesn’t tell you something about you, it tells you something about the other person that you really need to know and it liberates you. It allows you not to look at your past in a black and white sort of way but it allows you to always shape the you today and you’re values based on the history that you choose to retain and the details you’re willing to delete.