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Are You Incapable of Selling, or Is It This?
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: We are remarkably quick to turn repeated outcomes into identities: I can’t sell, I can’t lead, I’m not cut out for this. But before deciding what the result says about you, it may be worth diagnosing the conditions that produced it. Sometimes we turn repeated results into…
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What Martha Stewart Built Before Her Category Had a Name
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Martha Stewart was building what we would now call a personal brand, creator business and lifestyle empire years before the language existed to describe any of it. Her story is a useful reminder that sometimes the work becomes clear before the category does. When Martha Stewart started…
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How Many Jobs Are Hiding in That One Hiring Description?
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Job descriptions often combine several related but operationally different functions because having one person cover them can make economic sense. The question is whether that calculation takes into account the actual work, its volume, competing priorities and the capacity one person has to deliver all of it…
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Your Comfort Zone is Not the Enemy
I’m currently reading Choose Hard by MJ DeMarco. He reframed the comfort zone in a way that made me reconsider one of the most common ideas in personal and professional development. For years, we’ve been encouraged to “get out of our comfort zone.” The implication is that comfort itself is the problem. If we’re comfortable,…
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Competency without alignment = Burnout
You have the vision, the framework, your plan of action. You design a roadmap for execution and you determine criteria for measuring impact. This is clear, crisp and linear. Yet things still fall apart. Some say competency might be the missing link; but I’d argue that competency without alignment just leads to burnout! In my…
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Playing Chopsticks…When You Should be Playing Mozart…
We all know the maxim: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” We tend to describe ourselves very “hammer-like”…very vanilla…not too much to us…I’m just an x or y…not much talent needed to do what I do…I work at so so so…I work in…
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