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Leading Blog | Posts by Category |
09.22.22
Leading Thoughts for September 22, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Richard Feynman on regret: “If you want to live a regret-free life, you need to stop thinking about what others think about you and your life. We spend our entire lives thinking, and in fact overthinking about people, society, teachers, and others think, who do not know our paths, our struggles, our good and bad, and unfortunately, we allow them to control our lives. It’s you who has to decide what makes you happy and pursue it accordingly. It would be stupid of you to try and stand by someone else’s expectations. Do what you feel is good for you, and right for you, In doing so, it is very obvious that you will come across failures and disappointments, but that will teach you a great deal and the best part would you, it would you and only you responsible for that.. Prof. Feynman” Source: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Journalist Ferris Jabr on why walking helps us think: “Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.” Source: Why Walking Helps Us Think, The New Yorker, September 3, 2014 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.   Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:11 AM
09.15.22
Leading Thoughts for September 15, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Military strategist Sun Tzu on preparation: “The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.” Source: The Art of War
American novelist Mary Flannery O’Connor on growth: “Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.” Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:59 AM
09.08.22
Leading Thoughts for September 8, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Queen Elizabeth II on the value of stepping back and reflecting: “We all need to get the balance right between action and reflection. With so many distractions, it is easy to forget to pause and take stock. Be it through contemplation, prayer, or even keeping a diary, many have found the practice of quiet personal reflection surprisingly rewarding, even discovering greater spiritual depth to their lives.” Source: Queen's Christmas message, December 25, 2013
Queen Elizabeth II on courage: “Today we need a special kind of courage. Not the kind needed in battle, but a kind which makes us stand up for everything that we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics, so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future.” Source: 1957 Christmas Broadcast Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:56 AM
09.01.22
Leading Thoughts for September 1, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Jon Gordon on the ultimate rule of positive energy: “Your positive energy and vision must be greater than anyone’s and everyone’s negativity. Your certainty must be greater than everyone’s doubt. There will always be people who don’t share your vision. There will always be the doubters who doubt, doubt, and doubt and tell you you can’t do this and you won’t be able to accomplish that. They think that dreams were meant for others but not for people like you and them. And there will even be people who don’t want you to succeed because it makes them see their own weaknesses and failures. Rather than driving their own bus they are trying to ruin everyone else’s ride.” Source: The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy
Wally Amos on facing your problems: “One of the realities of existence is this: If you don’t get it right the first time, life will give you another chance to master that aspect of things. And if you miss your next chance, that same challenge will again present itself to you. The process continues until you get it right. The inevitable cycle is a curse if you are running away from your problems, and a blessing if you are seeking to grow through them. In every challenge lies an opportunity.” Source: Man With No Name: Turn Lemons into Lemonade Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:02 AM
08.25.22
Leading Thoughts for August 25, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Fred Harmon on the value of self-restraint: “Situational rather than habitual self-restraint is always a strain. Self-mastery lets us relax and focus on results even in tense situations. The world-famous tennis star does not lose her concentration because she is behind in the deciding set. Long practice in controlling her emotions permits her to continue playing at her peak. The practice of self-restraint in making common everyday acts more perfect builds up a similar inner calm on which one can rely in any crisis.” Source: The Executive Odyssey: Secrets for A Career Without Limits
Andrew and Nada Kakabadse and Linda Lee-Davies on staying forever refreshed as a leader:: “Successful leadership is never truly mastered as it is an organic service which must be ever refreshed and refined. The changing nature and demands of the follower and the changing nature and demands of the external environment mean that even once the leader has reached a point of maximum provision for their troops in their current state, they must put some serious planning into the next likely situation they will face. There is no rest, learning to lead never stops and the truly successful, the truly great leader knows that they are leading to learn.” Source: Leading for Success: The Seven Sides to Great Leaders Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:48 AM
08.18.22
Leading Thoughts for August 18, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Former Blue Shield of California CEO Bruce Bodaken and Robert Fritz on opinion dumps: “Telling someone your opinion is not the same as exploring reality. Groups that really tell each other the truth are the ones that ask each other questions, seriously seek to understand opinions that are different from their own. They strive to comprehend rather than simply impose their ideas on others, and they engage in a collective dialogue in which people together seek understanding.” Source: The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance
Ram Charan on the roadblocks to moving forward: “Today transformational change is the norm. Every company has to be able to perceive what will make their best-laid plans obsolete tomorrow and change direction quickly. Dissatisfaction with the status quo and a search for what’s next is a universal human endeavor. It does not reside in one person, department, or organizational layer. The flow of ideas cannot be blocked by bureaucratic layers. Do the people at traditional companies welcome change? What happens to the good ideas that emerge? How quickly do they get converted into action?” Source: Rethinking Competitive Advantage: New Rules for the Digital Age Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:20 AM
08.11.22
Leading Thoughts for August 11, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Historian John Lukacs on turning points: “A turning point is not a milestone; the latter is a numerically fixable place, foreseeable, linear, and sequential. A turning point may occur in a person’s mind; it may mean a change of direction; it has consequences that are multiple and unpredictable, consequences that are more multiple and unpredictable, consequences that are more often than not recognizable only in retrospect. A turning point may sometimes be foreseeable, but not with certainty.” Source: Five Days in London: May 1940
