Double Your Productivity in 15 Minutes

guest blog by Dan Forbes, Founder of the Lead With Giants™ Community In the early 1900s Charles Schwab was president of Bethlehem Steel, a small, struggling company. He was looking for ways to increase productivity and profits. In walked Ivy Lee.  He was a business consultant and promised Schwab that in just fifteen minutes he could … Read more

Leadership Lessons from The Lord of the Rings

Leaders Venture into the Unknown  “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Bilbo Baggins Leaders Step Up “I will take the Ring,” Frodo said, “though I do not know the way.” … Read more

Put Trust on Your Daily Docket  

Leadership speaker and author Bob Vanourek use this picture of the trust definition in the dictionary to express the importance of trust.

Let’s assume that as a CEO or board leader you want your firm to be viewed as trustworthy by its stakeholders. You realize a more trusting set of relationships between people will be useful, perhaps even a breakthrough to improved performance. Great. But this is a field where you don’t have expertise. You have been … Read more

Rationalizations that Derail Leadership

Author and Leadership Speakers Bob Vanourek and Greg Vanourek use a train that has run off the tracks to show how rationalizations can adversely affect leadership abilities.

“The softest pillow is a clear conscience.” –Narayana Murthy, Co-founder and former CEO, Infosys Our ability to rationalize our behavior is astonishing. And dangerous. Basically, we all have a good sense of what’s right or wrong, but we have an inherent ability to talk ourselves into believing that something that’s wrong is really okay. We’re … Read more

Three Responsibilities of Great Leadership

Great leadership has many responsibilities: Safeguarding your colleagues Serving your stakeholders Making tough decisions Planning for succession And much more However, certain responsibilities are critically important and do not get the time and attention they deserve. Here are three.   1) Commit to the triple crown quest of building an excellent, ethical, and enduring organization. The … Read more

Six Tips on Giving Effective Feedback

Leadership speakers and authors, Bob Vanourek and Gregg Vanourek, use the image of an older gentleman listening intently to a co-worker to show the importance of transparency.

Here are some edited excerpts from a great post by our leadership colleague, Chuck Wachendorfer, on giving feedback effectively.   Giving feedback effectively includes following these rules: 1. Focus on the behavior, not the intention. Never question someone’s intent. Assume they wanted to do the job well. It’s the behavior that may have fallen short. … Read more

Leader, Manager, Follower: Not as Simple as You Think

“Life’s a dance, you learn as you go. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow.” -song lyric by John Michael Montgomery Which are you: a leader, manager, or follower? More importantly, which should you be? Can you be them all? Should you? It’s an important choice. Too often, leadership is lionized while management and followership are … Read more

The Scourge of Short-Termism

Leadership speakers and authors Bob Vanourek & Gregg Vanourek use the image of newsprint saying "stocks falling" to illustrate the scourge of short-termism.

 “The future whispers while the present shouts.” –Al Gore, former U.S. Vice President One of the great scourges of our age is “short-termism.” A staggering 78 percent of the managers surveyed in a large-scale study of CFOs and CEOs admit to sacrificing long-term value to achieve smoother earnings. In July 2011, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation … Read more

Twelve Tips to Grow as a Leader

Leadership speakers Bob Vanourek and Gregg Vanourek feature Nelson Mandela as exemplifying growth in leadership.

Leaders aren’t born. They grow. Yes, some people are born with characteristics that make leadership easier. Some people are more outgoing, or intellectually gifted, or quick thinking. Some are excellent communicators, or have natural self-belief. But opportunities to learn and grow dramatically outweigh all of those factors combined. Leadership is learned and developed through a … Read more

Is Your Organization Out of Alignment? Two Checklists

The single hand of a drowning man illustrates how it feels to be out of organizational alignment, as seen by leadership speakers Bob Vanourek & Gregg Vanourek.

Are you working more but enjoying it less? Stressed out? Overloaded? Does it feel like things are slipping out of control? These conditions are becoming “the new normal” for leaders today; they also indicate that your organization is out of alignment: People are working at cross-purposes Turf wars break out between departments Everyone is criticizing … Read more

“Take This Job and Shove It”? Not So Fast

Sometimes you have to walk out. Some of you are stuck in a toxic firm or with a terrible boss. But before you say, “Take this job and shove it” (to quote the old song), let’s run through a pre-flight checklist before flying the coop.   1. Live Lean If you don’t have your dream … Read more

The Three Most Important Questions About Your Leadership

Here are three critical questions to ask yourself before you undertake the responsibility of leading other people:   1. What’s the difference between “the leader” and “leadership”? “The leader” is the historical leadership model that has led us astray so often. It focuses on the skills, attributes, and qualities of the “the leader.” It tells … Read more

Unleashing Other Leaders

Bird out of Cage demonstrates the power of unleashing other leaders.

