Here in the United States, last month’s Super Bowl is long over. Its headline stories have been told and retold, its heroes decided, and its lessons have already taken back to locker rooms and front offices for next year’s planning. Sometimes, however, it’s the stories that get overlooked that impart...

What’s the key to success in business? It’s what all leaders hope to find out and pursue. For years, when asked this question, leaders have been unambiguous in their answer: Culture. As but one example, a whopping 94% of executives in a Deloitte study said they believed that a distinct...

Consider this thought: As leaders, as organizations, we’re doing too much. A related and more troubling thought: Many leaders have in fact lost our way.  Far from speculation, according to a number of studies those are among the dominant themes of the last year. As leaders close out the current...

Here in the United States, there’s been a lot of news lately about professional football – American football, that is. Yet, even if you’re not a fan or follower of the sport, the storyline is all too familiar and worthy of your attention – especially if you are a senior...

Right now, leaders across the globe are trying to figure out their strategy. A pandemic-scarred world that isn’t quite post-pandemic makes this extremely difficult. The landscape is volatile. Solutions seem to demand a complexity equal to the complexity of the environment. And the clues to what tomorrow will bring are...

One of the hardest parts to being a leader is freshness. It’s not a term we typically use when talking about effective leadership, but it’s always there. We tend to focus instead on the many forms it takes, the freshness of ideas, for example. It’s there in other forms too,...

Over the course of the past three weeks, the International Olympic Committee and this year’s host Japan have doled out hundreds of bronze, silver, and gold medals – symbols given to athletes for reaching the height of human achievement in whatever sport they’ve dedicated years to being the best. Long...

Metaphors can be powerful. “She has a heart of gold.” “All the world’s a stage.” We hear a good one and like magic an image or idea from an entirely different zone can suddenly shed new light on a challenge or opportunity we face in our own zone that has...

With the deluge of news stories, you’re to be forgiven if you missed the recent news of tennis star Naomi Osaka dropping out of the French Open – not for reasons of physical injury, but something less often talked about. When she announced her decision, Osaka said it was a...

A very long time ago I learned a simple rule of thumb that has countless times proved itself true: The best lessons, the breakout lessons, often come from somewhere other than the land you know. It’s a rule of thumb that can frequently run counter to our habits as leaders....

Two things are undeniably true. The first is that regardless of which part of the planet you occupy or what sector you work in, the world today is turbulent. Just pre-pandemic, a survey of 1,500 senior leaders found 84% describing their current operating world as "increasingly disruptive." Immediately prior to...

Our images of the perfect leader, team, or organization are flawed, most notably when it comes to disagreement. Almost universally, we regard disagreement as bad, something to be avoided, severely limited, or at the extremes, punished. An affinity for order drives this view. Predictable processes, roles, and interactions, we are...

Planning, tactics, clear roles, and all other forms of order and discipline—to one degree or another, as leaders and as followers, in organizations small and large, frankly as humans we pine for these things. They promise predictability (even when they fail to deliver). But here's the problem: The world today...

Norman Maclean wasn’t a business writer. He didn’t consciously write about leadership either. In fact, fewer than should don’t even know who Maclean was—even if they know that a young Brad Pitt starred in a movie based on Maclean’s most popular novella, A River Runs Through It. But that doesn’t...

Here’s a thought that goes against the default thinking of most leaders: Increasingly, it’s more important not to lead than to lead. Strange as it may at first sound, in a highly uncertain world it’s an important thought to understand and embrace—that is if your goals include adaptability, innovation, and...