Professor Emeritus at Fuller Theological Seminary Eddie Gibbs on what we find in the absence of good leadership: “Feedback is no longer oriented to how people can succeed but to how they have failed—not just in their work but as human beings.” Source: Leadership Next: Changing Leaders in a Changing Culture Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:40 AM
08.04.22
Leading Thoughts for August 4, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Performance coach Jason Selk on the need to heat up your performance: “All day long, the thermostat governs the temperature in the room and won’t allow the room temperature to rise or drop from the desired temperature for long. Human beings are the same way: we neither outperform nor underperform our self-image for very long. That’s why it is so important to set your self-image gauge high enough to achieve your life goals. Set your self-image gauge too low, and by definition, you’ll underachieve because your mind won’t call for the motivation to achieve more.” Source: Executive Toughness: The Mental-Training Program to Increase Your Leadership Performance
Jim Loehr explaining that the key to mental recovery is to give the conscious, thinking mind intermittent rest explaining that the key to mental recovery is to give the conscious, thinking mind intermittent rest: “Much like the body, the brain needs time to recover from exertion. After we have learned new information or had new experiences, it takes time for the brain to consolidate and encode what it has learned. In the absence of downtime, or recovery, that learning cannot take place as efficiently.” Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:36 AM
07.28.22
Leading Thoughts for July 28, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Betsy Myers on how leadership is about how you make people feel not only about the work but themselves: “The truth of life is that it doesn’t unfold through lofty mission statements or happen in broad strokes. It is a personal, everyday experience for every one of us.” Source: Take the Lead: Motivate, Inspire, and Bring Out the Best in Yourself and Everyone Around You
Mike Thompson on becoming a discerning leader: “Being a discerning leader isn’t about making a good decision, but rather about forming the habit of making good decision after good decision. To become a discerning leader, you need to immerse yourself in a constant state of evaluation. It means continuously gathering and analyzing information, seeking various points of view, and scanning the horizon for coming shifts. Because these leaders never view their decisions as static, they aren’t consumed by trying to make the perfect call. They can confidently move forward, knowing that they can, and will, make adjustments as they go.” Source: The Anywhere Leader: How to Lead and Succeed in Any Business Environment Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:23 AM
07.21.22
Leading Thoughts for July 21, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Jack Zenger, Joe Folkman, and Scott Edinger on how clarity tells people what not to do: “Clarity of vision helps all members of the group to be vigilant about not attempting to serve everyone who wants to be a customer, or to embark on any project about which someone becomes enthused, or to create a new product because one prospect or client expresses interest in it. These are hard decisions to make, especially for newly created organizations that are scratching out their existence. But given limited resources, it is especially crucial for those companies to stay focused.” Source: The Inspiring Leader: Unlocking the Secrets of How Extraordinary Leaders Motivate
Musician and speaker David Usher on the opportunities to apply creative principles to all areas of our lives: “Once you start to look at the world through the lens of creativity, everything looks different. Creative thinking is an integral part of everything we make, but also every relationship we have and every interaction in our lives. It’s not just about the world of things. It exists in the connections we make, how we formulate sentences, the way we negotiate with our bosses, and how we choose to look at the world. Once you see the creative process as the underpinning of all these connections and interactions, then the world really is different. Instead of just acting by instinct and routine, repeating the same patterns over and over, you begin to view interactions as possibilities, and you become an active participant. Every moment and interaction becomes an opportunity to apply the principles of creative thinking.” Source: Let the Elephants Run: Unlock Your Creativity and Change Everything Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:32 AM
07.14.22
Leading Thoughts for July 14, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Former president of Chick-fil-A, James Collins, on the correlation between authority and responsibility: “Authority properly used comes packaged with responsibility. Therefore, as I discovered over the years, more authority can be gained in bits and pieces. I gained more authority without having it given to me; all I had to do was figure out what the boss didn’t like to do, take responsibility, and do it.” Source: Creative Followership: In the shadow of Greatness
Bill George on why leaders lose their way: “Leaders whose goal is having power over others, maximizing their wealth, or becoming famous tend to look to other people for fulfillment and acknowledgment of their status. Source: Discover Your True North Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:52 AM
07.07.22
Leading Thoughts for July 7, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Henry Kissinger on the need for leadership: “Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution. Along this route, leadership is indispensable: decisions must be made, trust earned, promises kept, a way forward proposed. Within human institutions—states, religions, armies, companies, schools—leadership is needed to help people reach from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going. Without leadership, institutions drift, and nations court growing irrelevance and, ultimately, disaster.” Source: Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy
In a caution to all leaders, Professor Ngaire Woods at the University of Oxford on why Vladimir Putin would turn Russia into a pariah state without achieving any of the goals of his invasion: “Why would such a powerful leader make such a major blunder? The answer lies in the very nature of power itself. Leaders in positions of tremendous authority often wear blinders that can cause them to make profound mistakes. Power can mislead insofar as it prevents the powerful from taking full stock of the consequences of their actions. Source: Foreign Affairs, July/August 2022, “What the Mighty Miss: The Blind Spots of Power” Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:50 AM
06.30.22
Leading Thoughts for June 30, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Scientist Marie Curie on the importance of self-improvement for the betterment of self and others: “You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.” Source: Pierre Curie (Autobiographical Notes)
Thomas Mitchell, a farmer, on productivity: “It is wonderful how much work can be got through in a day, if we go by the rule—map out our time, divide it off, and take up one thing regularly after another. To drift through our work, or to rush through it in a helter-skelter fashion, ends in comparatively little being done. ‘One thing at a time’ will always perform a better day’s work than doing two or three things at a time. By following this rule, one person will do more in a day than another does in a week.” Source: Essays on Life by Thomas Mitchell, Farmer Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:03 PM
