In my previous blog, I spoke about about the advantages of showing up for meetings on other people’s territory.  Now I’d like to elaborate a bit more on one aspect of this – the importance of always bringing along a gift. Now by that, I don’t mean a material gift, as that can cause an 

One of the key lessons I have learned in business and life is the power that comes from simply “showing up” on someone else’s territory and terms. No matter how much you may prefer not to go or drive somewhere or how much more convenient it might be or how important it might make you

Since a holiday blog wasn’t readily coming to me this year I had decided to pass – that is, until shortly before Christmas, when something totally unexpected happened to me that renewed my sense of trust in both myself and my fellow man. Without providing the identity of either the country or individual involved, for

This past week, while attending a large meeting in New York focusing on strategy for an emerging growth category, I was asked by a fellow participant  how a specific company had come to be so successful. I thought for a moment and then replied, “They always say YES!” I then proceeded to explain to how

There’s no mystery to what it will take at this point  to keep our planet fit for human habitation. We already pretty much know what we have to do in order to make it more sustainable and less toxic and eliminate the problems of waste and scarcity. So why does what appears to be so

My two previous blogs emphasizing destination rather than  diversion and survival rather than sustainability have led me to think about Black Friday, the launching pad for the Christmas shopping season. Now I know that many of my colleagues have been urging us to put the brakes on growth and production, lest we deplete our resources

Now that the 2012 election and all the partisan sniping that preceded it are finally over, it has occurred to me that the thing that’s missing in our country right now is a cooperative approach to solving society’s problems. By that, I mean we have to learn – or perhaps relearn – how to start

My last blog was about how changing our approach to recycling from one of mere “diversion” to “destination” — that is, implementing a preplanned system of directing different materials for reprocessing  – could best enable us to  create a “zero waste world.”  This again got me thinking about the meaning of “sustainability,” a subject which

After spending time at the Sustainable Packaging Forum 2012 and hearing some of  the challenges involving recycling and the multiple approaches to it, from educating the public to spending billions on infrastructure, I couldn’t help but reflect back on a time when a ‘recycling mentality’ existed throughout America.  Ask anyone who was around during the