When I think about how West Point has changed over the past several decades, one shift stands out above the rest. The Academy used to lean hard on negativity to shape cadets, including food denial as punishment and coercive techniques designed to wear down rather than build up promising young men and women. That approach … Read more
The mirror will flatter you if you let it, but All-In Adaptive Leaders need a way to make it reflect the truth A few years ago, I was a guest on Doug Brown’s CEO Sales Strategies Podcast, and we spent much of our conversation on what I call The Three Yous. At one point, I … Read more
Why the fourth Big 6 Leadership Principle® matters most when people are anxious about what comes next. In 480 BC, King Leonidas led a force of 300 Spartans and several thousand allied Greek soldiers to hold the narrow pass at Thermopylae against an invading Persian army many times their size. For two days, they held … Read more
When I interviewed Mr. Doug Hyde, Executive Vice President of a major architectural firm, for my book, The Power of Being All In, he told me something worth noting. His organization expected to roughly double in size over the next three to five years. Then he told me how: “We need to continue to grow … Read more
It is hard to be patient. It is hard not to answer every email or text within seconds, although most of us try. In Leadership in the Information Age, I wrote that leaders are like the proverbial firefighter: any time we see a problem in the making, we feel a need to go “beat the … Read more
As we came out of the 1970s with the Cold War drawing to a close and new threats rising from every corner of the map, the Army knew it had to change its culture. I described that decision in We’re All In. We had to build junior leaders who could make real strategic decisions, which … Read more