06.23.22
Leading Thoughts for June 23, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Engineer, designer, entrepreneur, and investor, Tony Fadell on becoming a manager: “Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. You will no longer be doing the things you do really well—instead you’ll be digging into how others do them, helping them improve. Your job will now be communication, communication, communication, recruiting, hiring and firing, setting budgets, reviews, one-on-one meetings (1:1s), meetings with your team and other teams and leadership, representing your team in those meetings, setting goals, and keeping people on track, conflict resolution, helping to find creative solutions to intractable problems, blocking and tackling political BS, mentoring your team, and asking ‘how can I help you?’ all the time.” Source: Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
Former Nike Chief Marketing Officer Greg Hoffman on passion: “Passion is a risk-taking emotion because it demands that we reveal so much of ourselves to others. If you’ve ever found yourself in a conversation with someone about their passion, then you know what I mean. You can feel it; they get carried away. And when they finally stop talking, they can be a little embarrassed. But that’s good. Show that to your audience. Imbue your brand, your stories, your spaces with passion unbridled. Start talking about what you love and don’t ever stop.” Source: Emotion By Design: Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:36 AM
06.16.22
Leading Thoughts for June 16, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Amor Towles’ character Count Alexander Rostov on withholding judgement: “The Count had to acknowledge once again the virtues of withholding judgment. After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of the hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration--and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.” Source: A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel
Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter on rights and civility: “If we fail to distinguish desire from right, we will not understand that rights are sensible and wise only within particular contexts that give them meaning. The Constitution protects a variety of rights, but our moral norms provide the discipline in their exercise. Sometimes what the moral norm of civility demands is that we restrain our self-expression for the sake of our community.” Source: Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:44 PM
06.09.22
Leading Thoughts for June 9, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: INSEAD professor Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries on the importance of being kind: “Quite often, when people are hurting others, it is because they are hurting themselves. This does not mean that you should try to explain it away, that you should try to justify and rationalize inappropriate behavior. The decision to set boundaries concerning certain behavioral patterns is part of being morally responsible. Still, in trying to understand why these people are doing what they are doing, you could also keep in mind the words of Carl Jung: ‘Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.’ It may give you additional insights about what is happening as we all have a tendency to project unwanted parts of ourselves on to the other. It is far too easy to deposit on the other aspects of our shadow side—to use the other as some kind of ‘garbage can.’” Source: Leading Wisely: Becoming a Reflective Leader in Turbulent Times Darryl Stickel on the growing cynicism surrounding leadership: “As the world evolves, our expectations of leaders seem to be getting broader and increasingly contradictory. Ultimately, we tend to trust those who have strong abilities and demonstrate excellence in their field. Are leaders supposed to give us decisive direction? Be consensus builders? Inspire us? The answer to all of these is yes, but how are they supposed to do that in environments where those judging leadership qualities appear to agree on so little? Also, our definition of leadership excellence changes with different situations. The challenge we have is that if we don’t clearly define excellence for leaders, it is almost impossible for them to strive for it.” Source: Building Trust: Exceptional Leadership in an Uncertain World Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:57 AM
06.02.22
Leading Thoughts for June 2, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Professor emeritus of medicine Jon Kabat-Zion on problem-solving: “In general, if you feel you’ve got a problem to solve that is ‘out there’ and you don’t necessarily see or want to see any possible relationship between the ‘you’ who is trying to solve the problem and what the problem actually is, you may wind up not being able to see the problem accurately, in its fullness. You therefore may unwittingly be contributing to maintaining the undesired situation rather than allowing it to evolve and perhaps dissolve.” Source: Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future Writer David Chapman on how to improve your thinking: “Learn from fields very different from your own. They each have ways of thinking that can be useful at surprising times. Just learning to think like an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a philosopher will beneficially stretch your mind.” Source: How to Think Real Good Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:36 AM
05.26.22
Leading Thoughts for May 26, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Former president, CEO, and chairman of Procter & Gamble, John Pepper on values: “Over the years, I’ve seen that the strongest leaders are those who have enough confidence to seek input from others without losing the direction provided by their own internal compass. They understand that the objective of learning is not comfortable consensus. It is to make wiser, more informed choices.” Source: What Really Matters: Service, Leadership, People, and Values Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsk on having compassion when leading change: “The people who fight the hardest also have the most to lose; and therefore, they deserve the most time, attention, care, and skill.” Source: Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:32 AM
05.19.22
Leading Thoughts for May 19, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: London Business School professors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones on conforming yet remaining authentic: “Leaders must conform enough if they are to make the connections necessary to deliver change. Leaders who succeed in changing organizations challenge the norms—but rarely all of them, all at once. They do not seek out instant head-on confrontation without understanding the organizational context. To change an organization, the leader must first gain at least minimal acceptance as a member.” Source: Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? What It Takes to Be an Authentic Leader Harvard Professor Joseph Badaracco on quiet leadership: “The most effective leaders are rarely public heroes. These men and women aren’t high-profile champions of causes, and don’t want to be. They don’t spearhead ethical crusades. They move patiently, carefully, and incrementally. They do what is right—for their organizations, for the people around them, and for themselves—inconspicuously and without casualties.” Source: Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:17 AM
05.12.22
