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Baseball is Ridiculous. (Let's Make Business More Like It).

Baseball is Ridiculous. (Let's Make Business More Like It).

However you feel about baseball (I happen to love it) at some level, it is objectively ridiculous. Think about it. What would you say if I said, “I have a job for you. I want you to stand by this pentagon while that guy throws hard balls at you as hard as he can. Don’t worry. He isn’t allowed to hit you, but he might sometimes. Your job is to take this wooden cylindrical thing and try to hit them between these two lines that diverge from the pentagon.” I can tell you’re intr

What Makes Difficult Conversations… Difficult? (And One Thing to Do About It)

You’ve been there. One of your employees (or someone else you depend on for something) isn’t meeting expectations, and you’ve got a choice. You can tolerate it and hope that the problem will fix itself on its own - that they’ll discover on their own that their performance needs adjustment. Or, you can talk to them about it. (You could also do the first for awhile while you let your resentment build until you blow up.) In the long run, option two is your best bet. For mos

The Cost of Taking Things for Granted

The Cost of Taking Things for Granted

In this article, we’re going to quickly cover taking things for granted, and specifically what’s going on behaviorally when we’re doing that to people (or they’re doing it to us) and how it both drives, but also constrains performance. And we’ll start (as we often do), with the three basic factors that make us do anything. Broadly speaking, there are only three reasons why we do anything when it would be easier not to. And let’s face it, it would almost always be easier not