Presence

Today’s Tuesday Reading is the essay “I’m Thinking.  Please.  Be Quiet.”  which appeared in the August 24, 2013 issue of The New York Times.  George Prochink, the essay’s author, is also author of the forthcoming book, “The Impossible Exile.” Around 1850, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who felt that he had been tortured by noise all his life, […]

Leadership lessons continue to flow from the recent worst-to-first Red Sox season.  Here is a great article from Fast Company on David Ortiz and leadership, “World Series MVP David Ortiz’s Big, Bold, On-the-fly Leadership Lessons“. It’s lessons:   1.  Borrow from other industries.  I.e., the huddle. Video of Papi rallies his teammates in dugout   […]

Many aspire to be a formal leader at some point in their career.  The Tuesday Reading for today has some advice for you:  “Act Like A Leader Before You Are One”.  In her HBR blog, Amy Gallo, contributing editor at the Harvard Business Review, suggests that you begin to act, think, and communicate like a […]

Among the attributes that all leaders need is confidence – not too much so as to be blinded by benign overly confidence and not too little to feel inadequate. This week’s Tuesday Reading, “To Strengthen Your Confidence, Look To Your Past” <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/to_strengthen_your_confidence.html>, comes from the pens of Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins.  Su and […]

It’s hard to be a good judge of people.  Because it’s hard we often, almost exclusively, depend on extrinsic markers academic scores, results in previous jobs, job titles, salary, etc.  We can also add extrinsic measures from social media – how many friends of Facebook, followers on Twitter, or who we know in common on […]

This essay first appeared in the Harvard Business Review blog and comes from the pens of Deborah Gruenfeld, Maghadam Family Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Lauren Zander is Founder of the Handel Group. Gruenfeld and Zander posit that authenticity is of great value as a leader […]

In “The True Story of Amazing Customer Service From – GASP! – an Airline”, Barbara Apple Sullivan, CEO and managing partner of Sullivan, a brand engagement firm based in New York City, retells the experience she had when she lost her passport in Paris, trying to return to the States on Delta Airlines.   From […]

Anna Mar, engagement manager and senior writer at simplacable.com posits that open positions in your organization are precursors to contests.  This piece was suggested by Bill Allison, an ITLP alum who is Director, Campus Technology Services at the University of California, Berkeley.  Bill noted that the short piece is valuable even when the leadership contest isn’t bitter […]

Jack Zenger is the CEO and Joseph Folkman is the president of Zenger | Folkman, a leadership development consultancy.  They are the authors, with Scott K. Edinger, of The Inspiring Leader:  Unlocking the Secrets of How Extraordinary Leaders Motivate.  In their blog posting, they report that shortly after The Inspiring Leader was published, a prestigious journal expressed interest in publishing […]