An Update on My Journey

Now that I’ve been running my own business and attracting clients, I hit a point where I had to ask an honest question: am I actually getting better at this, or just busier?

One of the things Microsoft did really well was build a culture around continuous learning, the idea that you keep stretching yourself, even in areas where you're already the expert. It was a good idea. In practice, the pace of a large matrix organization made it hard to actually live out, not for lack of intent, just lack of time and bandwidth.

Now that I run Better World Strategy, I get to decide how much I take on and what kind of work I do. That means I also get to decide what I say yes to, and one of the things I'm saying yes to is learning, deliberately and on purpose, not because a performance review asked me to.

A few things driving this right now:

• I'm working through a Harvard Business School certification in business strategy. It's intense, it's long, and it’s genuinely eye-opening.

• I'm making my way through a stack of books: HBR's 10 Must Reads: Strategy, Alan Weiss's The Consultant's Bible, James Ragan's From Employee to Consultant, Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, and a reread of Kotter's Leading Change.

• I'm helping launch a small network of fellow consultants this July, not to compete, but to trade notes and learn from each other's wins and mistakes.

It’s important to say this: I'm not doing this to collect knowledge for its own sake. I've got 25+ years of experience in operations and strategy already. What I'm after is sharper: I want to get good enough that when a client works with me, or takes one of my future courses, they can point to something real, like a bigger budget, more customers, or more people showing up for a mission they believe in. Growth they can actually measure. That's the bar I'm holding myself to, and I can only get there by learning from people who've done this longer and better than I have.

That's really the whole reason behind my consulting business. The goal was never just to run a practice. It's to help organizations, nonprofit and for-profit alike, turn their purpose into real, measurable momentum. I take that seriously enough to keep putting myself back in the student seat.

So here's what I'd genuinely love to know: what's a book, course, or training that actually changed how you think about strategy, culture, or operations?