Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

I love to read business books. I read books on management, leadership, supply chains, personal growth, and even textbooks when I run into specific business problems at a client. It's gotten so bad, that I downloaded the 100 Best Business Book summary on my Kindle just to get some idea of what I could read next. So what have these books taught me? To be truthful, I'm not entirely too sure. It's not like I'm in line to be the next CEO anywhere. It's not like it's put me at the top of my peer group in my class of managers. All it's really done is help me with my EQ, management style, and consulting style. All good things I think - but not anything that appears to stand out from anyone else. What I've come to realize is that even with my subscriptions to McKinsey Quarterly and Success Magazine - and even though I read as much as possible about Strengths Based Leadership or Personal Branding, it means absolutely nothing unless you share or teach someone e...

There comes a point in every management consultant's career where they have to go through the emotional anxiety moving to the next level. I am at that point. The unfortunate thing is that because I've been in this business so long, I look for ways to poke holes into my own story. For all the good work that I do, I only seem to remember what went wrong because our firm likes to pick the proverbial scab called "developmental opportunities," and not really help you further develop your strengths. So as I continue to build my story, brand, business case, etc., I have to reflect on my last 10 years in consulting and figure out what my life has been all about. Then I get to justify it in front of a panel of judges (like American Idol on steroids except that EVERYONE is Simon Cowell). As I go on this journey, I'll write about it in the hopes that people learn from my mistakes. I sure as hell am not learning from people ahead of me. It's like they go into a dark r...

Lately I have been having episodes where I wonder why I even bother going to the airport. Today, Delta was kind enough to turn a maintentance service that should have taken 5 minutes into 1 hour and 1/2. The flight left when my flight was supposed to land in the destination city. I made it to the hotel just in time to catch the last 49 seconds of the NCAA basketball championship. Good thing it was an extremely close and exciting game. Ironically, I saw a former BA who used to work with me in the crowd in Duke blue. He was live and in HD. That was actually kind of exciting. For those of you that travel a lot and rent cars, some airports have rental car facilities between 8-13 minutes away, while some have them on site. In most of the cities I travel to, I usually have to catch a rental car shuttle bus to the central rental car facility. Tonight was actually interesting because I was on the Avis rental bus today and heard two business travelers talking. One was a systems engineer. The...