In 1855, 16-year-old John D. Rockefeller walked into the office of Hewitt & Tuttle in Cleveland, Ohio, and started his career as an assistant bookkeeper. And as every successful entrepreneur knows, building a great business takes more than a great idea and outsized ambition—it requires disciplined habits, making strategic decisions, and following through to completion on what needs to be done. John D. Rockefeller, the world’s first self-made billionaire, understood and practiced these fundamentals well. Though over 100 years old, his approach to scaling businesses still offers powerful lessons for today’s entrepreneurs looking to continually outsmart their competition.

"Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems."

- Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker’s quote, "Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems"* challenges our conventional thinking. As entrepreneurs, we often find ourselves drawn to spending more time putting out fires than looking for business opportunities. It's human nature to focus on problems. We are often drawn toward the certainty of fixing issues we’ve seen before, and it can be comforting to show other people that we’ve spent our time fixing the problems everyone sees and experiences.  But is that really the best use of our time?

We’ve all heard this quote. And many of us have lived by these words. Michael Jordan once said, “If you quit once it becomes a habit, never quit.”

Are you feeling stuck in your personal or professional life? Burnt out, unsure of your next steps, and craving more meaning?

Wish you could fall back in love with work?

Famous writer and poet Kahlil Gibran once said, “Work is love made visible.” Does that feel like a distant concept to you? Have you lost that lovin’ feeling? If so, you are not alone. Gallup reports that only 32% of workers say they are engaged. That means two-thirds of us are just working for the weekend. Bummer. That’s a lot of hours just phoning it in. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to sacrifice that much of my life just for the almighty dollar…

“You are perfectly designed to get the results you are getting” is an adage we continue to see when companies hiring playbooks are not optimized to ensure greater success in hiring. To help you get to a great hiring process, we thought it best to shape this article around avoiding a handful of the most common hiring process mistakes we help clients fix…

Peter Drucker famously said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. We find another strategy killer is willful blindness - when people block out the uncomfortable realities of their world. When combined with Jim Collins’ findings in Good to Great around how businesses need to simultaneously confront the brutal facts of their present situation yet never give up hope that they will persevere in the end, confronting the willful blindness that we all have is needed for success in business and life.

We often think of life as linear, with fixed mile markers setting our pace for the long run: Get your degree. Land the job. Find a partner. Grow your family. Build the career. Maybe even complete an IronMan or two in between. Then, over time, your relationships flex, the kids move out, and your business marches on. Where to next? If you’re straining to see where your next mile marker hits, you’re far from alone.