My partner Matt has loved cooking since he was a child. But in college, he studied advertising and marketing, then got a job at the local radio station followed by a big think tank in Washington DC. For more than five years he stayed in a relatively low-level position, doing the basic job requirements but...
I was the type of adolescent who said things like, “human beings are a parasite upon the earth.” Not because I was going through a significant goth phase, as I likely said this while wearing bright baggy trousers and a Jurassic Park t-shirt, but because I had been highly influenced by my mother’s environmentalism. My...
I sat in the bleachers in the corner of the gym. My then three-year-old held her place on the mat doing jumping jacks, eyes glued to the instructor. They switched to a choreography of punches and kicks punctuated with diaphragmatic “HA” sounds. I had enrolled my firstborn, who had a tendency toward timidness, in karate...
Do you find yourself experiencing any of the following? Team members or vendors coming to you with deliverables that are meaningfully different from what you asked for Employees missing the “big picture,” and spending too much time on trivial things you’d mentioned in passing Employees misinterpreting your curiosities or suggestions as directives Being surprised by...
Talentism Partner and frequent Sensemaker contributor Jake Bornstein was featured this week on the Healing Ground podcast. The conversation touches on a number of Talentism themes — Jake’s ongoing learning and pursuit of greater purpose alignment through his professional journey, his experience with chronic illness and the confusion that comes with it, and a wide-ranging...
Our imagination is an amazing thing. It conjures up realities that never existed, worlds that have yet to be discovered. But our imagination does have limitations: It is often a product of experiences that are joined into new concepts. We may imagine a car that talks, but we first have to experience “car” and “talk”...
When I have bad days (an unfortunately more frequent occurrence during COVID-19), the causes may be different, but the perspective, ultimately, always ends up the same; insufficient, overwhelmed, and, blind to the quality of relationships in my life, alone. I know I’m not the only one. With the privilege of hearing the private worlds of...
The best hope for repairing our tattered social fabric may be in our workplaces In 2003, a friend called me and posed a challenge: “I have a software team that needs to achieve the impossible in six months, and they need leadership. Would you be willing to help?” It was exactly the kind of sticky...
This is a personal reflection written by our CEO Jeff Hunter in response to the current pain and protests being voiced across the US. It’s not meant as a piece of advocacy or a prescription for what to do; rather, it vocalizes the internal process of one leader making sense of all of this, and...
Most of us have an uncomfortable relationship with fear — for the most part, we want nothing to do with it. Especially for leaders, parents, or really anyone responsible for another person’s well-being, fear, in ourselves and others, can look like a villain to be caged or, at minimum, a distraction to be overcome. There’s...
