Articles & commentary
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The Leader’s Greatest Harvest
“Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” – Marcus Aurelius Seeds are curious things – small, innocuous . . . overlooked. Incredibly, they are filled with an amazing power for growth. A growth for greatness. So, too, is your capability for seeding leadership potential! I learned from a…
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The Art of Applying STEM: Why STEAM Matters
Intentionality of design is an important component of any successful project. It means understanding the customers’ needs to ensure the final product meets, or exceeds, those needs in the customers’ own context and constraints. Wouldn’t it be great if these were baked-in at the beginning? If we intentionally designed products, services, and processes not only…
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The Great Turkey Rebellion: A Tale of Strategy and Complex Change
The turkeys gathered by the light of the moon to conspire against the farmer, who was preparing to satisfy the needs of holiday dinner-parties throughout the town. They spent the evening drawing up battle plans, sharpening beaks and claws, and discussing the benefit of rotten eggs launched from catapults as distracting fire. As the dawn…
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Confrontation From A Fruit Fly’s Perspective
“Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.” Groucho Marx There are over 5,000 species of fruit fly in the tephritidae family, each with unique properties. So many species, in fact, biologists have made it a favorite pastime to analyze the tiny creature in the quest for advancements ranging from ecology to neurobiology.…
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Thank You For Your Service
See on Scoop.it – Living Leadership This is one of most honored posts I’ve ever ever hosted. Lt. Col. Matthew Fritz is Director, Commander’s Action Group of NATO’s Air Training Command in Afghanistan. Training a newly formed Afghan Air Force is the epitome in complex continual change management. Matt has become a very dear friend, thanks to…
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Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is the hottest leadership catch phrase, but what does it actually mean? At its core, emotional intelligence, or EQ, is a set of characteristics or traits possessed by effective and influential leaders. Emotionally intelligent leaders have a heightened awareness of their strengths and weaknesses and can adjust their leadership approach after reading group…
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Neuroscience Confirms We Buy on Emotion & Justify with Logic & yet We Sell to Mr. Rational & Ignore Mr. Intuitive
Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman[i] says that 95% of our purchase decision making takes place subconsciously (aka System 1).[ii] Despite widespread agreement amongst neuroscientists that our conscious rational mind plays a minor role in decision making, why do our sales messages to buyers focus almost exclusively on facts and figures? Doesn’t all of this…
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Hiring Veterans Is Easy. Keeping Them Is Hard
After a collective push to hire more than a million U.S. military veterans in recent years, business is wrestling with a new challenge: holding on to them. Hiring initiatives by Verizon Communications Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Union Pacific Corp. and hundreds of other companies have helped cut unemployment among younger veterans—in the double digits six years…
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Are You Missing Half of the Change Equation?
All types of organizations give change top priority, but studies consistently show between 50-70% of change efforts fail. It doesn’t bode well for organizational ambitions if such efforts are — at best — just as likely to fail as they are to succeed. How can leaders and organizations improve the odds of success? We found…
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Beyond The 80/20 Rule: This Formula Might Make You Rethink Time Management
Kim ran a successful professional services firm with a staff of 28 and clients in a dozen states. But when she shared her 2017 goals with me, I saw something that gave me pause. There, under her revenue and profit goals for the year, was this sentence: “Eliminate 12 hours a month of non-revenue work.”…