Last week, I wrote about my wife’s bike accident on our recent vacation and her perspective of how it could have been worse. What I failed to mention was that, after a day’s rest, she got back on her bike and participated in a large portion of the last two days of our group’s ride. Part of her motivation was to be able to experience and…
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A few weeks ago, I took an Uber to downtown Boston for a meeting with a group of peers. About ten minutes into my ride, traffic stopped completely. A major car crash had occurred 100 feet in front of us after a car had come down the highway entrance ramp in the wrong direction. People were walking around wounded and it was chaos. It must…
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A few weeks ago, during one of our company’s leadership trainings, several employees expressed how impactful our core value “Own it” is to them inside and outside of work. For many, our concept of Own It has become a standard, even with friends and family. Three years ago, we had a similar core value, “accountability.” However, while team members were certainly willing to be accountable…
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In his acclaimed book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins coined the term BHAG, which stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. In studying companies with a remarkable, decades-long track record of success and high-performance, Collins found that each had a consistent presence of a BHAG. In each of these organizations, their BHAG served as a North Star for employees and changed the…
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Last week, I wrote about my grinding climb up Grouse Mountain. Fortunately, I didn’t have to climb down as the traffic is only one-way. While we were able to enjoy a leisurely gondola ride back to the bottom, there are many mountains where this luxury is impossible, such as Mount Everest. On incredibly steep, high-altitude mountains, the descent can be far more perilous than the…
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Three years ago, inspired by Brian Scudamore and Cam Herold, I wrote a Vivid Vision for our company describing what Acceleration Partners will look and feel like by January 1st, 2020. It includes some very ambitious goals, most of which we’ve met or exceeded and a few that are within range. This Vivid Vision is shared with all new employees, prospective employees and partners. As January…
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This week’s Friday Forward falls over the July 4th holiday, a time when most people in the U.S. are on vacation, including me. Although I have never skipped a Friday Forward, I thought that I would honor the spirit of vacation by re-sharing some of the most popular Friday Forwards related to travel and vacation. Many of the posts below were published when the Friday Forward…
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Last week, I attended a mastermind dinner in NYC on the topic of work-life integration. The host had hired a sketch artist to create a visual representation of our discussion so that each attendee could have a unique and interesting reminder of the discussion to take with them. Intrigued by her skill, I asked the artist how she’d gotten into this line of work, to…
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This week, my youngest son’s school held their Insect Fair, where students invent their own “insect,” including its backstory. What was different about this year’s event compared with the previous ones for my other two kids was that the parents never saw the kids’ creations prior to the reveal at the fair. After seeing far too many projects being turned in that looked like the…
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I recently heard someone say something to the effect of “If you are really happy or really sad right now, don’t worry, it will pass.” This concept represents interesting philosophical and mathematical principles around regression to the mean and the concept of normalization. Here’s a recent example to explain this a bit more. This week, my wife and I finally replaced a trash compactor in…
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