Tag Archives: Harvard Business Review

Green-to-tee Strategy, and other fun

“For smart, talented, and ambitious people, winning is sometimes so easy that it makes true success elusive. That’s because victories, easily obtained, can obscure the ultimate goal.”

That’s a quote out of Hannibal and Me, Chapter 6, which is about life strategy. It’s also how I open my latest “teaser” post in the Harvard Business Review. It segues, as one does, from Hannibal in 216 BC to Carl von Clausewitz to, yes, Tiger Woods. 😉

It’s all about strategy, you see — about thinking backwards, from the green to the tee, no matter what the life situation happens to be. (Thank you to Ryan D., who suggested this angle last time.)

Meanwhile, Doug Desalles and I had a great chat on his cool radio station in Sacramento, Radio Parallax. It’s about a half hour long, but we really go quite deep towards the end.

The Catastrophe of Success, and other fun

“The Catastrophe of Success” is the title of a short, famous essay by Tennessee Williams. I borrowed it as the title of a blog post I wrote for the Harvard Business Review the other day. That post is a teaser for Chapter 8 in Hannibal and Me, titled “The Prison of Success.”

(I might follow up with another post for the HBR. Those of you who’ve read the book: Feel free to suggest topics/themes in the book that could make good teasers in 700 words.)

Meanwhile, the Canadian journo-blogger Kempton did a fun Skype interview with me about the book, and just posted it in four clips on his blog. I’ll give you just the first clip below, so head over there and give him some traffic. In the other clips we talk about Eleanor Roosevelt, Liu Shaoqi, and others.

(It is obvious that I had just rolled out of bed for this one. Kempton, I promise to shave and comb next time. ;))

And, speaking of fun YouTube clips, Alex Norwick at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism did the one below. Thanks, Alex!