The Hurt Locker is a gripping movie — enthusiastically and universally acclaimed — about an elite team of American soldiers in Iraq “who have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world: disarming bombs in the heat of combat.” Time after time we watch the team’s new leader, Staff Sergeant William James, arrive at Read More

Leaders gain trust and teach people what’s important to them by telling stories. But these days there’s so much to attend to — now! — coming at us so fast. You might be tempted to let slide your soft skills, like how to tell a useful story. Just get to the point and move on Read More

What kind of leadership do we need now? This was the question I asked last week at the beginning of a day-long workshop attended by a group of senior-level women at a major technology firm headquartered on the west coast of the US. And I’ve been asking this question of thousands of other business professionals Read More

I just returned from Toronto where I spent some time in the hands of an amazing corps of health care professionals at Medcan, North America’s biggest preventive health clinic. I heard more than one story of how Medcan’s preventive assessments saved lives — and enormous medical cost. Medcan’s CEO, Shaun Francis, is an alumnus of Read More

A distinguished woman rose to speak in the front of a room of 40 fellow employees during a Total Leadership workshop I was conducting earlier this week at a large pharmaceutical company’s headquarters. “Joyous laughter — this is the sound I hear throughout the home I have built and now maintain for mentally ill women Read More

Steve Lopez’s magnificent story (a book and now a movie) about his friendship with Nathaniel Ayers — the homeless cellist stricken with schizophrenia — provides powerful lessons about leading change that instruct and inspire. As I read the story, I found myself coming back to three themes that resonated with my own teaching on creating Read More

Who cares what games we choose…little to win, nothing to lose. So goes the chorus of the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s 1967 #1 hit song, Incense and Peppermints. This phrase — an iconic representation of ’60s counterculture — came to mind the other day as I read what one of my Wharton MBA students wrote in Read More

A New York Times story (the most emailed article for much of today and yesterday) reports on the positive impact school recess has on academic performance. Here’s how it begins: “The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.” The paradoxical lesson of this story is Read More

Too often I hear the word “leader” misused. It’s a sad fact that many business professionals don’t see themselves as leaders, mainly because “leader” is a term typically linked to people in positions of formal authority. This is a fallacy that undermines performance, in all aspects of life. Someone said to me recently, “I don’t Read More

In a recent blog post I wrote: An economic world turned upside down makes it easier to take a fresh look. This can open the door to making changes that will benefit you and the most important people in your life, now and in the long run….The crisis, in other words, can make it easier to Read More