There is tremendous power in curating your goal list Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com Several years ago I was at an event for a non-profit’s leadership team, board members and most engaged volunteers.  In the course of the keynote speaker’s remarks, he asked for the mission/vision statement of the organization.  Like many of these sorts of statements, this one listed four or five priorities that the organization wanted to address.   After hearing it, the speaker took a minute to reflect on each of the priorities and offer some thoughts on each that would be worth consi ..read more

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner Photo by Monoar Rahman on Pexels.com My high school English teacher and I often failed to see eye to eye, and for good reason.  As an generally enthusiastic, periodically obstinate, and frequently arrogant 9th grader, I (and several others) made the less than ideal choice one lunch period to lock ourselves in our dining room in order to keep out a group of obnoxious middle schoolers.  While a much longer story, it is important to note that I attended a brand new school for high school that at times that first year was a ..read more

or is good enough sometimes just that? Among the many pleasures of house shopping is seeing how someone else lives.  Even more so after buying a new home – you constantly wonder, how did these people live like this?  No dimmers on this light switch, atrocious lighting, you call that closet storage – all actual quotes about our home. This begats the question – why do some make such choices?  Is it a failure of vision – an inability to envision a better future?  Or is execution the scarce commodity? Or maybe the busyness of life got in the way and the benefits weren’t worth t ..read more

Is excellence little more than just hyped up efficiency? The Internet is good for many things, the creation of new terms for example.  Terms like “Bro” and “Bro Culture” originally were an attempt to group and characterize a certain type of hyper-masculinity.  If we all at this point instinctively know what it means for someone to be a Karen, I am willing to bet for most, “bro” has a similar connotation. The standard, regular way bro is typically associated with a hard-partying lifestyle – think cast of Jersey Shore.  But the concept quickly expanded.  Young men, being quic ..read more

Parenting a middle schooler is fraught with challenges.   The inner life of an emerging adult – desperate not only to self-individuate but also not sure of being ready to leave the comforting dependency of childhood – is laden with minefields. Yet when walking through it, I have been surprised by the opportunities to re-learn and re-affirm some lessons myself.   None perhaps as important as the lived reality of each of our own narcissism. We share this lesson repeatedly – telling our middle schooler that no one is paying attention to them/their actions/choice of clothing, e ..read more

buy here The Family Enterprise Playbook: A Framework for Action How Do You Build a Family Enterprise? How do you know if you are successful in doing so? I have wrestled with these 2 questions for the last 2 years, since publishing my first book.   Over that time, from working with families directly and talking with countless others, I consistently heard a sense of confusion, uncertainty, and occasional dread.   More and more families like the idea of building an enduring family.  But where to start and what to do?  What’s the next step for where the family is to ..read more

This week’s highlights: Bill Waterson, Marketing, and The Preppy Handbook (again) Photo by Rodney Truitt Jr on Unsplash “Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.” – Anatole France Happy Labor Day Weekend Hope everyone finds a brief respite from their professional labors by enjoying their recreational ones. Cheers,  David Featured Article TAC – Why Bill Watterson Vanished. The creator of Calvin and Hobbes is back, but the mystery is why he disappeared in the first place. TheFreePress – A Constitution for Tee ..read more

This week’s highlights: Monster Trucks, Soap, and Sea Planes Happy Friday Back to school and back in action here at Fifteen on Friday One thing to highlight is tomorrow’s Leagues Cup match between Nashville SC and and Inter Miami.  Here’s the rundown: What?  Leagues Cup is a international competition between professional soccer teams in the MLS (US & Canada) and Liga MX (Mexico) Who?  Nashville SC vs. Miami – the new home of the soccer GOAT Lionel Messi. Messi has almost single handedly reversed the fortunes of the Miami team… When? Saturday at 8PM CT Why ..read more

This week’s highlights: Great Work, Temperature Taking, and the Steve Jobs’ Loophole Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash Happy Friday Hope you have a wonderful summer’s weekend!   For this week’s original content, I am continuing my series on governance.  Since joining student government in 9th grade, I have seemingly been doing governance work for my entire adult life.  Over the course of time, I have been fortunate to serve in a governance role for a wide variety of organizational types – non-profits, professional peer groups, and even several private ..read more

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com In our first post about organizational governance, we concluded that there were three primary focal areas of governance: Identification of goals – aka purpose and vision Pursuit of those goals – aka strategy Social structure – how the team must be arranged to accomplish the strategy  We also concluded that these three core areas also sound confusingly similar to the core actions that management is responsible for.   Today’s post will explore the interplay between governance and management in greater depth and tease out where the difference i ..read more