Most of my blog readers don’t wake up every day and think, “I want to be only as good as most other people.” I know that many of you want to leave your mark on the world and succeed versus just survive. (There are many ways to succeed, well beyond money and status.) Conformity and […]
If book smarts were enough to be a CEO, any intelligent person could pull it off. However, there’s a difference between information (which you can get from a book) and knowledge. Though you see it more in the younger ages, informative incompetence (II) isn’t the domain of just young leaders. One of the smartest guys […]
Meetings aren’t the problem — leadership is Ah, meetings. Most of you have a full day of them if you’re in a senior leadership role. Be honest, wouldn’t you rather have a Rottweiler chew on your shin than go to most of them? The fact that you “own” many of them is even more disheartening! […]
Parallels between aviation and business The Boeing 737 crashes of 2018 and 2019 have me thinking of flying and its parallels to business. With the 737s that crashed, the aircraft “CEO” didn’t know the critical infrastructure of the operating system, and the result was fatal. CEOs in business who let the company get away from […]
What’s most difficult, however, isn’t the infrequent bad behavior from a boss. We all deal with that. It’s the boss or board members who are consistently poor leaders. Those I encounter typically suffer from one or more of the following: Inability to trust others Putting their self-interest ahead of the company’s Unwillingness to make tough […]
Positive behavioral change affects everyone “For behaviors that you want to do, the goal is to make triggers salient, the behavior easy, and the reward as immediate and satisfying as possible. For behaviors that you don’t want to do, it’s the opposite. Bury the trigger (move the fridge to the garage), make the behavior hard […]
Many years ago when I was on the board of Kinko’s, we had a pointed conversation about our future initiated by John Davis, a board member and Harvard professor who specialized in family business. He believed we needed to change our culture from family to team. Even though we were a multibillion-dollar business, we were […]
In an apparent example of breathing his own exhaust, the founder of WeWork — now rebranded We Companies (We) — recently invested in another company tied to his hobby, surfing. When your current business model loses a dollar for each dollar it earns in revenue, wouldn’t you want to fix that first? We is private, […]
“Xi does feel a sense of crisis… From Xi’s perspective, he believes his policies are correct, but the problem is they aren’t being implemented properly.” —Wall Street Journal talking about China’s paramount leader If only those fools would implement my policies everything would be fine! Perhaps I should “disappear” a few more! When people refer […]
If there is one thing that I have seen handcuff more executives than anything else, it is the need to be liked (NTBL). It’s nice to be liked. Most of us want friends and family who like us so that we can share our time together, be comfortable, able to let our hair down. That […]