About Michael Hyatt

In the Western literary tradition, the silver bullet was the only weapon that could destroy certain types of monsters. As a result, it became a metaphor for a singular solution that solves a giant problem.

Today is the official pub date for The Faith of Barack Obama by Stephen Mansfield. I am very excited about it’s publication. Of all the books about Obama that have been or will be published, this is the only one I know of that deals exclusively with his faith.

Twenty years ago, Robert Wolgemuth and I started a publishing company. We had a dream to publish books that truly made a difference, in people’s lives and in the overall culture. The only problem was that we didn’t have much money. Our competitors had seemingly every advantage, including piles of working capital (or so we […]

You can live your life on purpose. It begins by creating a “Life Plan.” This won’t insulate you from life’s many adversities and unexpected twists and turns, but it will help you become an active participant in your life, intentionally shaping your own future.

In the current issue of Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2008), Nicholas Carr asks, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He then goes on to describe what the Internet is doing to our brains. This is a must-read for anyone in the book publishing industry.

You don’t have to make every experience in life a WOW. If everything is a WOW, then pretty soon, nothing is a WOW. But you must be able to identify which experiences you want to make a WOW, and then have a process—or a “technology”—for creating that outcome. I call this “the how of WOW.” It involves asking five questions.

I have been blogging for four years. During this time, I have learned a good deal about blogging. I’m sure I still have a long way to go, but I thought I would summarize what I have learned so far.

Twitter’s home page says it best: Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? … So far, I think there are four: It allows family, friends, and others to follow your activity throughout the day and keep up with your life.

The most important thing you can do as a leader is to keep your heart open.

…Maintaining an open heart—pumping possibility through your organization—is the most important thing you can do as a leader.

As I was reflecting on the game Monday morning, I thought that the Giants, particularly Eli Manning, demonstrated four characteristics of all great leaders:

…It would have been easy for the Giants to listen to the drift of the media and assume they couldn’t win.

Admittedly, I am a novice runner. I’ve been running just a little over a year. So what could I possibly have to say about training for a half marathon? A couple of things.

The book, as we know it today, will eventually die. It won’t happen all at once. And it won’t happen immediately. But, in my opinion, it is inevitable. Why? One word: inefficiency.

Every stream has a current. Throw a twig or a piece of paper into the water, and it will drift with the current. This is natural. It is simply the way things work. Organizations are similar to streams. They too have a flow.

Currently, Amazon.com has a big competitive advantage compared to brick-and-mortar bookstores. In a word, that advantage is selection. But that is about to change.

I often hear people complain about how long it takes to get a response to e-mail. Sometimes, to be sure, it is because the person they are waiting on is inept. The simplest request gets lost in a sea of unprocessed e-mail.

Most of us don’t spend enough time thinking. We are so busy doing that we have, I fear, almost forgotten how to think. Yet it is our thinking, more than any other single activity, that influences our outcomes.

The use of e-mail in corporate culture is pervasive. I rarely get letters any more. Even phone calls are uncommon. But I get scores of e-mail messages every day. Yet, I am continually surprised at how people often misuse this medium. Therefore, I would like to humbly offer up 18 suggestions for better e-mail communication and etiquette:

I thought it was about time to overhaul my standard voice mail greetings. I’ve been following the same procedure for several years. I generally update my office phone message daily. I liked providing the current date to let callers know that I was checking my messages regularly. But that has proven to be more trouble than it’s worth.

I am reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. He’s only 29-years old, but is wise beyond his years. This is probably the best book I have read on productivity since Getting Things Done by David Allen.

The old adage, “so many books, so little time,” is more true now than ever.

There are probably as many different philosophies of creating an annual budget as there are companies. When I came to Thomas Nelson initially, the philosophy was the push-up, pull-down philosophy. Management would try to get the individual units to push up their revenues budget as high as they could and push down their expenses as low as they could go.

Inspirational leaders set the pace. Inspirational leaders believe in the future.

This morning I ran the Country Music Half Marathon.

Many years ago, I had a boss that drove me crazy. He insisted on micro-managing me. He wanted to know every move I made. I had to furnish daily status reports with every call, every conversation, every project, etc. It really got to me. I tried to be patient, but I eventually quit. I just couldn’t succeed in that environment.