Leading Thoughts for May 12, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Anthropologist Grant McCracken on inspiring innovation and creativity: “People who escape familiar groups and make contact with unfamiliar ones become smarter and more creative. Former Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens on servant leadership: “Do you want to be around somebody who lifts you up, or somebody that breaks you down? That’s why whenever people ask me what’s your leadership style, my answer is, ‘It should be you.’ There’s an authenticity that is needed for leadership. If it’s not real, then it’s not going to work. Source: Getting to Us: How Great Coaches Make Great Teams by Seth Davis Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:03 AM
05.05.22
Leading Thoughts for May 5, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Professor Scott Galloway on the worst advice given to young people: “Your job is to find something you’re good at. And then spend thousands of hours and apply the grit and the sacrifice and the willingness to break through hard things to become great at it. Because once you’re great at something, the economic accouterments of being great at something, the prestige, the relevance, the camaraderie, the self-worth of being great … will make you passionate about whatever it is. Here’s the problem with believing you should follow your passion: Work is hard. And when you run into obstacles and you face injustice, which is a common guaranteed attribute of the workplace, you’ll start thinking, ‘I’m not loving this. This is upsetting and hard. It must not be my passion.’ That is not the right litmus test.’” Source: The Pursuit of Excellence: The Uncommon Behaviors of the World’s Most Productive Achievers by Ryan Hawk Stephen M. R. Covey on command and control: “Command & Control is about getting things done, but it misses the potential power of the people who get those things done. Command & Control is about being efficient with people, trying to motivate them instead of inspiring them. It’s about self-interest and competing rather than serving and caring. And if all else fails, it’s about barking out the orders so everyone does exactly what they’re supposed to do—not because they want to, but because they have to. In short, it’s about controlling people instead of unleashing their potential.” Source: Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:27 AM
04.28.22
Leading Thoughts for April 28, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: David Baldacci’s character Aloysius Archer on resilience: “From now on his life path would be pointed steadily forward, right at the fresh waves coming for him, rather than the choppy ones that had just passed underneath and battered him. Source: Dream Town Tim Elmore on the difference between adapting and adopting: “The key to good leadership is catching the wind and capitalizing on it to take you where you need to go. And, perhaps more importantly, to take the students under your care where they need to go. Our job is not merely to adopt what’s trending in our culture. Leaders don’t just fit in. Our goal is to adapt, not adopt. There’s a huge difference. We adapt to the realities of our day, leveraging current methods to say what must be said to our young. Once again, we are timely in our methods, but timeless in our mission. We are timely in our communication style, but timeless in our content. We are timely in our pedagogy, but timeless in our purpose.” Source: Marching Off the Map: Inspire Students to Navigate a Brand New World Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:12 AM
04.21.22
Leading Thoughts for April 21, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Consultant Stan Slap on the purpose of leadership: “The irreducible essence of leadership is that leaders are people who live their deepest personal values without compromise, and they use those values to make life better for others—this is why people become leaders and why people follow leaders.” Source: Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managers Tom Morris on the Rule of Reciprocity: “One problem with the Rule of Reciprocity is that when you live by it, you allow others to call the shots. Like it or not, we deal with people every day who fall into this pattern of conduct and just reflect back to us whatever we do to them. This is a truth of great importance since it gives us one of the main reasons why unethical business practices are self-destructive. It may be easy to treat people badly one by one, or a few at a time, but over the long run, if you have treated enough other people terribly, and they are living reciprocally, then they are out there as a growing multitude preparing to do the same to you. And together, they’ll eventually have the power to bring you down.” Source: Art of Achievement: 7C’s of Success In Business and Life Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:40 PM
04.14.22
Leading Thoughts for April 14, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Creative director, designer, and agency owner Michael Janda believes every position can be electrifying: “You don’t have to be the art director, creative director, CTO, or VP of blah-de-blah agency to be a key member of a company. Any role, any position, in any organization can have a huge impact on the success of the organization. Throughout my career, I have seen junior programmers and junior designers make HUGE impacts on company success. By striving to maximize your contribution, regardless of the position you fill on the org chart, you can make an impact.” Source: Burn Your Portfolio: Stuff They Don’t Teach You In Design School But Should The twentieth president of the United States, James A. Garfield, on the sovereignty of the family: “There are several sovereignties in this country. First, the sovereignty of the American people, then the sovereignty nearest to us all—the sovereignty of the family, the absolute right of each family to control its affairs in accordance with the conscience and convictions of duty of the heads of the family. In the picture before us, that is bravely symbolized. I have no doubt the American people will always tenderly regard their household sovereignty, and however households may differ in their views and convictions, I believe that those differences will be respected. Each household, by following its own convictions, and holding itself responsible to God, will, I think, be respected by the American people.” Source: The Life and Work of James A. Garfield by John Clark Ridpath Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:24 AM
04.07.22
Leading Thoughts for April 7, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Wayde Goodall on why people fall: “There are reasons people make bad choices, and it doesn’t happen overnight. There is an evolution—one thought, decision, or move at a time. They decided to go to the wrong place, ask the wrong question, look at illegal or immoral materials, or have a conversation with someone they knew was compromising. The behavior began somewhere. Source: Why Great Men Fall Ringo Starr on Paul McCartney’s work ethic: “The other side of that is—I was telling someone the other day—if Paul hadn’t been in the band, we’d probably have made two albums because we were lazy buggers. Source: BBC Interview: Ringo Starr - Talks about Change The World EP, Beatles, Joe Walsh & more Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:15 AM
03.31.22
