Michelangelo, when asked about his masterpiece, the statue of David, said he simply removed everything that wasn’t David from the marble. This approach is the essence of the Michelangelo Principle: achieving greatness by removing what’s unnecessary. For example, many of […]
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Imagine that you would start a business to compete with Coca-Cola. Your product has the following characteristics: It’s more expensive, it comes in a smaller size, and the taste is dreadful. In his entertaining and insightful book Alchemy, Rory Sutherland reveals […]
The graveyard is filled with important people who could not be missed. No-one is irreplaceable. Having said that, it’s prudent to be prepared when important people leave an organization. This is called succession planning: A list of key people, with a […]
The ability to run effective meetings is essential to drive organizational results: After all, no single big goal can ever be achieved in isolation. High-energy meetings are the catalyst for effective teamwork. This is not easy. Many times, a team […]
You have 30 seconds to draw in the audience at the start of your meeting, speech, or presentation. Frankly, I don’t know if 30 seconds is always true. In my experience, it’s even less than that. There are three strategies […]
One famous episode of the comedy series Seinfeld showed a long line of people anxiously awaiting their turn in a line leading to a soup restaurant. Surprisingly, the store owner was unpleasant and egregiously rude, even refusing to serve one of the […]
Frasier was a popular sitcom which aired in the nineteens. The star of the show, Dr. Frasier Crane, was a radio psychiatrist. His catch-phrase while on the air was a simple one ‘I’m listening…’ I was reminded of this recently when […]
A Pressure Safety Valve (PSV) is a safety device widely used in the chemical industry. When a chemical reaction becomes uncontrollable and pressure increases rapidly, a PSV opens and pressure is released to a safe location to prevent the vessel […]
Some 20 years ago I worked closely with a brilliant scientist to develop a mathematical model of a complex chemical reactor. He was a nice guy, whose main satisfaction was to be right in the modeling field. That was a […]
Last year I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with my family. The room with the most famous paintings of the most famous Dutch masters was packed. The other rooms in the museum were almost empty. A small amount of exhibits […]
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