Former Phoenix Fire Chief Alan Brunacini spent nearly 50 years in the fire service and helped shape modern thinking around customer service. He lived by a simple phrase: “Be nice.” I have my own slightly less polished version: Don’t be an asshole. I say it at work, in meetings, and when I teach. Not for shock value, and not because I’m trying to be vulgar. “Be nice” tells me something about how I should treat you. “Don’t be an asshole” forces me to look at myself. For me, that’s the harder part. It’s easy to be nice when things are going well and the people around you aren’t testing your patience. The real challenge comes when someone disappoints you, hurts you, makes you angry, or you’re just done dealing with them. That’s when “don’t be an asshole” really means something. I ran into one of those situations recently. Someone I wasn’t on particularly good terms with was on my Sam’s Club membership, and it was about to expire. I wasn’t renewing it because I don’t use it enough during th...

A couple weeks ago, I talked about a phrase that makes me cringe: “ We’ve always done it this way. ” Another phrase has the same effect: “ Time to change things up. ” Many years ago, I was the captain for a fire company’s ambulance service - which meant that I was the emergency medical services (EMS) chief. My assistant captain and I worked hard to make sure that the EMS staff felt respected and valued. One of the simplest ways to unite people is to share a meal. So, each shift, we gave our crew members meal vouchers. They covered a modest lunch or dinner at local restaurants. Not everyone saw the value in that. Quite a few members of the fire company, many of whom had little understanding of the EMS side of the organization, were pretty vocal about their disdain for this practice. Eventually, we were forbidden from giving out the vouchers. The result was predictable. Staff who had been willing to step up and help with extra shifts or duties now flat out refused. Our residents still n...

My Nan recently celebrated her birthday. I say “celebrated” even though she’s been gone for almost thirty years. Because birthdays don’t just disappear when the person does. I’ve been thinking about Nan a lot - about what she taught me growing up. This blog is built around three ideas: Think. Teach. Show up. And if I had to point to someone who taught me what that last one really means, I’m not sure I could find a better example than her. When you were with Nan, you had Nan.  One hundred percent. She listened. She paid attention. She made you feel like whatever you were telling her was important, because to her, it was. Not necessarily because the story itself was important, but because you were. That distinction matters. As kids, we didn’t recognize everything Nan did for us. We just knew that she somehow made things happen. Nan listened. She worried. She laughed. She made time. She paid attention. She loved us unconditionally. There are people who teach us by sitting us down and...

It's impossible to work 25+ years across several disciplines without picking up some "words of wisdom." Dad sayings. Grandpa sayings. Frank-isms. Whatever you want to call them. One of the phrases I come back to pretty often is, “We’ve always done it this way.” That phrase gets a lot of criticism, and it’s often for good reason. If the only explanation for doing something is that it’s the way we’ve always done it, maybe it’s worth asking why we’ve always done it that way. Sometimes it started for a good reason. Sometimes there still is a good reason. Sometimes nobody really remembers. That doesn’t automatically make the old way wrong. But it makes it worth a look. What problem were we trying to solve? Does this still solve it? Is there another way? Is there a better way? Years ago, I managed an ambulance service that was part of a fire company. Technically, I was the ambulance captain, although functionally the job was really emergency medical services (EMS) chief. A...

This summer, four baseball players from the local minor league team called my place home. And a couple days into the season, our kitchen table picked up its own identity: The Family Table . We gathered. We laughed. We told stories. We listened. We gave each other a hard time. We were unapologetically ourselves. Every conversation added to it. Every inside joke. Every debate. Every dare.  No matter what, we showed up for each other.  None of us could create that alone. Life moves pretty fast. The last game was played. The season ended. Bags were packed and the guys headed in different directions. The house got quieter. But The Family Table didn't disappear. Its reach just grew beyond the kitchen. The season brought us together for a short time. But what we built will stay with us always. Pull up a chair. There’s room.

Car Talk was a show on National Public Radio for 35 years. People would call Tom and Ray Magliozzi - Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers - because their transmission was making a strange noise, their car wouldn't start when it rained, or their mechanic had just told them they needed a $2,000 repair and they wanted to know if he was full of crap. And the brothers would try to figure it out. Sort of. Because it usually didn't take very long before the conversation wandered as far away from the car as they could get. They'd start asking about the caller's spouse. Or their job. Or why they bought the car in the first place. Tom and Ray would eventually get around to trying to solve the problem, and often, neither of them really knew the answer. They would proudly announce that they were proceeding "unencumbered by the thought process." That meant that anything was fair game. What if we tried this? What if we turned that upside down? What if we just hit it with a ...