Leadership

“Freud had a point. He was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him.” That’s what brought me to 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos . I’m a part of a list where folks discuss various aspects of positive psychology. A 20-pag...

There are no silver bullets – and even if there were, it wouldn’t be very safe to shoot them. The path to developing psychological safety isn’t easy, but Timothy Clark offers some practical steps and advice on how to build psychological safety in The 4 Stag...

What happens when you step out of Disneyland or Walt Disney World? You take the shuttles, monorail, or boats back to your vehicle… But what then? What happens after you’ve been to a place of magic and you come back to the “real world?” Do you bring a...

It's an uncomfortable conversation. There is a group of change practitioners who believe coaching is required to accomplish change. I'm not convinced. However, to investigate the premise a bit, I picked up The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More &...

Leadership isn’t easy. It’s difficult, because leadership requires a great deal of strength. I don’t mean lift-a-car-off-a-child sort of strength. I mean the kind of strength to both understand who you are and be who you are. Brené Brown’s latest book, Da...

I read a lot of content on psychology. I love learning more about how people think. I am intrigued by different attempts to understand the human condition. However, I don’t find myself interested in studying the neurology of how the brain works. In Emotional In...

Nice guys finish last – or do they? This is at the heart of Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success . If you study people and sort them into categories of the most giving and those that are trying to wring out the very last ounce that l...

Sometimes you stumble over a book in a way that makes you believe that there’s some outside force – God or the higher power or whatever – and you decide you need to read it. Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the Wo...

Generally, I don’t read biographies.  For me, they’re boring.  However, Ed Stack became very interesting to me, so I decided that there must be more to him and his book, It’s How We Play the Game , than meets the eye –enough that it was a worthy investmen...

Learning how to grow a company is a difficult challenge. There’s never enough time and always too many problems. There’s always the gap between what you want to do and what you actually do accomplish. However, despite this some leaders manage to create not...

Sometimes, I get to know some truly amazing people. I get to spend time with other speakers and authors who have messages to share with the world. One of the people I’m privileged to know is JoDee Curtis and her team at Purple Ink . The latest book th...

The title is simple. The book is long. However, Leadership  is a comprehensive look at political leadership that James MacGregor Burns executes well. I’m not personally much of a fan of political books. However, as I read Leadership for the Twenty-First Cent...

Self-Esteem is something we’re pushing into our children. Dr. Spock’s guidance to parents in the 1950s led parents to work on a child’s self-esteem to the exclusion of proper discipline. Here’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in Finding Flow : “Dr...

Every organization wants extraordinary results.  That’s what The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations promises.  Built on decades of research, the book lays out a framework for what James Kouzes and Barry Pos...

Leadership is a tricky word to define. That’s why, in Leadership for the Twenty-First Century , Joseph Rost takes more than two-thirds of the book to try to define it – and probably still doesn’t get it quite right. You might expect that I wouldn’t be a fan...

There’s an old I Love Lucy  episode where Lucy and Edith are workers at a chocolate factory, and they can’t keep up, so they start eating the chocolates and stuffing them in their clothes. Laverne and Shirley  are standing in front of an assembly line in...

Sometimes, paths cross a few times before connections are made.  The Leadership of Organizational Change wasn’t my first interaction with Mark Hughes.  I read it because of the respect I had for a man who has spent his life trying to understand and...

Never has the relationship between leadership and change been so laid bare as in Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change . It should not be surprising that leadership and change are so related. Leaders are the catalysts and...

As a consultant for the better part of my career, I have had the opportunity to move between organizations fairly fluidly. I’ll be working with a manager for a few months or a few years and then move to the next project at the next organization. One o...

Sometimes my reading list has me walking down a long hall with statues lining each side. The statues are the great men and women who moved forward our understanding of ourselves, the way that we work, and the way that we lead. On Becoming a Leader is...

It was the closest that the world had ever come to a global nuclear war, and it started in America’s back yard. Metaphorically speaking, it was just one minute from the end of the atomic day. The clock advanced to just one minute before midnight, a w...

There are numerous books about leadership. A plethora of visionaries over the years have sought to improve leadership in organizations. So what makes Primal Leadership  unique is that it talks about the emotional component of leadership. Speaking about e...

There are a lot of noisy leaders in our world today. There are too few people who have the courage and desire to demonstrate Quiet Leadership . The book is interesting, because, ostensibly, it's introducing you to a six-step process for transforming...

Terri and I give a talk on conflict de-escalation and resolution with great regularity. One part of that talk is about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and specifically the introversion-extroversion scale. I – from the front of the room – ask the...

Have you ever had that bewildering moment when you’re in a conversation and you suddenly realize that you have no idea what the conversation is about? You’re going along, disagreeing but still conversing, until you reach the moment when you’re aware that ...

I meet monthly with a group of organizational development folks. Some of them are professors. Some are consultants. Others are practitioners in their organizations. I love the meetings because they challenge me to learn and grow. Several of the participants...

Being the president of your own company has its advantages. However, it doesn’t mean that you always get your way or that you’ve always got the power to tell others what to do. There are committees, boards, and other places where you’re not in charge. In my...

Margaret Wheatley’s work was a recommendation from a friend.  In a chance part of our conversations, he shared his reverence for her and her work.  That’s why I picked up Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, and Restoring Sanit...

My first visit to Walt Disney World was when I was about eight or nine. I can’t remember my exact age but from the pictures and my memories I know that I wasn’t too much older than that. I can remember arriving when the park opened and leaving when the...