Many years ago, I was finishing a master's degree in counseling and picking up bartending shifts to pay the rent. One Mother's Day morning in Atlanta, something unexpected happened — and it taught me more about what it means to help someone than anything I learned in graduate school.

When systems we believed in cause harm, something inside us gets injured. That injury often shows up as fatigue, cynicism, and disengagement. But underneath it is often moral sorrow: the pain of caring in environments that don’t always seem to value care.

In a TED video, Atul Gawande summarizes what we do at RPC every day—we help managers learn to analyze and solve problems in human systems.

As leaders, we don't often think much about poetry, until it becomes a necessity.

A few thoughts on two timeless principles for managing time and tasks.