Business, Tech, Consulting, Analytics

  Stay positive. We hear this from teachers, friends, partners, bosses, and doctors. I’m guessing even godfather Don Corleone said it once to his lieutenants.   And there’s a reason for this hackneyed advice—99% of the time it works and works well. I hate working with a negative, irritating sour puss and I’m pretty sure you do to.   Now let’s talk about the 1%. Not the wealthy 1%. The 1% of the time you should be critical and harsh in your thinking. Once a year or maybe twice a year, clear your schedule for a hyper critical day where all the stops are pulled out and skeptical/suspicious/unkind thoughts are allowed. Why? Because most of us are basically good people and are uncomfortable with highly critical thoughts. Much of this is subconscious, which is why you need to designate a day for extremely critical, even unpleasant thinking. It takes that to root out mistakes, bad decisions, excessive trust in people, organizations, and businesses.   You have to get up an...

I was reading a Time magazine article (May 10, 2021) by Edward Felsenthal, Time's editor-in-chief. He was talking about the strategic direction of the magazine towards a more proactive approach to shape the world to be a better place. That sounds great, don't you think? How could one argue with that?  Here's what he said at the end of the article [emphasis mine]: "Our aspiration is tor TIME, in our company and in our coverage, to be among the ranks of businesses that drive positive action. When I started at TIME in 2013 , our mission was often described as “ explaining the world .” Today , we see it somewhat differently—it’s about telling stories about the people and ideas that shape the world, in hopes of doing our part to improve it . "   But look closely and you'll see two levels of news filtering. Filter #1: In 2013, Time was filtering all the hundreds of thousands or million of events happening in the world to find the few topics of most interest to the...