Leaders today need to, not only develop loyal and committed followers, but also unleash other leaders who can lead various critical tasks. Leadership in this scenario is not about the great skills and talents of “the leader,” but the collective strengths and blended talents of the leaders and the followers, who variously lead at times … Read more

We’re All Entrepreneurs Now

guest Blog by Mike Critelli During my 25-year tenure as a senior business leader, I have seen a remarkable change in the requirements for successful business leadership. Leaders today must adopt more entrepreneurial behaviors and imbed them in their organizations, however large or mature those organizations might be. The image of an entrepreneur as a … Read more

Creating Alignment & Balance through High-Performance Leadership

(This is a guest blog by Charles Walsh.) One of the most important aspects of leadership today is intentional alignment of purpose and direction. A four-quadrant approach will assist you in achieving high-performance leadership while ensuring balance of effectiveness and impact of results. In the 21st century, the battle cry of top leaders is achieving … Read more

Synthesis: A Critical Leadership Skill

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo Da Vinci Leaders today are swamped with information 24/7. The complexity can be overwhelming. Yet leaders are supposed to rally colleagues with insightful analyses of problems and plans for how to succeed. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. spoke about the importance of getting to the “simplicity on the other side … Read more

Leading a Tech Startup in China

Interview with Steve Mushero   Founder, CEO, & CTO, ChinaNetCloud Leaders Speak Series Steve Mushero is Founder, CEO, and CTO of ChinaNetCloud, a leading global provider of Internet Managed Services. Headquartered in Shanghai, China, ChinaNetCloud is a private company founded by Silicon Valley technology entrepreneurs, with a team of system experts and support staff in … Read more

More Leadership Half-Truths

Many leaders operate from half-truths or outright misconceptions about leadership. Here are more examples, adding to our prior post, “10 Leadership Myths and Half-Truths.”    Half-Truth: Leaders Hire the Most Competent People Yes, leaders hire for competencies and skills, but equally important is to hire and promote people with character, emotional intelligence, and cultural fit. … Read more

Vanguard’s Values-Based Visionary: Jack Bogle

Interview with John Bogle  Founder and Former Chairman and CEO, The Vanguard Group Leaders Speak Series The Vanguard Group is an investment company with over $2.0 trillion in assets, offering mutual funds and other financial products and services. The investors who place money in the funds own Vanguard. Based on his undergraduate thesis at Princeton, founder … Read more

Leadership Is a Group Performance

Leadership a group performance? Ridiculous, right? It’s true. In this age of intense competition, information overload, and downsizing, no leader can do it alone. The amount of work coming into your inbox seems infinite. The faster you turn it out, the faster new stuff roars in. So how do you cope? You recognize that the … Read more

What Makes Mayo Clinic Great

Interview with Drs. Leonard Berry and Kent Seltman  Authors of Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic Leaders Speak Series Mayo Clinic, founded in 1864, is a global leader in health care delivery, research, and education. With its four main hospitals and additional affiliated hospitals and clinics, Mayo serves more than a million patients annually with revenue … Read more

The Leader’s Worst Enemy: Ego

Of all the leadership traps, none is more fatal than ego. When others around you are whispering how wonderful you are, how fortunate the group is to be led by you, then even the strongest of wills can break. Or, if you are so insecure that you must feed your own ego, then your leadership … Read more

Suicide by Quarter–Leading for the Short-Term

Have you ever: Told one of your line managers to “do whatever it takes to make your numbers this quarter”? Pulled sales from next quarter to make this quarter’s numbers? Cut into critical R&D funds to hit Wall Street forecasts? Asked the CFO to lower the reserves for future expenses to help earnings this quarter? … Read more

The End of Leadership?

Barbara Kellerman and Jim O’Toole, two leadership experts we respect, are ticked off about the failures in leadership we witness virtually every day. (See “Mad About Leadership” in Strategy+Business, June 2012). Think of all the leadership-related scandals recently:   Recent Leadership Hall of Shame Barclays Bear Stearns BP Countrywide Financial Galleon Group GlaxoSmithKline Goldman Sachs … Read more

How Great Leaders Maintain Exceptional Focus

One of the cruel ironies of our time is that with such incredible access to information, many leaders are drowning in data and bogging down in complexity. They drink through a fire hose of reports, analytics, blogs, and tweets. Mobile devices blessedly update and painfully distract. At some point, the choices become debilitating, especially with … Read more

Leadership and the Quest for Excellence

Getting results is one of the preeminent tasks of leadership. “The world is not interested in the storms you encountered,” says Norman Augustine, “but in whether or not you brought the ship in safely.” Perhaps he took his cue from Winston Churchill. When asked about the Allies’ aim in World War II, he replied: “I … Read more