I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of employee engagement. For starters, it’s a horribly clinical term that doesn’t really capture the essence of the concept. What’s really important, and maybe more difficult to explain, is the idea of having a self-directed team that comes up with ideas and does things that you might not have ever thought about. Previously, I wrote about a big idea from Mike…

Business owners, especially those with smaller businesses, will tell you that one of the main ways they get new customers is through word-of-mouth. However, very few of those same business owners actually do anything to purposely generate word-of-mouth. They’re just happy if it happens. Think about some of your own experiences or maybe businesses that you’ve known. If you were to ask those business owners why their customers would say nice things…

If you start reading a lot of business books, you’ll quickly notice that there are common themes and ideas that come up over and over. As an example: Patrick Lencioni writes a lot about the power of vulnerability-based leadership, which is also a central theme in Extreme Ownership (by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin).  And it’s also referenced in Daniel Coyle’s book The Culture Code and pretty much anything written…