ARE:A Renewal Enterprise

A New Year's Resolution for Leaders

A lot of us are making resolutions this weekend - lose weight, exercise more, get organized, write more blog posts (ok, maybe that's just me!), etc. And a lot of experts (like our friends over at the Harvard Business Review) are making suggestions about what kinds of resolutions we should make.

It occurs to me that, behind every New Year's Resolution, is a desire to do what matters. I'll toast to that. But it also occurs to me that, for most of us, doing what matters also means that we need to figure out how to stop doing things that don't.

Here are 5 purposeful questions you can ask yourself to figure out what doesn't matter anymore:

1. Are we (still) having fun doing it?
2. Is it easy to get people to lead and participate in it?
3. Are people's lives being changed by it?
4. Are we being changed in positive ways by doing it?
5. Would anybody miss it if we stopped doing it?

If you answer no to #1 plus ANY of the other questions, you should stop whatever it is you're doing right now.

If you answer no to any one of these questions, including #1, consider taking a time out from doing it. Take a break. Give it a rest. And see what happens. After a few weeks or months, re-evaluate it and decide whether or not it's worth doing again. Odds are, it won't be.

What New Year's Resolutions are you making this weekend?

5 Things To Learn From The United-Continental Merger

Type "United Airlines Sucks" into your Google search engine and you'll get over 44 million hits. Start reading the posts. But don't spend too much time doing it. It doesn't take long to overdose on the venom.

I was spitting a little myself a few days ago when I found myself caught in the middle of United's much anticipated merger with Continental. I'll tell you that story - and about their quick response, which has suddenly turned me into a United fan, at least for the moment - in a minute. But then what I really want to share with you are 5 Things To Learn From The United-Continental Merger.

10 Things I've Learned Along The Way

I got to spend last weekend with one of my favorite people. Margaret is a powerhouse of a personality with a positive outlook and a huge heart. She is in round 3 (or maybe 4) of her career. She got her start in brand management and marketing in the corporate world but left her VP position a number of years ago to open a boutique kitchen store in what was then an emerging neighborhood in Minneapolis. The recession has sucked the life out of a lot of businesses. Margaret's didn't make it. For awhile after the store closed she took whatever job she could find in the short-term; that meant working retail for a neighboring business owner. But now she is back in the corporate world, doing what she does:

Making life work, one way or another, without letting the ups and downs of it all kill her.

Margaret has been asked to give a lecture to a class of young business students and, over a glass of wine one night, I asked her what she was going to talk about. What emerged is Margaret's list of "Ten Things I've Learned Along The Way." Here it is: