A Truth That Will Surprise You
Let me tell you a truth that will surprise you but will also help us identify an enemy of strong leadership. Most men who have extra-marital affairs do so out of boredom. I know this sounds strange. You would think they would be driven only by lust. The truth is that when we do the post-mortem on leadership crashes caused by affairs, most of the men involved were trying to break out of suffocating boredom. It was the intrigue of the affair that appealed to them most. The woman was attractive to them but they were mainly drawn by the[read more]
The Cancer of Offense
There is a force that I’ve seen destroy a huge number of leaders. I want to help you avoid it. The force I’m talking about is the cancer of offense. Leaders are frontline and visible. They usually have strong personalities and a fiery sense of themselves. As a result, they can rub people the wrong way. They can generate resentment in others. They can make themselves targets of payback and wounding opposition. Add to this the fact that leaders are often charged with being in command during bruising battles and you can see that a leader’s life is often lived[read more]
Leadership and Public Relations
Leadership is not all public relations, but good leadership does involve public relations. In my view, PR is simply about telling a story, telling it widely, and controlling that story as much as you can. Leaders who can’t do this don’t have all the tools of leadership in their toolbox. If you’ve been getting Leading Thoughts for a while, you know I have no intention of being political here, but I do want to use Donald Trump’s latest troubles as an example for you. There are three huge laws of public relations that I push aggressively with my clients. First, narrate reality,[read more]
The Art of Leadership Humor
Last week I asked you to read a selection from my book The Character and Greatness of Winston Churchill. It was a piece about humor and the purposes it can serve in a leader’s arsenal. I want to add some thoughts to that piece and make application more directly to your life as a leader. Some leaders are naturally funny. Most are not. It doesn’t matter. We can all learn how to round out our humor, as I’ll explain in a minute. The most important matter is to understand the purposes of humor. It is easy to get the impression[read more]
Humor
In this week’s Leading Thoughts, I want to offer a short piece from one of my books. I’m doing this because the piece deals with humor in the life of Winston Churchill. It is hard to exaggerate how important humor is in a leader’s arsenal. I’m not referring to the silly, giggly brand of humor common these days, but rather to the higher humor that both wrings a laugh and imprints an enduring message. Churchill was a master at this, so forgive the length and the presumption of quoting my own work, and enjoy this chapter from The Character and Greatness of[read more]
An Ordered or Paced Life
If I urged you to live an “ordered” or “paced” life, would it make any sense to you? If I said I wanted you to get more rest, and I meant this both in the sense of physical rest and also in the sense that you be at rest about the most important factors in your life, would that have meaning for you? I have recently been asked to advise some significant leaders about major crises in their lives. Though each of these situations are unrelated to each other, the crises are all from the same source. In each case,[read more]
Discerning The Future
I have been in Saudi Arabia during the past two weeks. I was lecturing at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). It was a wonderful experience and I want to offer a lesson from it in this week’s Leading Thoughts. Some years ago, King Abdullah concluded that the oil in Saudi Arabia would one day run out. This meant that his people would have to learn different skills and shift to a different kind of economy. He decided to build a university that would train the top students in the knowledge necessary for this new economy. He put[read more]
Turning Points
I’ve talked to hundreds of leaders in my life. One of the common themes of these conversations is “turning points”—those books, movies, people, or experiences that made a profound and almost instant difference in a life of leadership. I’ve been pondering my own “turning points” recently, largely because I’ve been increasingly asked about them so often in the Q&A sessions that follow my speeches. It has been pleasant to think back on those moments and the good that came from them. So, let me list three books and three movies that have shaped my life of leadership. Perhaps you’ll find[read more]
Groupthink
It was George Orwell who first coined the term “groupthink” in his disturbing novel 1984. In this one word he captured the dangers and dysfunctions that can deform the thinking of a group. It would help us to apply this term to our lives. Orwell intended “groupthink” to describe the hyper-conformity, manufactured consent, and deference to strong personalities that often permeate groups. Consensus forms out of compliance, passivity gives the appearance of unity, bullying is mistaken for leadership, and self-deception masquerades as conviction. In short, the group pummels its members into submission and calls it progress. Orwell applied this meaning to totalitarian[read more]
Chief Integrity Officer
We live in a world of facades. We live in a world of branding that isn’t always true and of “staging” and of “fake it ‘til you make it.” Things are rarely as they appear to be, and it all has an effect upon us. We can get used to surface appearances that are far different from the realities at any depth. We can also let cynicism tempt us to settle for the facades. This can kill great leadership. A leader’s job is to make sure that all is not only as it appears to be but that it is[read more]