Some lessons are learned the hard way. That’s kind of stating the obvious, I know. Today I want to share some experiences around the topic of Succession Planning. How Compression Planning can help with Succession Planning One of the applications I’ve heard many people use Compression Planning to address is the topic of Succession Planning. […]
BrainTrain: September 2016 The kids are back in school in their new district and are adapting as well as we could have hoped. I still remember when I found out Steph was pregnant with twins as it was day 2 of one of our Institutes. Fast-forward almost 11 years and they are now in 5th […]
I’m thankful our youngest, Blake, never got into the Dora the Explorer series. The twins loved it but it drove Stephanie and I a bit crazy. So I can’t attribute what I’m about to share with you to having watched too much Dora. I’ve written before that Blake is a very affirming, positive five year […]
On Friday, May 26th, Stephanie and I took a one-day bus trip to Gettysburg with Logan and Lauryn and their fifth grade class. I know I’ve been there twice in my life (as my mother pointed out). Once as a child and once with my dad when we were driving back from a facilitation assignment […]
Something we used to teach in our Institutes was “pre/post concept.” For some reason we stopped doing it maybe 15-20 years ago. It is something that has come up three times in the past two weeks so I figured what better way to process it than through sharing through a BrainTrain/Blog post. Basically, to me, […]
I’ve noticed something lately with my three-year old son Blake. It’s about his outlook on life. When one of us asks Blake how he is doing, he always yells “GREAT!” We didn’t teach him that. He is just kind of wired that way and it puts a smile on my face every time I ask […]
With my forty-odd years of sitting in on business meetings, I have found one thing to be true: people like to talk. They like to share. And they have lots of ideas when you get them going. Now this inherent capacity of human beings for expressing their thoughts can be viewed as a strength. But […]
To fully understand the power of the Compression Planning® model, we have to go back to its origins. I was recruited to design and lead one “last-ditch effort” to save a parochial high school in Austin, Minnesota (population 23,000). The previous year’s fund-raising efforts brought in $60,000 and spent $40,000 to do it over a […]
I recently read that one-minute spent planning a business meeting will save 10 minutes of the same meeting. To me, it seems more like 1 to 50, or 1 to 100, in many cases. For more than 36 years, I’ve been dumbfounded by how executives and board meeting members can sit through endless, unproductive, and […]
Helen McNellis My Mother passed away Sunday morning, December 22, 2013. She was 2 months shy of 99 years of age. She led a life full of curiosity, wonder, spontaneity, awe and joy over the simplest of things. If I were to present Mother with a trophy, it would be “World’s Best Listener.” She would […]
