The Business Conductor 

Everyone knows how Blockbuster ended: bankruptcy in 2010, a lone store in Oregon, and Netflix dominating the market with 280+ million subscribers. But this isn't a story about missing the future. It's a story about what happens when leadership can't stomach short-term pain, even when the alternative is death.   What Blockbuster Got Right   John Antioco joined Blockbuster as CEO in 1997 and spent a decade making smart moves. By the mid-2000s, he saw Netflix coming and responde

Employees who feel heard are 4.6x more likely to do their best work. But many brainstorming sessions do the opposite.   Loud voices dominate, good ideas get lost, and innovation dies in the chaos.   After leading multiple operational turnarounds over the years, I can tell you the fix: The Affinity Diagram. It's a method that unlocks your team's best ideas and turns them into action.   This video walks you through exactly how to run it.   Stay creative, my friends Why Your Bra

Weekdays at Bernie's: What I Learned at WorldCom WorldCom and Enron aren't the same story. Enron was a maze of fraudulent shell games, while WorldCom was a solid business destroyed by culture. Why? A CEO who didn't want to hear bad news. Compare that to Ford's Alan Mulally, who clapped when executives were honest about their problems. Same struggles. Opposite leadership. Opposite outcomes. The lesson: Problems never age well. So build a culture that gets them out in the open

When everyone is #1, nobody is.   That's what happens when you have too many KPIs. People cherry-pick the metrics where they look best. Individual dashboards show green but the business bleeds red.   Here's a short video telling the painful true story and 5 lessons we learned about fixing broken KPI systems.   Which lesson resonates most with you? Green Dashboards, Red Business - Video

“Trees don’t grow to the sky.” Even the best companies hit limits, unless they protect their future from the present.   Steve Jobs and...

The New York Yankees had two legendary managers who couldn’t have been more different. Billy Martin led with fear. He could turn a team around overnight, but within a year or two, it would collapse. As owner George Steinbrenner admitted: “He just couldn’t keep it burning.” Joe Torre led with trust. Calm, steady, supportive, and he delivered 4 World Series titles and a decade of playoff runs with the Yankees. Watch this 3-minute video to understand a timeless truth about leade

Circuit City and Best Buy both averaged ~$10M in sales per store in the early ’90s. By the mid-’90s, Best Buy was at $40M+… while Circuit...

Most leaders say they believe in setting big goals. Yet when planning season arrives, those goals often shrink to fit the budget. The...

"Practice makes perfect.” We’ve all heard it before, but science says otherwise. Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes permanent....

Ready. Fire. Aim.   I’m sure we’ve all heard this before, and that most everyone understands the metaphor of shooting before aiming. Not...

“ Hire great people and then get out of their way”  – Steve Jobs   I’ve seen this quote and the reference to Steve Jobs many times. The...

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”   That quote is often attributed to Albert...

Things were getting heated. The voices and emotions in the room were increasing, while the collective logic and rationale were...

What the heck was I thinking?!?!     I’ve never helped a manufacturing business before. But here I am in a big white room trying to solve...

We were in big trouble. Our VC-backed, high-volume sales business, experiencing rapid hyper-growth, had hit a wall. We were a third-party...

It was early 2021. Our company had recently experienced a failed acquisition, bankruptcy, layoffs, loss of significant market share to a...

We just celebrated Independence Day (July 4th), and it reminded me of a story from our nation’s founding—one that offers powerful lessons...

In a recent post, I mentioned how critical comparisons are in analyzing data—specifically, that “a number means nothing until it’s next...

There was a show that ran for 12 years on TV called “Undercover Boss.” I’m sure almost everyone has heard of it. I loved the show not...

Customer ratings. NPS. Customer feedback. I’ve heard wildly different opinions from senior leaders on the value of these types of voice...