I was recently walking in Beverly Hills and passed a travel agency that's been there for decades. I shuddered as I remembered my first brush with the badass, old broads who ran this agency long ago.

Going back thousands of years, society has celebrated rites of passage as a means to show community support to people going through a pivotal life transition, whether that be puberty, commencing adulthood, marriage, welcoming a baby into the world, or death. Rituals provide a “rest stop for the soul,” recognizing the end of one thing often marks the beginning of an exciting new start.

For the past couple of decades, business magazines have fawned over the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world because, as Zuck suggested, "Young people are just smarter."

Some poems transform over time. This piece was written five years ago for a client. It was to support an initiative towards growth and transformation within the company. Five years later, I'm on my second trip to MEA. During this visit, the reminder that we are an ongoing progression brought this piece to mind.

In the warmth of my farewell morning’s sun from the patio of MEA’s Baja campus, a message came to me – one rising from the open conversations and deep learning my workshop days had offered. It rang clear and true: "Elder” is an invitation. "Elderly" is what happens when we don’t RSVP "Yes."

"Small talk" is defined as "polite conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters, especially as engaged in on social occasions." Sounds rather quaint, right?

At the turn of the century, my academic friends Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton (Stanford Business School) wrote a book, "The Knowing-Doing Gap," which chronicled why there are so many gaps between what companies know they should do and what they actually do. Their terrific book was about turning knowledge into action.

We tend to consider experience our best teacher because it helps our pattern recognition and intuition. However, sometimes experience stands in our way.

“What makes the desert so beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that, somewhere, it hides a well…” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Can you feel like you've taken an extended sabbatical in just a week's vacation?