Leading Thoughts for March 31, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Richard Rumelt on listening: “When another person speaks, you hear both less and more than they mean. Less because none of us can express the full extent of our understanding, and more because what another says is constantly mixing and interacting with your own knowledge and puzzlements.” Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters Ram Charan on leadership: “Leadership matters. It creates and harnesses the energy of people, gives them direction, and synchronizes their efforts. In fact, it is a leading indicator of a company’s prospects, unlike financial results, which tell you only where the company has already been. Strong leadership makes a good company better just as surely as weak leadership lowers its prospects and over time ruins it.” Source: Leaders at All Levels: Deepening Your Talent Pool to Solve the Succession Crisis Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:03 AM
03.24.22
Leading Thoughts for March 24, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Sebastian Mallaby on forecasting the future: “The revolutions that will matter—the big disruptions that create wealth for investors and anxiety for workers, or that scramble the geopolitical balance and alter human relations—cannot be predicted based on extrapolations of past data, precisely because such revolutions are so thoroughly disruptive. Rather, they will emerge as a result of forces that are too complex to forecast—from the primordial soup of tinkerers and hackers and hubristic dreamers—and all you can know is that the world in ten years will be excitingly different. Mature, comfortable societies, dominated by people who analyze every probability and manage every risk, should come to terms with a tomorrow that cannot be foreseen. The future can be discovered by means of iterative, venture-backed experiments. It cannot be predicted.” Source: The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future Jeffrey Sutton and Robert Sutton on the relationship between knowing and doing: “There is only a loose and imperfect relationship between knowing what to do and the ability to act on that knowledge. Competitive advantage comes from being able to do something others can’t do. If you and colleagues learn from your own actions and behavior, then there won’t be much of a knowing-doing gap because you will be knowing on the basics of your doing, and implementing that knowledge will be substantially easier.” Source: The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:35 PM
03.17.22
Leading Thoughts for March 17, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Lawyer Michael L. King on identity: “One of my happiest childhood memories is of a ride with my father in our old clunker of an automobile. A shiny red Cadillac whizzed past and daddy remarked how pretty and expensive it was. “Why do Cadillacs cost so much money?” I asked. “Is it the name?” Source: “Fatherhood and the Black Man,” Wall Street Journal, June 6, 1988 American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz on learning: “Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.” Source: The Second Sin Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:51 AM
03.10.22
Leading Thoughts for March 10, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Julie Winkle Giulioni on career development: “We have come to believe that career development is exclusively about the climb up and around the corporate structure. And because we’ve accepted this limited view of career development, we too are blind to the broader definition of the experience, the enormous possibilitities that are present, and the many other ways you as a manager can help employees succeed and grow. Source: Promotions Are So Yesterday: Redefine Career Development. Help Employees Thrive Phil Nolan, former CEO of Eir, on distributed leadership: “The concept of distributed leadership will keep you in touch with the environment. If you want to prepare people for this environment, you have to get leadership further down the organization. We generally tend to drive managing down the organization, but not leadership. As an organization, we have to prepare for acts of leadership further down the organization. I think that that is the hardest thing for us to do as people sitting at the top. It feels like an unnatural act.” Source: A Time for Leadership Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:38 AM
03.03.22
Leading Thoughts for March 3, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: P. M. Forni on the art of going over your life: “You reflect to review the past, take stock of the present, and build a better future. The learning you acquire from reflecting on your experiences and those of others will depend on your willingness to ask yourself tough questions and to stick around for the uncomfortable answers. Here you must exercise caution. Do not dwell on the past unless you can learn from it. Do not look back to hurt yourself or others. The point is to use the past in ways that are beneficial to you.” Source: The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in the Age of Distraction Performance psychologist Jim Loehr on our moral operating system: “The combination of personal beliefs, ideology, and strong emotion can completely overwhelm our capacity for rational thought and sound judgment. Once we declare a belief to be unfettered truth, we close the door to introspective inquiry. Rather than using our powers of reason to investigate weaknesses and inconsistencies in what well could be a faulty belief, we instead use our capacity for creative logic to garner support for what our gut tells us to believe. Once a belief is successfully dressed up as truth, we feel justified in whatever moral judgment or decision we render.” Source: Leading with Character: 10 Minutes A Day to A Brilliant Legacy Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:34 AM
02.24.22
Leading Thoughts for February 24, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Former CEO of Best Buy, Hubert Jolly, on the value of more decisions to keep moving forward: “A good plan is all we needed to create momentum and hope and get people engaged. Making decisions fast—like matching online prices and reinstating the employee discount—was crucial. It boosted people’s energy and created a sense of possibility and hope. What separates great leaders from good leaders is not the quality but the quantity of decisions. More decisions create more momentum and energy. These decisions will not all be good ones. But if you know how to ride a bicycle, then you know that it is much easier to correct course when you pedal your way forward than when you stand still.” Source: The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism Michael Mauboussin writes that how you improve your skill depends on where the activity lies on the continuum between pure luck and pure skill: “In cases where there is a clear relationship between cause and effect, and in activities that are stable and linear, deliberate practice is the only path to improvement. For activities near the luck side of the continuum, a good process is the surest path to success in the long run. Accurate feedback is essential no matter where you are on the continuum. Improving your skill means constantly looking for ways to change your behavior, either because what you’re doing is wrong or because there’s a slightly better way of doing it. No matter what your profession or level of expertise, the chances are very good that accurate feedback can improve your performance.” Source: The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:32 AM
02.17.22
