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How to Reclaim your Muchness
You used to be much muchier. You’ve lost your muchness. I came across this quote recently where the person posting said that every time she feels the need to apologize for being too much, she remembers that this is what the Mad Hatter told Alice. I naturally assumed it belonged to Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century Alice’s…
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How Quickly Can You Dismantle Democracy Within an Organization?
Timothy Ryback’s The Atlantic piece, How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days, is a case study in speed and strategy. In less than two months, Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic—complete with constitution, free press, and elections—was hollowed out and replaced with a dictatorship. This isn’t about comparing leaders to Hitler. It’s about recognizing how systems…
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The Brilliance & Breakdown when Scaling
Leo S. Maranz was one of the earliest and most successful franchisers in American business. A mechanical engineer by training, he invented an automatic ice-cream freezer that could produce soft ice cream continuously—technology that didn’t just make dessert; it made a new kind of business possible. From the start, Maranz knew what he wanted and…
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Realistic Timelines Enable Unrealistic Complexity
The word realistic is used often within business discussions. “Is that realistic?” “Are we being realistic?” “This sounds really good on paper but perhaps we need to be MORE realistic.” Realistic suggests the reasonableness of the timeline and therefore guarantees success. Realistic timelines are often a hiding place for organizational drift, where inefficiency and mediocrity…
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Scarcity isn’t about Economics
I’ve always had some kind of morning ritual, from as far back as I can remember. My current ritual is reading a chapter of Proverbs, reading a Daily Stoic entry, and reading an thinking on a card from a deck by Esther and Jerry Hicks about money. The card I’m pondering today says that the…
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The Consulting Crash We Were Warned About
In 2005, Martin Kihn cracked open a world that, until then, largely operated behind frosted-glass conference rooms and perfectly bound slide decks.His memoir, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, was part confession, part dark comedy, and part industry autopsy. Kihn wrote from the inside. As a…
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When your Gift Becomes a Cage
Scott Clary, in his Saturday Strategy Sessions newsletter, asked a powerful question: What if the thing you’re best at is the thing that’s killing you? He used the example of Josh Waitzkin — chess prodigy, national champion, International Master, and the inspiration for Searching for Bobby Fischer. By all external measures, Josh was destined for…

