When I was a kid, a family friend told me that if you saved a penny and then doubled it every day, you’d have a million dollars by the end of the month. It was an early lesson in the magic of compounding growth. I’ve found this principle to be universal whether you are counting [...]
Fear is one of our most primal emotions. It helped our cave-swelling brethren survive – and they presumably passed on their successful genetics to us. Unfortunately, that hard-wired emotion of fear is still with us millions of year later. Fear is a leading cause of procrastination. Seth Godin argues in his book Tribes that it is often the fear of [...]
No leader ever sets out to deliberately do a bad job. But sometimes a leader is given the task of having to fix someone else’s bad job. This can be a daunting task especially if the damage and toxicity caused by the previous leadership has become a core element in the team’s culture. That said, [...]
Some people find themselves in leadership roles quite by accident. Someone quits or retires and overnight you are thrust into a leadership role. Maybe, after the latest restructuring, you are the last man (or woman) standing. Or, worse, you find out its simply your turn to be leader. Conversely, I often wonder whether people choose [...]
The Christmas season is a perfect time to take stock about our work as leaders. A lot of us are spending time a few days with family and friends before heading back to work. And a lot of us are going to head back into what could be best described as overstressed organizations. Overstressed organizations [...]
Leaders may well be a dying breed. Changing expectations and technology may herald the end of the role of leader as we know it. I’m talking about formal leaders. The one’s at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy. The larger-than-life turnaround CEO leader. The charismatic leader who motivates a team to boldly go where they’ve [...]
The biggest threat to organizations today is confusion. Complex organizations are especially at risk of confusion because there’s simply too much going on and systems are not in place to ensure people know what’s going on. Confused organizations are grossly inefficient with endless meetings (to mitigate the confusion), re-work or duplicated effort and leaders working [...]
The days of the heroic leader are gone. For years, we have heard about the amazing leaders who have singlehandedly made sweeping changes to an organization. We have idolized the likes of the “turnaround CEO” who can swoop in and rebuild a money-losing organization into a world leader. People such as Rudy Giuliani in New [...]
Your job can kill you. If you let it. Sure, there are lots of dangerous jobs out there. What I’m talking about is the risk to your health from working at a desk. I blogged a few weeks ago about a new study that concluded that working long hours doubles your risk of heart disease [...]
One of the toughest challenges for a leader today is finding sobriety in a world of workaholics. Hard charging executive leaders focus all of their energies on work. Ambitious corporate ladder climbers feel pressured to mimic the day-and-night work habits of their bosses. The instantaneous nature of today’s organizational communications, the ubiquity of company provided [...]