Leading Thoughts for February 17, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Dov Seidman on why organizations can compete through culture: “Culture can’t be copied. The collective experience of any group of people forms a unique narrative, a story that lives and breathes in the halls, offices, and factories of that enterprise. The way people connect, spark against one another to create new ideas or refine old ones, solve problems, and overcome adversity build the synapses that make an organization thrive or die, and no two groups conglomerate these experiences alike. Each is as unique as any family; the number of children can be the same but the ties that bind them will always be unique. Because of this singularity, culture, as an expression of the collective hows of a group or enterprise, gives us our greatest opportunity for differentiation.” Source: How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything Forrester's Law: “In complicated situations efforts to improve things often tend to make them worse, sometimes much worse, on occasion calamitous.” Source: MIT Sloan Professor Emeritus Jay W. Forrester quoted in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by George H. Nash Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:20 AM
02.10.22
Leading Thoughts for February 10, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Alan Deutschman on the effects of walking the walk: “When you walk the walk, you reveal the ranking of your values. Martin Luther King Jr’s actions showed that nonviolence was his paramount value for the movement he led. Although he sought many important things for black people in America—equality, respect, power, prosperity—he wouldn’t sacrifice nonviolence to achieve any of them. Nonviolence was nonnegotiable. It was number one.” Source: Walk the Walk: The #1 Rule for Real Leaders Thomas Sowell on intellectuals: “It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon—that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.” Source: Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:11 AM
02.03.22
Leading Thoughts for February 3, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Manfred Kets de Vries on developing emotional intelligence: “Certain kinds of learning can’t be rushed; they have to be approached one step at a time. This is particularly true of becoming more emotionally attuned. To acquire this kind of knowledge, there are two secrets. The first is to have patience; the second is to be patient! Acquiring higher emotional intelligence—that is, gaining a better understanding of the psychodynamics of human behavior—is never instantaneous. Becoming more psychologically minded requires not only time, but also persistence. Patience and persistence can move mountains. They are the keys to becoming more emotionally astute.” Source: The Leader on the Couch: A Clinical Approach to Changing People & Organisations John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison on the importance of serendipity: “We need serendipitous encounters with people because of the importance of the ideas that these people carry with them and the connections they have. People carry tacit knowledge. You can’t learn brain surgery just from a text. Nor can you learn how to make tasty homebrew without watching someone else carry out the process. In both cases, you’ve got to stand next to someone who already knows and learn by doing. Tacit knowledge exists only in people’s heads. As edges arise ever more quickly, all of us must not only find the people who carry the new knowledge but get to know them well enough (and provide them with sufficient reciprocal value) that they’re comfortable trying to share it with us.” Source: The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:55 AM
01.27.22
Leading Thoughts for January 27, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Amelia Dunlop on grace: “Grace is what we offer to each other when we show kindness to the parts of our humanity that are in need of elevating. It is too easy to point to the failings of my colleagues around me and not extend grace. I find myself saying things like, ‘With grace, he might not have known that this was important.’ Or ‘If we extend grace, she might have a lot going on right now and simply missed the email.’ It is because we are human, not perfect, that we need to learn to extend grace to each other, something that I find very much needed every day in the workplace.” Source: Elevating the Human Experience: Three Paths to Love and Worth at Work
Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta on regaining trust: “We tend to believe that trust, once broken, cannot be regained, when actually the truth is somewhat more complex. Trust, once broken, cannot easily be regained. We fall into this fallacy for two reasons. First, trust is so hard to regain that so few do it, making us think that broken trust is truly lost forever. Second, because trust is so hard to regain, it makes more sense to focus on protecting your reputation and avoiding losing trust in the first place. However, consider Boeing, Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, and Uber. All of these companies are battered but still in business. A trust betrayal does not necessarily mean game over. Still, be warned, trust regained looks different than trust that was never betrayed.” Source: The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:09 PM
01.20.22
Leading Thoughts for January 20, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Kevin Roose on resisting machine drift: “We’ve talked mainly about external forms of automation—industrial robots, machine learning, algorithms, back-office AI software. But there is a kind of internalized automation taking place inside many of us that, in some ways, is much more dangerous. Source: Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation Warren Bennis and Philip Slater on understanding the social territory: “It is important for the leader to follow the maxim ‘know thyself’ so that he can control some of the pernicious effects he may create unwittingly. Unless the leader understands his actions and effects on others, he may be a carrier rather than a solver of problems.” Source: The Temporary Society Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:18 AM
01.13.22
Leading Thoughts for January 13, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Consultant Larry Miller on the need for leaders to respond creatively to challenges: “Both cultures and companies continue to progress so long as leaders recognize the challenges and respond creatively. Each successful response leads not to a condition of ease, but to a higher level of challenge, requiring yet another new and creative response. Creative response is the essential function of leaders. The moment leaders relax and rely on yesterday’s successful response in the presence of today’s challenge, the decline begins. It is natural for leaders in every stage to rely on responses they find most comfortable and to fail when they do not adopt innovative responses. Both the history of civilizations and of corporations demonstrate this relationship between the behavior of leaders and the cycle of growth and decline.” Source: Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies Graham Duncan on the victim mentality: “One great portfolio manager I know told the story of being driven somewhere by an analyst on a rainy night when a truck swerved and almost ran them off the road. “Why is stuff like this always happening to me?” the analyst instinctively responded. But to the portfolio manager, that response reflected a terrible mindset, whether on the road or in the market: a sense that the world is acting on you as opposed to your acting on the world. It is a mindset that is hard to change. But from what I’ve seen, great investors don’t have it. Instead, they’ve come to understand which factors in the market they can control and which factors they cannot.” Source: The Playing Field blog post Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:54 AM
