[December 16, 2015] As military truisms go, this saying has been around since before recorded history. To underestimate your enemy often led directly to your death and to a Darwinian winnowing of leaders. In the business world, a related axiom is that you should never underestimate your competition. When senior leaders underestimate the enemy, people suffer – massacres,… Read More »
[December 11, 2015] Strong leaders have the capability to rally people to a great cause, inspire others, and lead them to achieve something no one else is able to do. Strong leaders can be controversial, divisive, and even a bit of a rebel … but they have clarity in their bold vision and are pragmatic in their goals.… Read More »
[December 2, 2015] As conversation would have it, our young adult children are great fans of the Star Trek series and the (so-called) unemotional character Commander Spock. The fictional character Spock is of a human-Vulcan heritage, but it’s his control over emotions and the logical manner that they liked most. Over the Thanksgiving holiday we discussed whether emotions… Read More »
[November 24, 2015] Leadership is certainly not easy, but no one who has taken such a position does so with the intent to do a bad job of it. Poor leadership – that can be described as being ineffective – is also not something that comes about due to a single error or bad decision but from a… Read More »
[November 23, 2015] The weather has turned cooler and the tree in front of my house has lost all but a few of its leaves. With cooler weather and the political season heating up I find it satisfying to sit down with a good book; one that pushes my intellectual boundaries. Books that create controversy are some of… Read More »
[September 30, 2015] In a previous post I listed the characteristics people like in a leader. What attracts people to a leader is of course no secret, but what is it that attracts leaders to other leaders? What leaders like in leaders, on the other hand, can be mysterious because so little is written about it. “Moral courage… Read More »
[July 31, 2015] If there is one thing that I’ve learned as a senior leader it’s that the best predictor of success in leaders is how those adults fared as children – did they grow up in a stable family and have the right experiences? Many leaders have begun to emphasize the importance of developing certain characteristics in… Read More »
[July 08, 2015] I listened intently to a small group of Albanian refugees, 16 years ago to the day in 1999, telling stories about their flight from their home country of Kosovo. They’d departed quickly; fleeing from an ethnic-inspired war that not only drove them from their homes but also saw the destruction of all records showing their… Read More »
[June 14, 2015] For those who’ve served in the U.S. military, there will always be a special place in our hearts for the Stars and Stripes – the flag of the United States of America. In our most recent war against terror, like the servicemen of World War II, we wore a U.S. flag patch on our right… Read More »
[June 06, 2015] Today we pay our respect to those involved in the success of Operation Overlord, more commonly known as D-Day on June 06, 1944 … the date of the first landings. Allies came ashore at Normandy, France and began the war to evict and eventually destroy Nazi Germany. There were four crucial events that preceded the… Read More »