Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth®

This election reflects a totally flawed Democratic strategy: • Painting your opponent as toxic but not having positive policies. • A candidate who cannot speak without a teleprompter and memorized sound bites. • A morally superior attitude that conveys people voting for the opposition are less educated, dumber, and morally inferior. • Rallying celebrity support, media support, Hollywood support, a...

The turning point in the American Civil War—and probably world history—occurred in Gettysburg on a rise called Little Round Top. At that place, at that time, a Union general saw a vast threat, and a Union Colonel and his regiment averted the threat through the brilliance of a single command. We need more courage in our lives because, unlike Gettysburg, no one is shooting at us. We are too easily p...

We all get the kind of government we deserve. If you voted for the winner of the election, that’s good until such time as you feel promises aren’t being kept. If you voted for the loser of the election, that means not enough people in the right places agreed with you, and you have to submit to the system. However, you’re still free to protest, be surprised by some things that are advantageous to y...

Bill Russell, in Second Wind, defines pressure and performance. For example: - Brady coming back from 25 points down in the second half of the Super Bowl. - Houston, we have a problem (Apollo 13). - Sully Sullenberger landing in the Hudson River.  The need is to really stay calm. - Three Mile Island as opposed to Chornobyl. - Bluffing in poker (vs. the “tell”). - Is Mickey Mouse a dog or a cat? -...

Many people in Rhode Island have never been to Boston, let alone New York. I’ve coached a very successful entrepreneur who has never been to New York and doesn’t wish to go. Most people can’t locate Bolivia or Laos (or Nebraska) on a map. When Americans in a survey were asked the three most famous Japanese they could think of, it was Bruce Lee, Yoko Ono, and Godzilla. Or not? Through my travels ab...

Esteem means respect and admiration. Hence, self-esteem would mean respect and admiration for yourself. Self-worth and self-esteem are the same thing to me, whereas self-confidence is your faith (or lack thereof) that you can do something: efficacy. Pride is feeling proud of your accomplishments, but vanity is insisting that others hear about them, as well. The pandemic, foreign wars, polarization...

The rate of failures of small businesses is astounding: 20% fail during the first two years, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first ten years.  While there are myriad reasons, such as succeeding generations of ownership not being as motivated or competent, most of these fail under the original founders and owners. That’s because they tend to think of their business and tasks and...

Some suggestions to build credibility with a buyer during the initial meeting. (This assumes you’re meeting with a true economic buyer who controls the budget.) 1. Assume a peer mentality. Don’t allow yourself to be cast in a “dog and pony show.” (I suggest you never show up with visual aids for this very reason.) Adapt an attitude that the two of you are peers mutually exploring a working relatio...

There are 330 million people in the US that we know of. There are 12,500 school districts, 18,000 police departments, 17,000 libraries, 400 different languages spoken, 45,000 flights per day, 5 million privately and commercially owned vehicles, 200,000 dentists, and 641 amusement parks.  There are nation-states (Japan, Korea), multi-state nations (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait), and multi-nation st...

This is a marketing lesson for the Catholic Church. I’m a lector and a Eucharistic Minister in the Church and converted 18 years ago. As some of you know, I’ve also spent a great deal of my coaching and consulting career in the field of strategy and have written two commercially published books on the topic. The average age in the church my wife and I attend is north of 60. Young people are not dr...

The agenda of inequality and wealth focused only on the richest might not reconcile with reality. There have been increases in home ownership (even though buying always has its difficulties, from interest rates to inventory). There is a record of intergenerational wealth transfer from retirement savings and the Regan-era IRA legislation. In the West, family prosperity is higher than ever: assets,...

Just tell me what I want to know. People instead tell you everything that they know. College professors are reading their dissertation notes. Electricians are telling you about high and low voltage, amps, and watts. The tree guy tells you about diseases of poplars when you asked if he could prune some dead branches on an oak. The auto guy explains why a repair isn’t as easy as it looks because of...

Even in truly tough times and horrible market segments, there are winners and strong companies. You have to play the hand you’re dealt, and you have to play it well. If anything is happening to you more than two times out of ten, it’s you, not them. With high interest rates, houses are still being sold. With food being expensive, people are still dining out. But you can’t expect yesterday’s ideas...

