As we come back from this July 4th holiday weekend, I ran across stories of five Congressional Medal of Honor recipients which touched me to the core. These men are basically ordinary individuals who performed extraordinary acts. They went back again and again into enemy territories to protect their regiments, taking fire and shrapnel for hours [...]

Most business executives relish in the perceived power behind the word accountability.  For employees it is either a welcomed set of expectations and boundaries which drive performance OR it becomes a marker which conjures up fear, insecurity, and concern of not being able to meet the expectation.
Without the ability to hold individuals accountable, a leader’s [...]

There have been many books written on Ethics over the years – including The Good Life by Gomes, The Ethics of Leadership by Ciulla, and a personal favorite, Ethics 101 by John Maxwell.
Frankly, as rich as so many of these books are, we often have a tendency to read them, even have the best of [...]

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, [...]

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 as [...]

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!
I [...]

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 what [...]

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 a [...]

Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Markets, and Target are just a few companies whose stores (or planes) I frequent. I began to wonder, particularly in this recession, how these companies were continuing to perform relatively well – despite people’s reduction in discretionary spending. Every time I head to Love Field in Dallas the Southwest terminal is buzzing [...]