Being a baseball booster can be fraught with disappointment. Just ask Cubs fans: 101 years and counting. My team, the Washington Nationals, is on its way to getting the first overall pick in the draft for the second year in a row. This isn't a good thing. Last month,...
Do you have what it takes to be a leader? And is this even the right question to ask? John Ryan, president of the Center for Creative Leadership and a former superintentent of the U.S. Naval Academy, has a great column in Business Week that posits that leadership has...
Great interview with Wal-Mart Vice Chair Eduardo Castro-Wright about leadership and what they don't teach you in business school. The crux of leadership: trust. Leadership is "about being able to get people to go to places they never thought they could go," he said in...
It's never a good idea to get too caught up in our great ideas, inventions, and innovations. Ask Tropicana, the most recent brand to get wrapped up in its righteousness without stopping to take the pulse of its community. Businesses need fresh voices and outside...
I love boards. Not sawed lumber, though I imagine that comes in handy if you need to build shelter from the rain. But those management structures that are designed to provide guidance, oversight, and strategic direction to an organization. I believe that all...
Did GM's CEO have to go? There's been a lot of discussion about the government's move to replace Rick Wagoner as a precursor to any wholesale restructuring by the troubled automaker. My own opinion: He had to go. Reinventing a business is hard work, and it typically...
Like many people, I was impressed yesterday by how effectively the Obama transition team had worked behind the scenes to rebrand the U.S. government. By 12:02 p.m., the first tweets were showing up alerting people that whitehouse.gov now belonged to the new president....
Did you ever wonder what it would be like if Barney Frank and Ben Stein agreed on something? It happened the other day when the two men concurred that it would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy if the Big 3 automakers were to fold. That was, of course,...
It's election day in America. Vote. Please. Photo by Theresa Thompson (Flickr).
I had a very revealing conversation with one of the officers on my condo board yesterday. Turns out that for the past year the board has been trying to restore a business focus to our operations. They've fired two poorly-performing vendors and read a third one the...