Those that have worked with me at Patagonia over the last five years or so have heard me announce a countdown of days until I reach my retirement date (or at least the date I plan to go part-time). I have long been planning for this important time when I…

When you need to make a decision or an evaluation, it is vitally important to have a tool that can guide your decision making process and be the means of obtaining an objective ranking for each of the possible outcomes. Many people have systems or even build tools that can…

What comes to mind when you think of the biggest risks you’ve ever taken? Did you come to regret taking any of them? When I consider these questions, there have been very few, if any, downsides to the risks that come to mind. Perhaps this says I’m not much of…

Email is often the overwhelming part of people’s daily work life; there’s too much email, it’s disruptive, and overwhelming. For many, there’s an urge to switch to other communication methods, such as Slack, or texting, simply because their email has become so unmanageable. I am not in that camp –…

In my first career — I was a Social Studies teacher – I had a mentor who taught me so much. He was my Science partner in a teamed teaching environment at a middle school. Rick is about 20 years older than me. He had another career in advertising prior…

Many years ago I was on a leadership committee where we took a self-assessment quiz to examine which of three different personality traits we might favor. The three areas were – Relationship seeking, Goal oriented, and “Big Idea” oriented. Everyone tended to have one of these traits dominate more than…