Good morning,The most important lesson to remember as a leader is that, for almost everyone, work is difficult. Keep in mind that, no matter how good a leader you are, how enjoyable a workplace you create, how well you empower your workers, they call it “work” for a reason. Philip Levine is a poet who captures this sentiment in his poem about auto workers, “What Work Is.” In honor of Mr. Levine’s passing this weekend, I encourage you to …
While most of us are pretty good at making daily to do lists, we generally have a much harder time being reflective. In today’s post I present a method that I have been using to become more reflective. There are basically two steps; one to do first thing in the morning, and the other to do in the evening. Step One: Think about your day ahead and what will be required of you to make it a good day. …
Resiliency is the ability to rebound from hardship, difficulty and misfortune and successfully adapt to adverse situations. It’s perhaps more important today than ever, because the world is more interconnected than at any time in history. The “flattening of the world,” as Thomas Friedman refers to it, means we experience turmoil faster, more intensely and more often. The worldwide financial turmoil of 2008 is a perfect example of that. Nothing great in life is ever achieved without taking considerable risk and facing distinct difficulties. So, going forward, …
The leaders I’ve worked with for some three decades have taught me many things, but these are two of the most important: Great leaders constantly strive to strike a balance between work and the other realms of their lives. Great leaders share a passion: They want to make a difference in the world. Here’s something else I’ve learned along the way: those two things go hand in hand. The most successful leaders are the ones who work the …
I have been enjoying reading “The Keeper”, the auto biography of Tim Howard– the bearded goalkeeper who was so sensational on the US Men’s National Team during last summer’s World Cup in Brazil. In his book, he talks openly about his two psychological disorders, which while causing him great difficulty in his early life, have also been an asset in his goalkeeping career. The psychological problems are Tourette’s Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which result in facial and verbal ticks, compulsive behavior, …
It’s the first day of the first full week of the year, and I woke up thinking about Isaac Newton and his first law of thermodynamics: objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless they are acted upon by an external force. “Yikes,” I think, “I think I know what that force is: work!” When it comes to work, no one had it more accurate than Maynard G Krebs. …