TED.com has posted a list of the 20 Most-Watched TED Talks to date. From their site (and for those that don’t already know what TED is): TED is dedicated to ideas worth spreading. And that leaves many wondering exactly which ideas have been spread the most widely in the six years that TEDTalks videos have […]
Author Archive: Tim Empringham, MBA
The Power of Sharing
In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that, I learn from him. Ralph Waldo Emerson In this age of social networking the concept of sharing has become extremely commonplace, but I’m not sure we have improved the value we create through sharing as opposed to increasing the […]
Are You Running in Circles?
Over the past few weeks I’ve been involved in a number of situations where urgent requests have been made of people and teams, and they have diligently run off at pace to deliver an appropriate response only to discover (days and weeks later) that their interpretation of the request wasn’t correct, or worse yet to […]
Dare to Disagree
After a discussion with a colleague yesterday on the topic of politics and the power of disagreement and free voices he referred me to a great recent TED talk from Margaret Heffernan called Dare to Disagree (below). This is exactly the sentiment I was trying to convey in my post yesterday on Walking the Fence. […]
Walking the Fence
When I was working for myself and leading a small company things were much easier. The 60 hour work-weeks, lack of vacation time, and total consumption in the work and building of the company were hard, but in a small company in a leadership position you never had to worry about what you said or […]
Why are you Here… and What are you going to DO about it?
Over the past few months I’ve come across some very valuable thinking and ideas that have made me examine a great deal of how I approach my life and work, and I’ve been struggling a bit to pull the ideas together into a coherent and meaningful framework. This is my attempt to summarize and bring clarity […]
The Importance of Book Ends
Take a look at your book shelf. You might have a nice built-in bookcase, an IKEA Billy case, or perhaps an open shelf on the wall, but any of them will do. Now imagine that your book shelf didn’t have any sides or book ends… how easy do you think it would be to keep your library […]
Where Are You Going?
There’s an old saying that failing to plan is planning to fail. It holds true as much today as it ever has, but I’ve been thinking about it a bit lately and the more I think about it the more I think there is something missing from this sage advice. Planning is critical… as long as […]
Loss Aversion and the Importance of Changing Your Lens
There is a concept called Loss Aversion that suggests that we hate losing exactly twice as much as we love winning. That concept drives our behaviour in predictable ways and is a key driver for our aversion to failure in our work. For that same reason I think it is twice as important to focus […]
This Makes You… Think?
I came across this graffiti painted on the back wall of a building at Yonge and Greenfield in Toronto and I was drawn to it instantly. Most tagging mostly makes me angry at the gall of people who violate the property rights of others, but this one was different – it had a message. If […]