(My first blog post via the Blackberry)

Thanks to every­one that fol­lowed my Iron­man efforts. On August 30th 2009 I swam 2.4 miles, rode 112 miles and “ran” 26.2 miles in 16 hours 30 min­utes and 41 sec­onds thus fin­ish­ing the Iron­man triathlon with nearly 1/2 hour to spare. By Iron­man stan­dards that’s very slow but by “human” stan­dards I am very proud. Thank you all for your sup­port. I will be pub­lish­ing a short e-journal (with bet­ter pic­tures) of my expe­ri­ence for those that have asked. I can’t begin to describe the expe­ri­ence in this small space. Stay tuned.….

Here is a great post by Seth Godin. Notice that the one pil­lar that does not require us to risk our­selves much is the one that gets most of our effort. We hear so much about how trust has to be built with oth­ers and how trust speeds every­thing up. That is all true of course, but maybe the biggest trust issue we have is with our­selves. And maybe the issue isn’t so much that we don’t trust our­selves enough, but that we place far too high of a value on appear­ing right all the time.

It all seems so good when we start. When we start a new job, a new project or we finally take the reins of our own P & L. But some­how lots of tal­ent and exper­tise don’t always add up to suc­cess. There are three intan­gi­bles that are non­nego­tiable if we hope to win. The relics of man­age­ment pro­pa­ganda, turf wars, crony­ism and a host of oth­ers stand tes­ta­ment to the fact that these three key fac­tors can­not be man­u­fac­tured. Much like trans­fer­ring val­ues, they aren’t taught, they’re caught. In short, lead­er­ship has to lead. So what are they and how do we fos­ter these intan­gi­bles within our orga­ni­za­tion? Read the rest of this entry »