Hello out there. I had a conversation with my son, the lawyer, over the week in which he was complaining that he wasn’t getting a lot of support from the family for a guy he was defending pro bono. “Nobody is doing anything. And if they do something, it’s half assed.” The guy, from El Salvador, had been detained by Immigration and been sitting in the Plymouth County House of Correction for almost 6 months. He was eligible for a green card, under something called “Nacara,” which is similar to political asylum.
Read more →What is an ‘A’ Player? Can You Coach ‘B’s to Become ‘A’s?
I was having a lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel with a client friend of mine, Greg Goff, CEO of Tesoro Corporation, a Fortune 125 company. He was here in Boston at the invitation of Michael Porter, Harvard Strategy Ace, who was putting on a workshop for a dozen CEOs. I mentioned something about leadership lag—the time gap between coming up with a new strategy and finding the leaders to execute it. We got into a discussion about the importance of having an ‘A’ player in every key job on his leadership team.
Read more →I Offer to Coach Benjamin Netanyahu…
I wrote a book called Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration a decade ago. One of the best chapters in the book was a story on the Oslo Peace Accords including an interview with Shimon Peres, the legendary Israeli statesmen who has the Wisdom of Solomon. Mr. Peres was captivated by the whole idea of collaboration and told me how vital it was for Israeli and Palestinian leaders to meet face-to-face.
Read more →My Impossible Future: Can I Really Coach Presidents?
I spent the first part of July in Korea at the invitation of Dr. Edward Choi, Chairman of CMOE, the #1 Leadership Solutions company in that nation, the company that introduced coaching skills to thousands of managers in companies like Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and Posco. Dr Choi is one of the people in the world who I truly admire and respect as a coach and mentor, and someone who has my complete listening.
Read more →Steve Jobs Told Me to Drop Out of College
In the past, if you asked an executive, teacher, or family member whose opinion you respected for career advice, they would probably say: Definitely get into an Ivy League college, join a Fortune 500 company, and join a posh country club for social networking. In today’s high tech, global economy, where talent rules, your advisers might tell you something entirely different. Drop out of school, go start your own company…
Read more →Get The Kind of 360 Feedback That Rips the Blinders Off
In coaching many executives, I have discovered that often what drives them isn’t reaching their yearly goals and meeting the budget cleanly. No, almost all have a dirty little secret that they rarely talk about to anyone except a close confident. They want to move up the ladder as fast as possible in order to achieve greater power, wealth, and make a difference. Unfortunately, even the most talented executives can find themselves stuck on the same rung for years (decades) due to leadership blindspots.
Read more →Let’s Hear From You: Making a Difference in South Africa
This morning I received a letter from Rubi Davids, a coach and mentor in South Africa. It really inspires me to get letters like this from people who have read my books and are applying it to make a difference in their world. So, if you are out there, I would love to hear from you. I would like to share Rubi’s letter to me and my response.
Read more →Bad Bosses Are Dangerous: From Leader as Cop to Leader as Coach
It’s been said that every leader should have a magnificent obsession, a big goal, or world shaking problem that they are totally immersed in almost 24 /7. One of the things I noticed when I started doing leadership coaching was that it was actually hard to get people to talk about a magnificent obsession on any consistent basis. If people were obsessed with anything, it was talking about “the boss.”
Read more →Best Companies for Leadership Development
Strategic thinking and inspiring leadership are in as business digs out from the turmoil. I came across a 2010 report from the Hay Group recently that identified the top 20 companies for leadership development that you might find useful. For what it’s worth, I know for a fact that most of these companies use executive coaches.
Read more →START A COACHING REVOLUTION: Fire the Leadership Training Department
GE is a company world famous for its leadership pipeline that turns out world-class CEOs, not only for GE but for other companies. Today, there are signs that the basic paradigm of leadership development that GE made famous is about to change. It started when CEO Jeff Immelt was faced with the impact of the global banking crisis on GE Capital. Jeff Immelt’s new approach to leadership development looks much more like personalized coaching and much less like the top-down, centralized approach of yore.
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