01.06.22
Leading Thoughts for January 6, 2022
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter on learning to be compassionate leaders: “The people who pose the biggest challenge often provide the greatest opportunity for our own development and growth. In this way, people provide the critical fuel for us to become compassionate leaders. Nearly every situation is an opportunity to learn. And the more we learn, the better ewe become. When we experience challenges from the people we work with, we have a chance: w can either resist them or we can see the situation as an opportunity to practice our leadership and our compassion.” Source: Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way Professor John Kotter on the need for more leadership from more people: “Although not everyone who seriously studies great figures would agree, we think it is very clear that if there was no Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Thomas Watson, the world would have evolved differently in some important ways. So the point is not that such people as inconsequential media figureheads, or had they not existed someone else would have played the same role, and just as brilliantly. Quite the contrary. The point is that we cannot depend upon mass producing heroic figures to solve humanity’s problems. There must be another way. Source: Change How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:51 AM
12.30.21
Leading Thoughts for December 30, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Robert Dilenschneider on knowing your strengths: “By knowing your strengths and building on them in a hypercompetitive world, we can be more effective. You need to learn how to block out your weaknesses, prune them, and drive steadily from your strengths. That takes an enormous amount of discipline.” Source: Power and Influence: The Rules Have Changed Michael J. Fox on optimism: “I started to notice things I was grateful for and the way other people would respond to difficulty with gratitude. I concluded that gratitude makes optimism sustainable. And if you don’t think you have anything to be grateful for, keep looking. Because you don’t just receive optimism, you can’t wait for things to be great and then be grateful for that. You’ve got to behave in a way that promotes that.” Source: “Unbreakable” by Andrew Corsello, AARP Magazine December 2021/January 2022 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:36 AM
12.23.21
Leading Thoughts for December 23, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Michael Useem on what got you here won’t get you there or reinventing yourself as you move forward: “The factors that led others to select you to manage a team, an office, or even an enterprise, are going to change as markets and methods evolve, pushing you to the edge, and making it vital to continually consider the additional leadership capacities required now. The best capacities of an earlier time thus remain informative but also incomplete for the challenges we face ahead.” Source: The Edge: How Ten CEOs Learned to Lead--And the Lessons for Us All Alaa Garad and Jeff Gold on how disruption and crisis require strategic learning across the organization: “Leaders must engage in learning that is continuous and strategic, that has to include a willingness to embrace critical thinking to avoid … functional stupidity whereby leaders can prevent learning and change for the sake of maintaining and sustaining an order that they avoid justifying. In a similar manner, some leaders can be accused of hubris, show contempt for criticism from others and become capable of inflicting damage on their organizations.” Source: The Learning-Driven Business: How to Develop an Organizational Learning Ecosystem Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:37 AM
12.16.21
Leading Thoughts for December 16, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on leadership: “The fundamental role of a leader is to look for ways to shape the decades ahead, not just react to the present, and to help others accept the discomfort of disruptions to the status quo.” Source: My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas on fear: “Fear is neither good nor bad. It is merely an emotion you feel when you get an outcome that is different from what you expect. The story we create about fear matters more that the fear itself. We control those stories and can craft either a negative one of doom and gloom or see fear as a cue for growth. When we are able to do the latter, fear becomes a path that leads to a better future.” Source: Unfear: Transform Your Organization to Create Breakthrough Performance and Employee Well-Being Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:34 PM
12.09.21
Leading Thoughts for December 9, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Michael Dell on success: “Success is not a straight line up. It’s fail, learn, try again, then (you hope) succeed. How successful you are is really a function of how well you deal with failure—and how much you learn from it. Many people don’t reach their greatest potential because they fear failure. In avoiding failure, they deprive themselves of a great teacher. Many others fall short because of a lack of opportunity, capital, knowledge, or skills. Persistence is an all-important quality on the road to success. (And success presents its own challenges, avoiding complacency being the first and biggest. Which is why, along with kaizen, PBNS—pleased but never satisfied—has been part of our culture since the beginning.)” Source: Play Nice But Win: A CEO’s Journey from Founder to Leader Gary Vaynerchuk on the value of soft skills to build a successful company: “Modern society’s definition of a ‘smart business decision’ is disproportionately predicated on analytics. Business leaders tend to find safety in the ‘black-and-white.’ They find safety in the academics, math, hard data, and what looks good on spreadsheets. Source: Twelve and a Half: Leveraging the Emotional Ingredients Necessary for Business Success Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:10 AM
12.02.21
Leading Thoughts for December 2, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Amelia Dunlop on elevating the human experience: “Elevating the human experience is about acknowledging intrinsic worth as a human and nurturing growth through love. Sometimes the person we need to see most worthy of love is ourselves. Sometimes it is another person. Sometimes it is a group of people who have been unseen.” Source: Elevating the Human Experience: Three Paths to Love and Worth at Work John Parker Stewart and Daniel J. Stewart on understanding effective leadership is something you learn as you go along: “One of our wonderful colleagues, John Zorbini, often said that if leadership were a car, you would think it must be a classic red Ferrari with the way we traditionally talk about it—or even the way we all think to ourselves about it. We sometimes put the idea of leadership on a pedestal and speak about it reverently. It’s the idea that when you become a leader, you are blessed with instant knowledge, judgment, and prestige. Source: LEAD NOW!: A Personal Leadership Coaching Guide for Results-Driven Leaders Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:05 PM
11.25.21
