Between the Lines

Happy 2011 everyone! I hope your year is off to a great start. Many of you have asked me to recap the most popular posts from 2010 – so my first posting of 2010 is just that: The Top Ten Between The Lines for 2010! The best advice I ever got Do I have to be liked [...]

As an executive, we have two assets which rival as to which is most valuable to us. Both our time and our team are the two most critical components in achieving our objectives, personally and collectively. Today I am going to focus on our time and a few suggestions on how to get the greatest [...]

Recently I have been asked to lead several board and executive retreats through their annual strategic planning process. The similarities of their challenges are startling similar – regardless of industry, non-profit or for-profit organizations. The days of plentiful donations for non-profits are gone. Double digit growth, for most companies, is a friend of distant past. [...]

In a February 2009 Fortune magazine article, Jim Collins, said: “In times of great duress, tumult, and uncertainty, you have to have moorings. Companies like P&G, GE, J&J, and IBM have an incredible fabric of values, of underlying ideals or principles that explained why is was important that they existed. The more challenged you are, [...]

Recently I had the fabulous opportunity to build a workshop with a colleague around the topic of Resiliency. It was a topic in which I have personally grown very familiar over the past several years. Yet, frankly, I had not directly translated my personal experiences of ‘bouncing back’ to the criticality of this same capability [...]

Happy 2010 everyone! I hope your year is off to a great start. Many of you have asked me to recap the most popular posts from 2009 – so my first posting of 2010 is just that: The Top Ten Between The Lines for 2009! If you missed any of these, I hope you will read them [...]

A year ago a friend of mine asked me to co-chair a charity event with her. At the time I said yes, I did not know I had been accepted into Georgetown University for my advanced certification program nor had the recession hit in full force. Thus began a year of growth, challenge, and discipline! [...]

Oprah and I have agreed on many things over the years; yet, imagine my surprise when I was reading her ‘What I Know for Sure’ column in this month’s magazine to find her expose on personal power. I quote: “The secret is alignment: when you know for sure that you’re on course, and doing exactly [...]

Mary is an up and coming leader in a Fortune 50 company. Over the course of her career, she has managed to zig zag her way into a nice position of great authority and power. However, of late, due to a significant corporate acquisition, she is now maneuvering new executive additions to her organization, and [...]

The situation is this: Bob is an executive who doesn’t believe he is taken seriously by his new immediate manager (an SVP of a publicly traded company) and his manager’s associated leadership team. His boss disagrees with his ideas and approaches for the business, and questions his overall ability to ‘think strategically.’ He categorizes Bob as [...]