When you were a kid, did you play tug of war? If so, you may remember having two equally strong teams matched up. There was lots of spent energy, sweating, perhaps swearing — and that damn rope just didn’t move! Does your company feel that way sometimes? Lots of people working hard and no movement?! […]
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 […]
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! Maybe you should cancel them and see […]
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 them (think of Wells Fargo [...]
There’s something universal about having incompetent leadership that we can all understand—ergo the success of the Dilbert cartoon. I doubt that any of you can get through your career without Dilbert’s boss appearing. Sad but true. I’ve spent a significant portion of my one-on-one time with coaching clients talking about how to deal with a [...]
“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 (keep ice cream out of [...]
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 [...]