Leading Thoughts for November 25, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Pastor Will Johns on seeing the world through the lens of gratitude: “Gratitude is a lens that changes the perception of everything in your life. Your world will be transformed. You will begin to see good things you’ve never noticed before. You will begin to feel joy for things in your life you knew were good but never fully appreciated. You will be able to count your blessings even during difficult circumstances. Gratitude will affect your essential perspective of and attitude toward life. And it will bring you the happiness you have been seeking your entire life. However, it doesn’t happen naturally.” Source: Everything is Better Than You Think: How Gratitude Can Transform Your Life Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton on how the best leaders know how people contribute and actively look for reasons to express gratitude: “It is about seeing good things happening and then expressing heartfelt appreciation for the right behaviors. On the flip side, managers who lack gratitude suffer, first and foremost, from a problem of cognition—a failure to perceive how hard their people are trying to do good work—and, if they’re encountering problems, what they are. These ungrateful leaders suffer from information deficit.” Source: Leading with Gratitude: Eight Leadership Practices for Extraordinary Business Results Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:41 AM
11.18.21
Leading Thoughts for November 18, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Liz Wiseman describes a practice of Impact Players: “Impact Players practice a fluid model of leadership—leading on demand rather than by command. They take their cues from the situation, stepping up when needed, but when their stewardship is fulfilled, they step back and follow others with equal ease. While others wait for direction, Impact Players step up and lead.” Source: Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact Peter Senge on getting to the root of the issue: “The bottom line of systems thinking is leverage—seeing where actions and changes in structures can lead to significant, enduring improvements. Often leverage follows the principle of economy of means: where the best results come not from large-scale efforts but from small well-focused actions. Our non-systematic ways of thinking are so damaging specifically because they consistently lead us to focus on low leverage changes: we focus on symptoms where the stress is greatest. We repair or ameliorate the symptoms. But such efforts only make matters better in the short run, at best, and worse in the long run. Source: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:10 AM
11.11.21
Leading Thoughts for November 11, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Scientist Edward O. Wilson on the unification of knowledge: “The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.” Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge The late professor and writer David Foster Wallace on focus: “Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” Source: This is Water Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 04:27 PM
10.28.21
Leading Thoughts for October 28, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: John Hagel on how emotions spread and thus how this dynamic can be used for or against us: “Emotions have an interesting network effect: Once a critical mass of people feel a certain emotion, it tends to spread exponentially, both in terms of the number of people who feel it and in terms of intensity with which it is felt. As the emotional cascade takes hold, it becomes harder and harder to resist.” Source: The Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success Thomas Sowell on the media gimmick of turning questions of fact into questions of emotion: “Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any rational adult understood this. But years of dumbed-down education and emphasis on how people feel have left too many people unable to see through this media gimmick.” Source: The Media's Role Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:04 PM
10.21.21
Leading Thoughts for October 21, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: The cellist, composer, and conductor, Pablo Casals, on being unique: “Each second we live in a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that never was before and will never be again. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all of the world there is no other child exactly like you. In the millions of years that have passed there has never been another child like you... You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is like you, a marvel? You must cherish one another. You must work—we must all work—to make this world worthy of its children.” Source: Joys and Sorrows: Reflections Frank Partnoy on the one word of wisdom in decision making – wait: “Life might be a race against time, but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires a pause.” Source: Wait: The Useful Art of Procrastination Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:40 PM
10.07.21
Leading Thoughts for October 7, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Elon Musk with a counterpoint to the idea to just trust the process: “I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that ‘it’s all about the process,’ I see that as a bad sign. The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.” Source: “Elon Musk's Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012 Canadian actor and director Antoni Cimolino on the value of the arts: “One music teacher in a school does more good for our children than a truckload of computers — mere information, and the tools for processing it, are useless to people whom no one has taught to dream; bandwidth isn’t as important as mind width, and mind depth; training technicians will advance us not one whit unless we also nurture the imagination of potential visionaries.” Source: Speech, Artistic Institutions: The Wellsprings of Our Spiritual, Emotional, and Intellectual Well-Being Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:50 PM
09.30.21
Leading Thoughts for September 30, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Mark Sanborn on why culture matters: “Culture is a corporate immune system that protects against variance, decline, or abandonment by identifying and combating threatening forces like toxic partners, disjointed processes, and bad decisions.” Source: The Intention Imperative Thomas Berry on the need for a new story: “It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story — the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it — is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story.” Source: The New Story: Comments on the Origin, Identification and Transmission of Values Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:07 AM
09.23.21
Leading Thoughts for September 23, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Alan Mulally on running a business in the midst of a crisis: “Running a business is a design job. You need a point of view about the future, a really good plan to deliver that future, and then relentless implementation. Source: American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan on the need for leaders to create an organization that can confront reality: “Exercising the power of realism requires an open and inquisitive mind, intense curiosity, the intellectual ability to sort out complexity, the ability to persuade others, and—undergirding it all—the courage of inner strength. People who lack these qualities can’t be considered leaders. They should look for other work.” Source: Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:11 AM
09.16.21
Leading Thoughts for September 16, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach on the need for flexible thinking: “We must dispel the notion that strong leaders don’t change their positions … or, dare we say, learn. