About ten years ago I joined a volunteer mountain rescue group in Colorado. My new-member training was rough at first; I didn’t take easily to the basic medical and technical skills I would need in order to join the team, and I wondered how well I would handle the inevitable pressure, mayhem and carnage involved in a real rescue. About a month into my training process I left town to compete in one of the biggest adventure races of my amateur racing career: Primal Quest, a ten-day, 500-mile, multi-sport team odyssey in the wilderness areas around Lake Tahoe. I was a last-minute replacement for a woman who’d been injured in training on a team called Outback Gear, and I when I arrived in Tahoe I met my teammates for the first time. They had booked us a nice little rental house in a quiet neighborhood near the lake for…
I’ve been facilitating generational diversity seminars for years, and the discussion that happens has become so predictable it’s almost dull. Either the room is dominated by Baby Boomers…
Many of my favorite organizational development theorists reference studies about the unreliability of memory in their work, and I find it particularly interesting to think about how the…
I volunteered at the New Hampshire Construction Career Day this week, held at the Hopkinton Fairgrounds. The 1000 high school kids who attended were treated to hands-on experiences…
We talk a lot these days about the loss of institutional knowledge the retirement of Baby Boomers represents for our organizations. But at the same time, a good…
Originally published in Trailrunner Magazine, July 2004 I guess it was watching the Eco-Challenge on TV that got me so fascinated with adventure racing. But wait, it was…
Originally published in Adventure World Magazine, Spring 2003 “Sarah Boardman?” Mike said, incredulously. “You mean the Sarah Boardman?” I sighed. I hadn’t expected it to be a hard…
The Accidental Tourist is one of my favorite movies because of one line in it: “What matters in a relationship is who you are when you’re with that…
These past few weeks I’ve been in the grip of my worst TV serial addiction since the last season of Downton Abby. With the final episodes soon to…
“Sweet home, Alabama!” Gary croons, belting it out across the water. Ken, not to be outdone, throws his head back and howls at blue sky, “Carry me home,…
One of my favorite writers/consultants on leadership, Peter Bregman, just posted a great article called Why So Many Leadership Programs Ultimately Fail. His message is that we can…
In leadership classes we trainers like to talk about behavior vs. character. Character is important, we say, but you can’t see character. What you see is behavior, and…
When I facilitate team building classes for groups of people from different teams, one of the key questions we toy with is how to turn groups of squabbling…
I’m fascinated by studies that show the link between empathy and job performance. The medical malpractice insurance industry has long known that patients want to sue the doctor…
I never would have bought a book called To Sell is Human unless the author was someone like Daniel Pink. I’m not in sales—never have been, never wanted…
Sometimes the oldest, simplest, “everyone already knows that” tools turn out to have the biggest impact on a group. Everyone knows Stephen Covey’s “circle of influence,” a tool…
The “power of positive thinking” has become almost a joke these days; the phrase conjures images of dorky motivational speakers wearing plaid suits and self-help books with Hallmark…
When the outlandish conspiracy theories about the Boston Marathon bombings began to circulate, naturally I thought back to last week’s post about the storytelling habits of the human…
One of my favorite topics for a team building session or a leadership class is “interpersonal mush,” Gervase Bush’s label for what happens when we create stories to…
One day a guy named Charlie Todd orchestrated a “no pants” subway ride. Seven friends stationed themselves at different subway stops in New York City, and one by…