In the realm of business, risk is seen as something to be managed, mitigated, or carefully leveraged. Accountants and actuaries quantify the risk factor and associate it with financial loss. Derivatives traders hedge against it elaborately, with obfuscation. Lawyers construct elaborate (and burdensome) defenses against it. CEOs eye it apprehensively.
Can you imagine a combat leader telling his troops to starve while he dines on char-grilled filet mignon? Yet, haven’t we all witnessed the dishonorable situational leadership of C-Suites that chose to downsize some while privileging others? There’s a better way.
As a leader, what’s your value scheme for teamwork and loyalty? How far would you [...]
If shareholder value is paramount and corporate executives are shareholders, what ensues is an absorbing conflict of interest. The greed in C-Suites and Boards gets fed like confinement lot cattle. From the 1980’s onward, reliance on personal credit debt and the pressure to earn and own more grew ravenously in America. With the added fuel [...]
How long do you think it would take to change the world if enough people acted effectively? Four decades? A lifetime?
What if it could be done in four years?
FOUR YEARS. GO. is a campaign “to shift humanity’s course toward a just, fulfilling and sustainable future by the end of 2014.” Why [...]
Photography is fun filled with graphic potential, appealing to people of all ages. Just to hold a camera offers intriguing possibilities! One can capture this moment… or that one. Any moment so captured documents life and offers opportunities to illustrate what happened.
The best photo images capture a subject at an intersection in time. These are [...]
U.S. political leaders have created a “crisis of confidence” that is hamstringing the American economy. Nearly every decision in Washington now is tainted by hyper-partisan enmity. Our political “leaders” wrangle while consumers and business twist in the wind.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has had enough. In a pointed two-page letter to America, Schultz [...]
If you still are challenged to believe core-values and corporate profits are compatible, look no further than the Nestle Purina PetCare Company. The 7,000-employee company is an outstanding example of values-driven leadership being the reason for—not the barrier to—market success.
Let’s look at Nestle Purina through two lenses: Financial and Values.
Nestle Purina [...]
I write here often about the important distinction between leadership and authority. Too often, we allow the title “leader” for anyone in the executive ranks, with little regard for the worthiness of their intention or the quality of their character. And, also too often, we overlook strong leaders at the helm of less high-profile businesses.
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I began writing this blog to promote a more discerning conversation about leadership. My motivation is my concern for the state of the world today. The world is in a severe crisis of leadership, and this is infecting culture, economy, politics, ideology, and the individual and collective sense of hope and despair.
In the 1960s [...]
It’s not routine for the world of professional sports to stand as a beacon of leadership. True, there are clichéd references to field generals and feats of athletic heroics. But just as abundant are the stories of dogfights and gunfights, of tawdry end zone antics and of greedy athletes holding out because $100 million [...]
