Five Productivity Lessons from Espresso
I love coffee. It’s delicious, chock full of life-enhancing antioxidants and fosters connections and collaboration, too. After spending a few weeks in Italy last year, I developed a love of espresso. In addition to the concentrated caffeine boost that a…
How the Economics of Friendship Shape Work and Life
Friendship is a fundamental and universal human need. This form of social connection cultivates mutual affection, trust, interdependence, and joy. According to one of modern social science’s longest ongoing studies, the social connections of friendship enrich and even extend our…
Three Leadership Lessons from Spider-Man
Plainly put, Spider-Man leads with a unique formula of leadership of kindness, humour humility, smarts, passion, and responsibility. And here are three leadership lessons that you can take away from Spider-Man. No, this not a “new idea” and “a few people” have “already written about this” in “2010” – this being said, my lessons get to the punchline quicker and better. And the artwork (see below) that I chose to adorn this post is both adorable and (probably) concerning.
Six Lifelong Learning Lessons from The Intern Movie
Last week I published a piece on lifelong learning lessons from the perfectly fine Google recruitment video and/or raucous, adventurous workplace comedy, The Internship. This week I will focus on another perfectly fine (except for the last 20 minutes, but…
Five Ways to Connect Your Workplace
The purpose of so many organizational teams, like innovation labs, and startup ecosystems, like Silicon Valley, is to disrupt the status quo. I’ve written about why we need to disrupt our workplaces and how to do it. The thing is…
The Business Case for Playing Every Day
Play is a central part of being human. Here is a business case for bringing play to your life and your practice every single day.
Five Career Development Trends Impacting Organizations
I wrote this article in January, 2020 (pre-pandemic, but just barely). What has changed? What’s stayed the same? How do these career development trends hold up? John Also, register for Cannexus23 today! — Career Development Trends Next week career practitioners…
Seven Ways to Make Time for Learning
The ability to learn is arguably the most important skill for human beings to develop. Futurist Heather McGowan argues that the rate of technological and demographic change means that we need to learn – not to mention unlearn – at…
Governance
The world is less democratic than it was 15 years ago. Peoples’ growing malaise with democracy has been a disturbing trend that dates back to the 1970s. The way we govern our communities – neighbourhood associations, corporate boards, regional elections…
Six Professional Lessons From Six Movie Side Hustles
We tend to remember Indiana Jones as a Nazi-fighting, world-saving, rough-and-tumble adventurer, not as a Professor of Archeology. We tend to remember Erin Brockovich as a feisty, community-minded legal aid who held corporations accountable, not as a single mom. And…









