Tom Schmidt

The best questions are organizing principles, magnets, ways of seeing.

“A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.”

― Winston Churchill

It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder.

When your goal is persuasion, don’t begin with new information. Begin by agreeing with what they already believe. Meet them where they are. Only then can you hope to lead them to where you want them to go.

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The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can

Does process matter? We are about to find out.

Ethan Mollick

Jul 28

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One of my favorite academic papers about organizations is by Ruthanne Huising, and it tells the story of teams that were assigned to create process maps of their company, tracing what the... See more

All the energy we spend trying to fix what's broken comes at the expense of making what already works unstoppable.

"Deal with the difficult while it is yet easy;

Deal with the great while it is yet small."

Operating with a modest initial budget of $15,000, Senator Truman ingeniously augmented its resources by appealing directly to the American public via CBS Radio, encouraging citizens to report any defense-related waste they observed in their communities. These citizen letters became a routine and valuable starting point for the committee's investig... See more

John Steinbeck on ignoring the finish line and starting:

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”