Clarity of vision, strongly held beliefs and consistency in action are exactly what we want from our leaders “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.” — Colin Powell It’s nice to be liked and loved; it’s just not an effective goal for a leader. If more leaders worried less about pissing people off (that’s the […]
New ideas and directions aren’t always easy to come by To prepare for a trip to Peru and the Amazon, my wife and I headed over to Passport Health in Boulder for shots and pills to avoid as many ailments as possible. (Great service at Passport, by the way!) My wife was recently in Indonesia, […]
Clients often ask me to help them diagnose and solve organizational dysfunction. In my observations, here are the top 12 reasons for dysfunction: No healthy conflict. Most people worry about too much conflict, but my experience is that there’s too little “healthy” conflict. If executives cannot speak their mind and disagree — about issues, not people […]
CEO leadership attributes… “If there is one central truth to be collected from the history of all ages, it is this: that the people’s rights and liberties, and the democratical (sic) mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a strong executive.” – John Adams (from “John Adams” by David McCullough) speaking about the […]
You need a strategy before you can execute successfully There’s a saying that people pass around a lot like it came from King Solomon: “It’s all about the execution.” As if strategy doesn’t matter. But, of course, it does. Executing brilliantly on the wrong strategy only makes you fail faster. As Sun Tzu said in […]
“I prefer a confident president to a certain president.” —Madeleine Albright I like this quote a lot. It reminds me of our now retired family medical doctor, a down-to-earth guy with many decades of experience. Although he had the silver hair and degree that allowed him to answer most questions with certainty, he had the […]
You likely have multiple “bosses.” These might include your spouse, a religious leader, the neighborhood homeowners’ association, the IRS, building inspectors or perhaps a fire chief if you’re a volunteer firefighter. I’d argue that, to a point, shedding bosses is as healthy as shedding pounds (keep the spouse). Nowhere is this more important than at […]
Investments in “growth” don’t always pay off in the year the investment occurs “For the farmer the calendar year is indeed much more than a convenient measurement; his production cycle actually runs from harvest to harvest. But to apply the farmer’s unit of economic life to an industrial economy, except as a conventional measurement, cannot […]
A recent Denver Business Journal article about the rapid growth of two Colorado-based companies — Snooze and Larkburger — caught my attention the other day. Not just because Snooze has great breakfast with a cool atmosphere and not because I’m envious of Larkburger for locating in ski areas. It’s because of their methods of expansion — not […]
I bent over to fill the cat bowl the other night and vaguely remember slipping on a rug. The next thing I remember is waking up with my wife holding my head and my brain doing flip-flops. I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but am sure—based upon my head pain—that I smacked my noggin […]