Self Help

Like many of you, I’ve spent the past few months talking with friends and colleagues about the future. Everyone, myself included, is taking their best guess about what the new normal will be. There are many common questions: what will happen to restaurants, theaters, Broadway, concerts, bars, hotels, commercial real estate, the auto industry, airline travel, etc. As the conversations drift from professional to personal I am almost always asked, "What do you think I should do now?" Continue Reading →

If you were giving a graduation speech to the class of 2020, what would your message be? That’s a question I made the mistake of trying to answer on Twitter. Continue Reading →

I was looking at my list of pre-pandemic theses and it is absolutely frightening how irrelevant most of them are to a post-pandemic future. Worrying about AI taking white-collar jobs, or the fate of commoditized packaged goods, or the adoption rates of IoT devices, or the potential deployment of 5G service seems meaningless if people are worried about being safe and wondering how they are going to put a roof over their heads and food on the table. So, it’s time for some new thinking, and an action plan for 2020 and beyond. Here's how. Continue Reading →

Everyone is starting to stream everything. I was not surprised to learn that the Actors Fund had started a daily streaming series featuring Broadway stars. I love it! Continue Reading →

The thesis of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection is usually expressed as "survival of the fittest." In our world, all evidence points to a slightly different synopsis: "survival of the most adaptable." Continue Reading →

There is plenty of medical literature about the dangers of being too sedentary and what to do about it. When you work alone, it is very easy to just sit at your workspace and not get up. Continue Reading →

Apple says it is okay to use disinfectant wipes on your iPhone. If you have a screen protector on your phone, make sure that the alcohol content in your disinfectant wipes won’t mess it up. Continue Reading →

Several of my clients are instituting an A-Team/B-Team strategy starting this week. The goal is to reduce the density of office workers and put additional distance (social distancing) between the workers. Desk assignments are modified to provide the recommended distance between co-workers. Continue Reading →

I am working remotely today. In fact, I work remotely every day and have been doing so for the past 20 years. The technologies that enable anyone to work 7/24/365 from anywhere in the world are so commonplace, there’s almost no need to list them (although I will reference a few specific tools I’m fond of in this article). What you need to know is that the sociology of productive remote working is much more difficult to master than the technology. Said differently, learning to work by yourself is harder than you think it is. Here are a few tips and techniques that will unlock your inner badass remote worker skills. Continue Reading →

Earlier this week, Twitter held an all-hands meeting using Google Hangouts and Slack. According to my friends at Twitter, the experiment was a resounding success. This raises the question: what are your favorite tools for remote meetings, as well as remote work? Continue Reading →