When you’re straight out of school, you do a lot of things that you don’t do when you have a few years of experience. That happens because you’re not fully aware of the impact your actions may have. Sometimes, doing things because you’re too dumb to know better is a bad thing. And sometimes, it’s a good thing. I started my career in a booming industry that was about six months away from an enormous bubble. I went straight from business school to an environment where just keep

Failure gets a bad rap. We don’t like it when it happens to us. And when it does, we find it hard to admit that we had anything to do with it. Often, we make excuses for it—to ourselves and to others. Of course, this makes perfect sense. Who wants to admit that we failed? After all, we think, failure is the opposite of success. Well, it’s not. To me, the opposite of success is not trying at all. It’s choosing to not try rather than risk failure. So what’s failure? Failure is

Every job demands a certain amount of creativity. Some jobs—like graphic design or copywriting—require creativity in a more straightforward way. But any job in the business world needs creativity, because improving, problem-solving, developing and adapting all require you to use that right side of your brain. There is, however, a difference between being creative within a framework, and what I like to affectionately call “free creativity.” For most people, being creative fall

How do you build loyalty? Does it have to be cumulative, like years of service at a company? Does it have to be nurtured like a sapling in order to amount to something? I think many people would say the answer is yes to both, with a big emphasis on the long-term aspect. People become loyal to clients or customers when they’ve worked with them for a long time. For years, that was how loyalty worked with me. I’m loyal to many of my clients because project after project, we’ve g