All tagged Life Lessons

Taking A Moment...

It’s been a heck of a week (on many levels), so my head has been in a few different places the last few days.

My natural instinct in times like these is to make sense of it all, to put everything into a construct that makes sense (to me). But as I tried to do so…

Omerisms Podcast - Episode 163

Structure, rules and constructs can be useful mechanisms and when we're growing up, they're usually unavoidable.

At the same time, they can be both good and bad and, as we grow older, it's worth questioning many of them. Both in terms of what they mean for us but also, as importantly, what they mean for others we live and work with.

Time As Wealth

At the end of the day, I think the most important type of wealth we’re after is time. In particular, the freedom to do what we want with it.

I know the conventional thinking is that we’re after financial freedom, but the reason we’re after that is to be able to do whatever we want i.e. to use our time as we please.

War Stories: Golf Lessons From Melbourne

I started playing golf back in 1996, while I was on a long term consulting assignment in Melbourne, Australia. I needed something to do on the weekends by myself, so I took a few lessons (not enough) and then started to play a local course a couple of times a month.

I remember one Saturday, I went out to the course with my friend and (former) colleague, Ben, and, as is normal, we were asked to pair up with another couple of golfers, who we didn’t know, so that we’d form a group of four.

War Stories: Self-Selecting Ourselves...Out!

Back when I was in Business School, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Michigan/Ross Business School universe was a gentleman by the name of C.K. Prahalad. In fact, forget the Ross world, Professor Prahalad was, alongside Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, arguably the best thinker in the world on the subject of Corporate Strategy.

I mean, this was the guy who gave us the term, Core Competence of the corporation, and got us thinking about what it was that a business really did.

War Stories: Turning Down Michael Jordan's Bulls

The year was 1995 and I’d just started in Management Consulting. Those first few months were interesting, exciting and (very) busy. I hadn’t been staffed on a project as yet, so I busied myself by helping several partners with proposal development and pitch work. That involved lots of research, coordination of different perspectives and inputs across the firm, and plenty of deck preparation.  

As a result, the hours were long. A typical day started at around 8 am and if I wrapped up by 9 or 10 pm, that was a ‘good’ day because it meant I could get a decent night’s sleep.