Having a balanced life has other benefits beyond just supercharging your creativity by taking advantage of your subconscious and leaving yourself the energy to be open to new ideas (and execute on them).
If you have a balanced world view you’ll find that when you have failures, or when you experience setbacks, you will not fall […]

Yesterday I talked a little about honesty, and I promised an example that would help illustrate why committing yourself to honest interactions is such a key ingredient in leadership development. Let’s make this a little more concrete: what kind of honesty are we talking about?
Take the simple, but very common, example of the annual performance […]

So if you’re talking about leadership philosophy, and so far we are, here’s one that’s got to be on the list: Be honest. Well, duh.
Here’s the thing about honesty: it’s usually hardest when it matters the most.
But when you stick to it you’ll find benefits you never planned for, along paths you hadn’t thought were […]

Sometimes many, many failures.
All this excellence-seeking will lead you square into the path of something that most of us will go to great lengths to avoid: failure. We’ll blame others, blame our circumstances, and blame the weather to avoid responsibility for failure. Most usually and tragically we avoid failure by avoiding those things at which […]

Be great and, in turn, expect greatness from those around you.
So I’ll admit that today’s topic has high potential for sounding trite, preachy, and not particularly useful. That said, I do think there is value in repeating, at least once, what “everyone already knows,” because we all forget this stuff from time to time.
One of […]

In developing your own leadership abilities, shoot for balance: balance rest with exercise, work with play, professional with personal relationships, and so on.
This is harder than it sounds, and more valuable than you may think.
I am privileged to be part a fantastic organization that creates Good every day for our customers. To become, and remain, […]

Several of you have been asking me when the printed version of the book would be available, and I’ve been saying “oh, a couple weeks…” for at least a month now.
Well, the ducks are finally all lined up. The printed copies are winging their way towards me even as we speak, and I’ve updated the […]

Everyone has something to say. Most of the success I have in dealing with people is in making them feel valued, helping them feel as if they have a meaningful role to play in what is going on around them. People in all situations feel valued when they feel they have impact or influence on […]

Between 75 and 100 emails get through my various filters at work and home every day. This isn’t a huge e-mail load, but still represents a problem. If every email consumes only two minutes of my time (read, trash or respond, and file) I’ve burned between 2 and 3.5 hours each and every day doing […]

I already mentioned this, but while a lot of the material on the site comes from the book, reading this site won’t be like reading a book.
The book covers five broad topics (leadership philosophy, managing and leading people, writing, speaking, and managing your own career) in two major areas (leadership philosophy and skills of the […]