Announcing the newest Immersive Executive Experience partner, Practical in Iceland.

IEE sessions are exclusive, custom designed, multi-day events where I personally lead small groups of business leaders to discover how to apply the “Slingshot Framework” in their business and personal lives. The sessions fuse together exceptional intellectual learning, hand-picked locations, and mind-opening adventures that reinforce the key principles of re-imagining boundaries. This combination enables participants to learn and to experience the power of continuous re-invention, which is the critical basis of staying relevant.

Workplace fun builds a company-wide emotional alignment and a foundation for open, creative thinking. It enriches the work experience and environment of employees. In turn, more content and more engaged employees serve to make the organization itself more successful.

Earlier in the month I wrote about April Fool's Day and the importance of honoring this ultimate holiday of creativity and fun. Now ask yourself this: Does your business have a sense of humor? Put another way, do you encourage playfulness and laughter among your staff and in your workplace? Or is your business environment rather serious, stiff, and bland? In which case how can you expect your employees to be creative, to continuously innovate, to come up with new solutions?

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

—General Eric Shinseki, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff

Being relevant is more important than being best or being biggest. Counterintuitive to such managerial concepts as relative market share or operational excellence, it is not enough to have an efficient organization or to be the biggest or best within a traditional market segment. Instead, you need to continuously scan the horizon and shift course to stay relevant. In fact, being biggest or best may be a hindrance, because it impedes your ability and inclination to adapt quickly.

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do. And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

—Dr. Seuss, American author and illustrator (1904–91)

April Fools’ Day. What a great concept. The first of April is the one day every year when adults have full license to be impish and playful. The act of planning and executing a ruse helps to reconnect you with your inner child, so take advantage of it. The best April Fools’ pranks are not unkind or nasty, nor are they designed to mock but rather to challenge your perception of reality and the limits of conventionality.

The basis of the most successful strategies is not outcompeting rivals, but rather creating your own game, your own market space.

It may be hard to believe, but all of us were children once. As children, we all experienced the sense of elation and accomplishment from inventing our own games and making use of random props and terrain to choreograph a customized pastime that was a blast to play. There was virtually no limit to what we could play and where. What if we could reignite our childhood creativity and deconstruct our realm of acquired assumptions in the process? It would not only be disarmingly fun but deeply meaningful in guiding our strategic thinking.