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Growing Up Globally Aware in America-A Key to Your Children’s Future Success

Mar 12, 2010

As if parenting isn’t challenging enough for most of us, there’s another task to add to a list that doesn’t seem to lack for things to do. This one may require foregoing a few soccer games, conducting some more of those “talks” and putting the effort forth to create new educational opportunities and family experiences. I’m talking about ensuring that our future generations of leaders grow up globally aware and highly familiar with the rich and complicated level of diversity, customs, practices and subtle and significant variations across cultures, countries and religions.

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Make Meaning as a Leader

Mar 10, 2010

The best leaders that I know are driven by an internal belief and desire to create something good and significant through their leadership efforts. They are egotistical enough to understand that they want to pursue greatness in some terms, and they are humble enough to know that none of this is about them, but rather it is for and with and by others that this something can be achieved.

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March Leadership Development Carnival at Great Leadership

Mar 8, 2010

I’m still chuckling over Dan McCarthy’s creativity with his Special Academy Awards Edition of the Leadership Development Carnival! In addition to great content from so many Red Carpet bloggers, Dan has me doing the opening musical and dance number. He clearly forgot to consult with my wife who would have informed him that I have two feet…both left, and my best songs are truly the ones that no one can hear outside of the range of my shower!

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Leadership Caffeine™-Learning to Lead in the Project-Focused World

Feb 28, 2010

The rise of “the project” as an important means of competing and creating value has profound implications for those in leadership roles. Unfortunately, in many cases, the evolution in leadership practices has not kept pace with the needs of project teams or the needs of organizations struggling to develop competence at executing on projects.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Teach, Don’t Tell

Feb 22, 2010

I discovered a long time ago that I was much more effective as a leader and as a father (a much harder job to get right!) if I adopted an approach that emphasized teaching over telling. While there are circumstances where telling is appropriate…the battlefield, the operating room, perhaps the football field and a few others that I’m sure that I would think of if given enough time, most people prefer to learn, not to carry out orders.

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Personal Responsibility and Success: Quit Shooting Yourself in the Foot!

Feb 19, 2010

I’ve been harping on personal responsibility at least once per week recently, and can’t quite get it out of my system. I’m bombarded daily with too many examples of people that fail to take responsibility for their actions and in the process, often stop one step short of success. One of my as yet unresolved points of personal inquiry (and wonder), involves those individuals in businesses and in graduate and undergraduate classes that are seemingly armed with their fair share of intellectual gifts and raw capabilities, but that still manage to metaphorically shoot themselves in one or both feet with alarming regularity.

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Embrace Ambiguity and Grow With It

Feb 17, 2010

Many people fear ambiguity and/or they don’t trust their own ability to create or solve a problem, so they respond with a question that delegates the thinking to someone else. That’s a bad habit, and if the workplace or college classrooms were refereed events, those “you do my thinking for me so I don’t have to be creative or take a risk” questions would be infractions.

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Suddenly, Deming is Relevant Again

Feb 12, 2010

In my opinion, Deming has never been irrelevant as a management philosopher, teacher and advisor, but our fast-moving, idol-for-a-minute, fad-crazed modern culture, we’re quick to write off those thinkers and doers from prior eras as yesterday’s relics…interesting perhaps, but irrelevant.

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The New Employer-Employee Loyalty Prescription

Feb 10, 2010

The term and concept of “loyalty” is one that is frequently bandied about in phrases that sound much like, “there is no longer any loyalty to workers,” and “few workers admit any feelings of loyalty to their employers.” The term is also used to contrast today’s transactional workplace relationships with the supposed near utopian state of yesteryear, when our parents and grandparents started at one company early in their lives and ended up retiring from that company 40 years later. The concept of “loyalty” in the workplace is in need of a makeover, complete with a new definition and fresh examples of what constitute reasonable and professional levels of loyalty for and from all parties.

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February Leadership Development Carnival

Feb 7, 2010

Thanks to Mark Bennett and the great people at Talented Apps for hosting the February, 2010 Leadership Development Carnival. Take a stroll through the Carnevale di Venezia Edition (you’ll have to click over to understand the creative tie-in to the Carnival in Venice) and check out some truly intriguing, inspiring and compelling posts from bloggers old and new. OK, instead of old, perhaps I should say familiar!

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