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The Ebb & Flow of Life: How to Survive the Holidays

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Good Year or Bad Year? The 10 Things that Happen Each Year Nothing creates emotional amplitude quite like the holidays. Especially this year. Social upheaval, global mistrust, selfishness, and behavioral unaccountability hardly mix a wonderful soufflé. Noise and uncertainty create disruption, as do mortality and circumstantial happenstance. Good things happen to bad people, bad things […]

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Today’s Assignment: Going Old School

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This time of year life seems easy or challenging, headlines scream abuse and conspiracy, and happiness washes upon us either in buckets or droplets. Surrounded by all that, today we are each empowered to brighten someone’s day in the simplest of ways. Today’s assignment is simple. When someone passes by, look at them and smile. […]

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Company Culture: Is Yours by Design or Default?

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The major driver of sustained excellence in businesses, teams, and organizations is culture by design. Unfortunately, very few are set up this way. Most have default cultures that have morphed over time. There are two major keys to culture design success, each of which comes with a potential failure point. Those two keys are accountability […]

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Five Keys to Staying Positive in Trying Times

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In 2007  the global recession toppled dominoes around the world. Around the world we shared a common enemy, which was economic instability. Flash forward a decade: Today  global angst looks like a life-sized Lego puzzle. Divisiveness rules,  mistrust abounds, and conclusion-jumping has leap-frogged a long assumed, more traditional respect for measured, fact-based, contemplative thought. What’s […]

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The Construction Process for Three Comedy Shorts

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In business and entertainment, story matters. A great story, well made with great characters, produces great results. Conversely, a thin story or mediocre characters can never tell a really strong story. I recently wrote three comedic film shorts, ten to fifteen minutes each, written to be shot with a “single or dual setup,” which enables […]

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Trump & His Dead Cats

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I was watching an interview on TV the other evening where respected newsman Bob Schieffer was asked about Donald Trump’s relentless creation of conflict-driven chaos and all the hand grenades Trump keeps lodging to change the national dialogue. Schieffer said something very interesting about how Trump does it and why it works. Trump is not […]

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