If you win a race by .001 seconds, have you really “won.”? And certainly, you’re not the “best in the world.” On that day, in that place, at that time, you finished barely ahead of the next person. What if you did it again an hour later? Of course, if you constantly and consistently win, you might be the best in the world or the best ever: Yankees, Celtics, Tom Brady, Rocky Marciano, Serena Willia...

The Olympics sparked several replays of an Australian swimmer, Cate Campbell, being interviewed on what I think was an Australian TV news show. In a prior competition, she had beaten out the Americans for the gold medal. The interviewer asked her what it was like.  She ranted on about how glorious it was because she detested the Americans using a cowbell to motivate the team and hated the chant of...

You’ve known wowsers. They’re always trying to be the “second smartest person in the room,” and they correct you even though you’re correct to begin with. They are official “killjoys.” They are critical of others’ pleasures and accomplishments. Lacking expertise doesn’t inhibit their critiques and corrections. They never converse; they lecture as perpetual professors. They’re distraught if they th...

People may think of a "Grand Challenge" as an exceptionally worthy and difficult problem to solve, and they'd be right. But it's also representative of a more formalized and impressive approach to what appear to be intractable societal issues. Seth Kahan specializes in these, his most recent being to remove stigma in mental health issues. This involves a farrago of interested parties, from televis...

My wife wasn't feeling well, so I went out to eat at 5:30 and brought her something back. When I do that, I bring my iPad and read a book at the bar. I finished, the takeout arrived in a shopping bag, and I drove home. At 10 pm I thought I'd play some Angry Birds before going to bed but realized my iPad was gone. I used "Find My iPhone" to determine that it was still in the restaurant. Although af...

I recorded and wrote this prior to the presidential debate. When I couldn’t publish it before the debates, I was going to abandon it. But in view of what occurred, I’m publishing the recording and show notes now. In the upcoming debates, no notes will be allowed, and the moderators can mute the microphones. Moderators have had undue influence on past debates, becoming the inappropriate centers of...

The only way to “coast” is when you’re going downhill. Even on a plateau, you have to pedal to keep moving. However, there is a way to “coast uphill.” To succeed, businesses must keep growing. And to keep growing, they must innovate. No business can grow simply by solving problems and “fixing” things (or, worse, blaming people). Problem-solving keeps you afloat, but it doesn’t raise the water leve...

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? No, they don’t. The advent of the automobile around 1895 did not engender a huge equine genocide. We use horses today: for work, for recreation, for crowd control, for sport. Hence, the internal combustion engine is not disappearing in your lifetime, despite stupid political statements such as the recent “all cars must achieve 65 miles-per-gallon by 2031.” (Let’s als...

Our 60th High School Reunion On the way to the reunion We’re on Amtrak on our way to our 60th high school reunion: Emerson High School, Union City, NJ. It was then and is now the most densely populated city in the country. Emerson is now a middle school, but back then it was one of two full-fledged high schools with all sports, and dances and typical teenage angst. We had about 200+ in the class....

Show Notes Mario Abbondanza and Noah Chantharangsy have been bartenders for quite a while, Mario for about a quarter century. I see them so often from the customer side of the table that I thought it would be fun to “step around the bar” with my listeners and discover what that would be like. You’ll find out that the hours are often brutal, but the job—rewarding. There’s fulfillment in helping peo...

We claim we don’t like elites, but we eagerly follow every ridiculous and pompous movement of the British Royals. (They’re now upset about a Nigerian trip that Harry and Megan took where they were treated too much like a state visit!) We belong to air clubs, hotel clubs. We have Amex green, gold, platinum, and black cards. Hertz has a platinum service. On our recent trip to LA, we arrived and depa...

I met Doug at Merck where he worked as a sales executive and I was an external consultant. Some years later, he called me from his current pharma company and asked my advice about an ethical issue he was seeing. About five years later, he was presented with a huge (listen to find out how much) “whistleblowers award” for turning the dangerous practices in for the government to investigate and elimi...