One gets people to show up. The other gets them “All in”. I grew up in a Culture of Compliance. As a young West Point cadet in the early 1970s, I had only a vague notion of what culture even was. We had a set way of doing things called “the military way.” Compliance was … Read more
The old directive leadership style no longer works. Discover why a culture of commitment and adaptive communication are essential for executive success. Recently I sat down with George Torok, host of Your Intended Message, a business communication podcast, to discuss how Adaptive Leadership and effective communication are inseparable. For decades, many business leaders operated under a … Read more
The world didn’t send us a memo. But it did send a message. When I was writing The Power of Being All In, I had the opportunity to interview a number of senior leaders across industries about the leadership challenges they were navigating in a changed world. One of those conversations has stayed with me. … Read more
There was a time when scale was an advantage. Or capital. Or access to information. Or geographic dominance. Those days are over. In the Information Age, accelerated by political upheaval, pandemic disruption, social unrest, and technological explosion, those advantages evaporate quickly. What worked yesterday gets copied today and is obsolete tomorrow. I’ve watched this play … Read more
Over the course of my military career, I learned early on that uncertainty was part of the fundamentals of strategic planning. The prominent military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described it this way: “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Conditions shifted. Sometimes the ground literally shook beneath our feet. But what stands … Read more
Before the pandemic and all of its 2nd and 3rd-order effects, most of us lived inside a predictable rhythm. Commutes. Office chatter. Calendars packed with meetings that required us to be physically present. We may not have loved all of it, but we understood the tempo. Work had a structure we could point to. Then the … Read more
