Why are the biggest challenges the hardest to kill?
What Does It Take to be a Great Leader?
Every Tuesday, we’re sharing valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders. You might start by building on the communication matrix and making sure you’re defending the castle to get done what only you can do. Make sure to take some time so you’re thinking past today. Don’t forget our 12 part Leadership series and #100 of my newspaper columns.
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Why are the biggest challenges the hardest to kill?
The magical mystery tour continues with another retrospective about some of the subjects covered in my first 100 columns … seriously? … the “first 100”? (Is that a threat or a promise?)
As I considered my earlier columns, I was struck that none of these issues has really gone away. We’re continually battling the same challenges … occasionally finding temporary resolution or respite, but so often juggling so many of them that we don’t take time to resolve 
any of them. Why are we stuck in that do-loop? That’s a conundrum we’ll attack in a forthcoming column.
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” ~ Andrew Grove
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
These quotes launched a few columns about leadership succession in the wake of the sudden terminations of the Merrill Lynch and Citicorp CEOs as the mortgage portfolios held on Wall Street imploded on the eve of the Great Recession. My focus, however, was more about how these colossal organizations, so dependent upon talented, international leadership teams, did not have a management succession plan in place. (more…)