One of the ways that our new book, Strategy Driven Leadership and my work in resilience have dovetailed together is in how we’ve worked to identify and destroy the Negativity Bias. You probably remember (or will experience today) our biological and cultural expectation to be overly critical and disapproving of any variety of behaviors we engage in, whether it be how we presented in a meeting or whether we listened with full attention to our daughter’s concerns about her soccer...

When I was 16, I broke my wrist playing quarterback in a sandlot football game. I did complete the pass for the touchdown but when I got up from being tackled, I noticed my wrist was bent in a most unusual way. My parents called our doctor who referred us to an orthopedic surgeon who told us to meet him at his office where he would set my wrist and place it in a cast. When we got to his...

I had an advisory call with a senior leader who mentioned about one of his direct reports who was having difficulty in establishing the priorities of a key project. While this employee seemed to understand the overall goal, he kept focusing on multiple tasks at the same time and even worse, was often influenced by that last idea he heard about (the so-called recency effect). This leader hit upon a key concept of leadership development that we discuss in Strategy...

In addition to my neighborhood kids waiting for the school bus when I’m out walking Cody, I can also tell that it is back to school time because of the myriad Facebook posts I’ve seen in the past few weeks showing preschoolers to college freshman proudly announcing their return to the halls of learning. Most look pretty excited or maybe a little nervous, like my great-nephew Jackson who went off to his first day just a few weeks ago. I...

I’m in New York this week and today this City will go take some time at 8:46 AM to remember the fallen from that tragic day. The modern-day resilience movement began 18 years ago today. We all began to understand that we could not control highly unpredictable events from happening and so we somehow had to do our best to be ready for them. On one side of the equation, that meant cameras on every street corner in every major...

It seemed like a simple enough question coming from a colleague over lunch last week. “Pretty good,” I told him and went on to share with him that I attended a program Sheila did last week where she spoke about her work in grief and loss. To a room full of participants, Sheila shared about how, in our most difficult times, we have to look for and find the gifts from the pain and anguish we experience when we lose...