Enterprise Thought

Everything in these pages, every company and every lesson, comes down to two things working together: your heart and your thought. I learned early that when those two are pulling in the same direction, there isn't much you can't figure out. And when they're not, no amount of money, talent, or luck will save you. Heart without thought is just feeling. You care, you're passionate, you want to do right, but you have no system for turning that care into something real. Thought without heart is just mechanics. You build efficient processes and smart structures, but nobody inside them knows why they're there or whether what they're doing matters to another human being. The combination is what builds something worth keeping. I didn't arrive at that understanding sitting in a classroom or reading about it in someone else's book. I got it by watching it work, and by watching what happened in the rooms where it was missing. The missing piece, more often than I expected, wasn't a strategy or a technology or a new hire. It was alignment. Heart and thought, running together, in the same direction, for the same reason. Who's Doing Your Thinking? Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that the world gets to tell you who you are. We are each free to choose what, who, and why we are. I wrote those words years ago in a little essay I sent to friends, and I believe them more now than I did then. So as you read about my choices, good and bad, I hope you'll start turning the same questions on your own life. Who are you? Who's doing your thinking? What's missing? That last question, asked honestly and asked often, is worth more than everything else I know.