What's Your Delegation Score? Delegation isn't just a handoff so you can walk away and do something else. It is a critical leadership skill you must master if you want to expand your reach, take control of your time and achieve the work-life harmony you're seeking. How often have you…
What does it take to get on the Medal Stand and out of the Grandstands? She's won 17 Olympic medals. 12 of them are gold. She holds 13 world records. She's been Sports Woman of the Year twice. She's obviously a remarkable swimmer. She did all of it after having…
Can we develop an incentive plan to drive superior performance? You can be pretty sure that's the question someone was trying to address when your key incentive program was created. At the time, the answer may have been yes. Since then? The chances are that question has never been asked…
Winston Churchill could have been an entrepreneur to have so eloquently dramatized the thrill associated with building a business.
Whether you own it yourself or share it with partners, it’s yours to build, to mold according to your dreams and values.
You may be building it from scratch or seeking new opportunities to jumpstart a mature company. In either case, I hope this will help you on your journey.
Why do you have your own business?
Independence, many will say, the chance to run my own show?
Be my own boss?
Do things my way – maybe because you’ve seen them done the wrong way and you can do better? (more…)
I have been working with a young CEO who recently acceded to her company’s leadership.
She was the successor to a more authoritarian regime and found herself working overtime to establish a more collaborative and less hierarchical environment.
She wanted to bring people to the table, encourage a stronger cultural bond among her employees and build a more inclusive culture that valued the contribution of each individual.
People welcomed those changes with open arms, eager to embrace a culture they much preferred.
What emerged along with a more engaging and transparent culture, however, was a cadre of executives so eager to please their new leader, and to be a part of her leadership team, that they acquiesced to every idea and plan. (more…)
Everyone makes mistakes.
We know this for a fact, don’t we? It’s pretty clear —like crystal.
So, why do so many persist in their insistence that they did no wrong?
Despite the lessons that cover the waterfront — from Watergate to the Catholic Church — the cover-up is always worse than the crime.
What appeared to be minor tributaries turned into a rushing river of a failed presidency and international scandal, yet the stream of lies and denial from those who fail to heed these lessons continues unabated in both our public and private lives.
For some reason, we persist in believing that the truth will never come out. (more…)
It lasts about 300 to 400 milliseconds. It occurs about 10 to 20 times per minute.
Over the course of a day, excluding about 8 hours of sleep, it amounts to about an hour and 20 minutes on average, a fair chunk of time in our waking day.
If you consider that the universe is about 14 billion years old, about 54,000 years would pass by during any given span of those milliseconds.
Some might argue that we can’t see anything during that period.
Yes, all that happens in the blink of an eye … about 1/3 of a second.
It ain’t much but in those small fractions, a lot can occur.
Do You Need to Start Your Own Bonfire? Barely 500 years ago, Girolamo Savonarola was an outspoken and strident critic of the current order, angrily vilifying the worldly possessions that tempted people to become sinners. He was ultimately excommunicated from the Catholic church, condemned for heresy, stripped of his priestly garments, hanged, and his body burned in the town square in Florence, Italy, a stark and ignominious ending to a life committed to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
“God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.”
– Thomas Jefferson
Some of you may be familiar with the famed but controversial West Point Cadet Honor Code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.”
Few of us would doubt the wisdom of “will not lie, cheat or steal”, the core of many of the values we learned as children.
One of the other things we learned as children, though, was, “don’t be a tattletale.”
Be loyal to your friends, don’t snitch on them, and don’t go running to mommy when you observe a small infraction of the rules. It doesn’t help that we’ve seen countless movies since then where a snitch ends up on the wrong side of the grass.
Thus, the controversial phrase, “or tolerate those who do.” (more…)