In reading about the scandal involving Rupert Murdoch, phone hacking, and his media empire, it's hard not to wonder "what the heck were they thinking?" But the real cause of this disaster didn't come from what these executives were thinking. It came from the way they were leading.

As...

Today, the Egyptian people proved that as people, what unites us is far greater than what divides us. They reminded us that while change is often difficult, our race will not, does not, and in fact cannot stop evolving.

And hopefully, they inspired each of us to let go...

Given that she's only 19 days old, perhaps it's too soon for me to be thinking about my daughter's career. Yet two recent articles got me thinking about the deep changes our economy is going through, and what these tectonic shifts are going to mean for her generation.

In Time...

Terrorism isn't caused by bad people being born to do bad deeds. It's caused by two things: a culture of fundamentalism, where extreme beliefs are celebrated as absolute truth; and a pattern of using these beliefs to make the ends justify any means.

By this standard, what we're seeing come...

After decades where we increasingly bought into the idea that "what's good for Wall Street is good for America," the financial crisis is causing many people to question the nature of business. Is greed and corruption merely "business as usual?" Or can business be a force for good?

In the...

GM's bankruptcy. Goldman's bonuses. AIG's collapse. It's easy to look at what's going on and say "How Stupid!" And this is true -- but perhaps not in the way you think. This is because study after study shows that the core problem in business is not a...

Most people -- including most salespeople -- have an inherent distrust of being sold. And the more purpose driven our work is, the more we tend to wish we could just avoid all that "sales and marketing stuff." For example, most non-profits see fundraising as a necessary evil, and most...

The financial industry is based on trust, and in the last year Wall Street has lost a ton of it. So what are we to do about this? In the face of all that's going on, who can you trust?

The bad news is that large pieces of the industry...

If you're a fish living in an aquarium, it doesn't take a whole lot of ingenuity to discover things like food, rocks, bubbles, and other fish.

But it takes a genius to discover water.

In response to a recent article on conscious business, someone asked me "so, what do...

In the wake of the financial crisis, there's been a lot of talk about ethical reform. With the disgrace of so many of the "best and the brightest," there's a lot of soul searching going on in government, industry and business schools. Most of this discussion is...

There's a lot of fear in the air. We're in the middle of what many are calling the biggest financial crisis since the great depression.

So how do we deal with this? How do we survive -- and even thrive -- during this crisis?

Our fastest growth happens when we...

Small business is big business. In the United States, more than half of all jobs are in companies of 100 people or less and more than 10% of all people are self-employed.

Yet most small businesses fail.

Why is this? And what can you do about it?

The biggest problem...

In last week's column, we talked about how capitalism's great strength is its capacity for economic expansion, and its great challenge is its addiction to economic expansion. We looked at the problems that come with unconscious capitalism, and the need for us to develop a new form of capitalism...

With the financial crisis, we've seen a lot of talk about why it happened and who's to blame. We've pointed a lot of fingers at a lot of targets, including bankers, regulators, and homeowners. We've identified a number of symptoms, including greed, incompetence, fraud, and inadequate regulation.

But none of...