[Dr. Thompson is currently William L. Giles Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Mississippi State University. Joe has a long and distinguished career during which he founded an NSF Engineering Research Center, revolutionized computational aerodynamics, and served on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 through 2001 under both Clinton and Bush.]

Looking back on […]

Teach what you know.
As a lightweight way to steer my life in the direction of making some small positive difference I’m a pretty big fan of that phrase. And if you are serious about developing yourself into a leader who makes a difference, you might want to consider adopting it for yourself.
Teaching as a way […]

Here’s another mom-and-apple-pie post, but hey, just because your mom said it doesn’t mean it’s not worth thinking about!
Most of what we’ve been talking about in this leadership philosophy series of posts is about a point of view—specifically, the point of view that I’ve adopted in my development as a leader and had some success […]

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, […]

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 […]