Just when you think you can’t take on one more concern, you’ve heard about two new illnesses from the Center for Leadership Disease Control here at Management Excellence. A few weeks ago, you were shocked to learn of the longstanding but freshly named malady, Tired Leader Syndrome. Adding fuel to the fire was the recent announcement here at the Center for Leadership Disease and Control at Management Excellence, that researchers have finally isolated the causes of a long-standing leadership wasting disease. This heretofore unnamed but common set of symptoms is now called Two-Dimensional Leadership Disease or TDLD for short.

I know an awful lot of talented, hard-working people talking about or rehearsing for the process of reinventing their professional selves. This is the silent epidemic taking place in people over 40 that doesn’t garner the same level of attention as our anticipated flu epidemics.

Note from Art: my week of alternative blog fare continues with this very autobiographical reflection on the formation of my later life leadership viewpoints! It's remarkable what you can learn and do if your attitude is focused on finding ways to improve and turning so-called down-time into time for creativity and improvement.

If you don’t know your customers at a sufficient level of detail, including their hopes, dreams and emotions, everything you are doing includes a high degree of guesswork and randomness. Your messaging likely includes a great deal of blah blah about your firm. Promotional activities are fired from a shotgun, and while they occasionally hit something, there is no viable, sustainable marketing system in place.