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I used to hear that all the time. When I was the Executive Producer of Seattle's hit comedy TV show Almost Live!, I used to hear that on almost a daily basis. Eventually, I started to believe it. I mean, why not? We were a hit in Seattle. We had some of the best comedy writers in the business. We already had a TV studio. Why shouldn't we go national? And then, one day, we got our chance. We were offered a slot on Comedy Central, the fledgling (at that time) national comedy network. (Okay, truthfully, that "one day" followed months of phone calls, number crunching, and negotiations. But none of that is relevant to my point, which I promise I'll get to eventually.) "This is gonna be great!" we thought. After all, if they loved us in Seattle (and they did), why wouldn't they love us everywhere? Well, they didn't love us. Oh, they liked us. But they didn't love us. We were okay. But we were just okay. Just okay doesn't cut it in my busin...

About twenty-five years ago, one of my friends told me he wanted to quit his job because he didn't trust his boss. He was in the kind of job where he had complete autonomy and didn't really have too many occasions where he had to interact with his boss. I kept probing, trying to understand what trust had to do with what he was hired to do. In my estimation, he was at the top of his grade, top salary, no one told him what to do because he had workers under his command, and he had a lot of latitude, except that he was always on call because he was the only one who knew how to fix whatever was wrong. At that time, I was right. Trusting his boss should not have been an issue since his boss didn't interfere with what he was doing and he couldn't be replaced so easily. A decade later, after he had quit his job and gone into a different field, the economy took a nosedive and everyone in his old company lost the money they had invested in their 401K funds. His old boss was p...