Category Archives: Leadership

Intrapreneurship vs. Entrepreneurship

We all know what entrepreneurship is. It is the cover-all-bases, create-from-whole-cloth style of leadership that must be exercised in order to establish or re-launch a new business entity and achieve sustainable success doing so. Some people mistakenly believe the central theme of entrepreneurship is the great big idea, but there have been plenty of game-breaking ideas that have been brought into the commercial landscape only to fall flat and fail miserably. Given the choice, I would much rather take hold of a somewhat pedestrian, but defensible, business idea or opportunity and support it with a market-winning strategy and near-perfect execution. There have been plenty of highly successful businesses built and sustained for the long-term on products…

Take two of these and call me in the morning…

The above phrase was once widely and regularly quoted as the standard instructions given by a doctor to his/her patient when the patient was prescribed a regimen of pills or tablets to take to cure an ailment of some sort. Not a whole lot of pomp and circumstance, but medicine was somewhat simpler in those days and not as many options were available to doctors in terms of antibiotics and other disease-fighting medications.

Wow. That prescription surely seems incredibly simple and unassuming today. Why… every medication that I receive from the pharmacy comes in a bag containing circulars and precautionary statements that take at least 15 minutes to read (I generally don’t), and the pill bottle itself provides every possible…

Receptivity in “Critical” Times

A few days ago, for no particular reason except that I happened to be thinking about some of my discussions that day, I took a marker and wrote on one of the flip charts in our conference room reserved for internal meetings, the phrase, “Criticism provides an opportunity for improvement.” I came back into that room for some reason the next day and found that someone had added the word “Constructive” to the phrase to create a new phrase, “Constructive criticism provides an opportunity for improvement.”

It took about four nanoseconds for that act to really get under my skin. I guess our society has advanced to the point and we are so smart that we can now be selective…