Friends, What if you screwed up a lot? Made judgment calls that didn’t work. Relied confidently on past experience only to find out that there were different variables at play this time. What if your people messed up a lot, like missed their goal 70% of the time? So, consider this: last year only 23 … Continued
Friends, On Wednesday, I had one of the most fun times I have ever had presenting to a group. Nate Butki invited me to speak on a panel in L.A. at the Great Places to Work Conference. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re the brains (and the heart) behind Fortune magazine’s January issue which features … Continued
Friends, Have you been watching the new Pope? Like all great leaders — would that be YOU??? — he demonstrates a powerful sense of symbols to model a way for others. His actions remind me of the line attributed to the awesome spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, “be the change you hope to see in the … Continued
Friends, Today’s column is really NOT about hoops (much as I love the game). It’s about how brackets are both really cool — for reasons I do not understand — and can be kind of useful. So, just for kicks I have created my own tournament bracket for your and my use. In each branch … Continued
Friends, In Sunday’s New York Times, the great novelist Elmore Leonard (University of Detroit High School, 1943) imagines what his father would say to Elmore’s mother about the current situation at the Vatican: “You see, we’re gonna have two popes at the same time — both infallible — and you don’t think there’s gonna … Continued
Friends, To paraphrase Tina Turner, “What’s height got to do with it?” Well, it seems like a lot. When George Washington at 6’1″ served as first president he was literally a head taller than many of his cohorts: John Adams was 5’7″ and James Madison a diminutive 5’4″. (Independence Hall in Philadelphia has a wonderful … Continued
Friends, My wife Jennifer, son Jack and I panted and fussed our way over the considerable hills of Oakland on Sunday. Jen signed us up for a Terraloco run (“crazy earth”) a 5K unlike any we’d experienced. About 75 people met in the Leaning Tower Pizzeria in downtown Oakland, and they gave us all a … Continued
Dear Friends, “So You Want To Be Part of a Great Team?” I ask, as did Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith in their book The Wisdom of Teams. The “why” you’d want to is obvious, and likely two-fold. First, teams generate results. A great team is more than the sum of its individual parts, and – … Continued
Friends, At the vigil last night, the President said: “There’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that is the love that we have — for our children, for our families, for each other. The warmth of a small child’s embrace — that is true.” When we are parent-leaders, we know: at bottom they … Continued
Friends, Sometimes December has the feel of the late stages of a marathon. The work, like those 26.2 miles, keeps coming, and you really start to just want it to be over. Even harder than those moments late in a marathon are the moments late in an 18 or 20-mile long training run (where there’s … Continued