If there’s one thing that Apple has been getting right, it is their ability to create beautiful, easy-to-use blockbusters. To build a great business, it’s all about creating a great product that people love for the positive impact on their lives.   ______________ The 2013 statistics on the iPad, and my own …blew me away. […]

“Our focus on removing or minimizing randomness has actually had the perverse effect of increasing fragility.”   How can we work through this  paradox in organizations?  Assistant Professor Adam Grant’s recent works provides insights. As a follow-on exploring the concept of anti-fragile systems that I blogged about earlier, consider the power of Dr. Grant’s recent work on Givers, […]

Being creative can be tough when bad news abounds.  Yet taking the creative, challenging coach role through turbulence is a hero’s journey that matters greatly as we recover and build anew. What does it mean to be a Trusted Change Advisor in today’s turbulent times? My colleague, Liz Guthridge, wrote a helpful post about the […]

What makes for a healthy, “anti-fragile” (adaptable, responsive) organization today?   These slides from my recent presentation to the Michigan Management Labor Association’s (MMLA) presentation on Wellness –A Healthy Engagement: Organizational and Personal Fitness provide insights on tools to help.  Wellness –A Healthy Engagement: Organizational and Personal Fitness from Deb Nystrom “The best way to predict […]

Random, extreme events:  What to do in a world we don’t understand.  Is it possible to develop characteristics to emulate strengths in nature in becoming anti-fragile as described by former wall street trader, now academic, Nassim Nicholas Taleb?  Since I wrote this post, I also followed it up with a SlideShare and presentation on Anti-Fragile […]

Join me and my Coach Café Ann Arbor colleagues to learn about how coaching can support your success through one of our coaching demonstrations or workshops during International Coaching Week, May 20-26, 2013. Of all clients who have engaged a coach, 99% report satisfaction with the coaching experience, 70% report improved work performance, 80% report […]

Tensions among senior staff in universities seem to be making the news on a regular basis. Examples include leader strife at Rutgers (blame), Penn State (cascade failure to deal with a crime) and University of Virginia (abrupt leadership goings and comings.) Last year Forbes described the University of Virginia‘s Board of Visitors vote to unanimously reinstate […]

Learn how to move out of the shallows of those old introvert & extrovert labels. What’s best used as a combo with other aspects of personality?  Introversion and Extroversion.   The famed psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, is one of the few that has added clarity to the oversimplification or archaic use of introversion […]

Are you experiencing prolonged harassment?  It may be that you may have just encountered a bully, or, when adding gender into the mix, experiencing an adult “mean girl.” As the number of women in the workforce and in leadership increases, stress in leadership roles has naturally affected women, as it does men,  and can include gender-nuanced […]

Entre-Slam is an entrepreneurial story telling competition held in Ann Arbor. Storytelling is powerful – and is a key leadership tool.  Telling my story was also a great way to illustrate storytelling as important to change and communicating complex ideas, including my history in organization development (OD).   Explaining OD to the uninitiated is like describing […]