Hard-Earned Business Lessons

"But I have a right to say that because we believe in free speech?" Have you ever heard a defense like that? Chances are this was when that person had just said something offensive - unwittingly or not. We hear so much about "free speech" in the media as it relates to the US specifically but I also want to recognize that this argument has been around for a long, long time now. I think there are some important, practical distinctions that we should make here which further help us understand this argument and its place in our society. First off, there is no such thing as free speech - at least not in the way that people think that "free speech" is free speech. People want and understand free speech to be a license to say whatever the hell you want with zero consequences. You won't lose your job, you won't lose any relationship you have, you'll get just as much service as you did before, and so on. But that's not practical and is not in effect

Most of us have been fans of things at one point in our life or another. It may have been (and probably was) a sports team or it could have been a brand. It could have been a person, celebrity, or even just a company itself. We all have our experiences with fandom and I'll own that a lot of it can be very positive. But there are a couple of very negative points to fandom, particularly in the past ten years or so, that I feel must make us reject the call of fandom. First off, have you ever heard the saying of how you should never meet your heroes? That obviously wouldn't apply to every single human (side note: for the love of god people need to stop using "not all" arguments for so many damn reasons), but I do think that it applies to a lot of people who you might have grown up idolizing. "Ignorance is bliss" is another saying that I think carries a lot of truth and I don't mean this in the "what they don't know can't hurt them sense" (b

Another hot topic worthy of an expanded guide is how to mitigate and navigate conflict that you experience as a professional or that people who work for you are experiencing. This guide will aim to cover this from a more or less holistic point of view aimed at both managers and direct reports but with an added emphasis to management because managers control a lot of how conflict may flow as you will see below. If you manage people or have managed people before, doubtless you will have noticed that your direct reports have been in conflict with parties internal and external to your organization. They don't always do the best job of navigating that and they don't always know how to best navigate it. There are myriad reasons for this but a good place to start is to examine the root of conflict and how we should handle it with that in mind, rather than dissect where people might make mistakes. Conflict, as should surprise nobody, is most often rooting in unclear expectations. This

Have you ever been frustrated by leaders or people who rank higher in your company not understanding the emotional intelligence consequences of their decisions or how they communicate to the group? Unfortunately, most of my experience and observations state that this is a pretty commonplace occurrence. I'd like to dive into the ethos of that a bit in the following. I think that it's important to understand the psyche of the people who may be bothering you with their behavior so that you might better manage how you react to and interact with those people. Let's start with entrepreneurs and executive-level folks because they have the burden of position and are therefore the easiest to target with analysis. For these people, in many cases, work is life and business is passion. It may be that you do not share their passion and that you would rather prioritize your time on family, sport, or a hobby that you really like. Probably work is just a means to an end for you. This might