“The people who have the best, most loving ideas tend to be executed or assassinated or discouraged.” ~Sarah Vowell One year ago today, Colleen and I experienced the worst 24 hours of our lives. It began in a visceral encounter with the fallout from the toxic culture at my workplace and culminated at 3:11am the next morning when I got…

What can a Top 40 radio station from the 60s teach us about audience engagement? In 2014, Steve Schram and I got the invitation of a lifetime. The 50th birthday party for our favorite radio station at the Red Eye Grille in Manhattan. We both grew up in the Detroit area during the time that WKNR was in its brief…

Church youth groups were a safe place for young people to hang out in the late 1960s. Or so the grown-ups thought. Joey Morrison and I regularly bolted from Methodist Youth Fellowship to visit Middle Earth, Ann Arbor’s premiere head shop. The black lights, incense and racy posters held our prurient interest more effectively then the biblical retreads that targeted…

I remember when I first heard McCartney sing that song. I could never imagine crossing the threshold. Back then, I was told by my peers, “Never trust anyone over 30!” I thought people were immortal, invincible and fearless. Boy was I wrong. Looking back over six decades, I attribute whatever success I may have had, in great measure, to luck….

By Scott Westerman “Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.” ~Earl Nightingale My granddaughter is an exquisite teacher. She is filled with fearless inquisitiveness. When something interests her, she wants to explore it again and again, until it becomes second nature. At two and a half, she loves…

On November 1, I will be shutting down my Facebook identity. It’s something that’s been on my mind for a long time. Beyond the popular privacy concerns, the biggest downside for me is how much time I end up spending there. In the days when I had a very public personal brand, I felt it was important to share a regular…

The fifth chemo is the worst. By now, you’ve watched her struggle with the poison four times. You don’t want to go to work. You want to be by her side. You want to help ease the pain. But you can’t do a damn thing about it. And that’s the worst part. The two of you actually agreed to pound…

We’re living on the Atlantic Ocean this summer. Colleen and I get up before dawn most mornings and stand on our 12th floor balcony to watch the sunrise. Every panorama is unique. Some mornings present an orange fireball that peeks above a placid sea into a cloudless sky. On other days, the horizon is boiling with thunderheads. Waves crash onto…

By Scott Westerman  The signature of the truly great vs. the merely successful is not the absence of difficulty. It’s the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophes, stronger than before. ~Jim Collins Whenever I need a refresher in the fundamentals of great leadership, I return to Jim Collins and his seminal work, “Good to Great“. Within it’s…

By Scott Westerman “Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great.” ~ ORISON S. MARDEN “People who soar are those who refuse to sit back, sigh and wish things would change,” writes Charles R. Swindoll. “They neither complain of their lot nor passively dream of some distant ship coming in. Rather, they visualize in their minds…