We expect good CEOs to regularly step back from the day-to-day and ask difficult questions. Where are we going? What’s working? What isn’t? Where are we investing our resources? What are we tolerating? What needs to change? And perhaps most importantly: Are the decisions we’re making today creating the future we actually want? It occurred to me recently that many of us spend our careers asking questions like these about organizations. But how often do we ask them about our ow

I recently heard about an old tradition called “telling the bees.” For centuries, in parts of Europe and later America, when someone in a household died, a family member would go out to the beehive and tell the bees what had happened. Sometimes the hives were draped in black cloth. Sometimes the bees were told the name of the person who had died. In some traditions, they were even symbolically invited to the funeral. At first, it sounded like one of those curious customs from

Something happens in August. The light changes. The evenings get a little shorter. Vacations wind down. Back-to-school displays appear in stores. Calendars begin filling up again. And somehow, the summer that felt as though it had just begun is almost over. Every year, we tell ourselves the same thing: There will always be another summer. And hopefully there will. But there won't be an unlimited number of them. That's something we rarely think about. When we're young, summers

Leaving a job is easy to define. There is a last day. You turn in the laptop. Your access gets shut off. You say goodbye. You update LinkedIn. Maybe you have a celebration, or maybe you simply close the door. And you're gone. Except sometimes, you're not. Because there is a difference between leaving a job and actually leaving it. You can physically leave an organization and continue working there in your head for months - or even years. You replay conversations. You wonder w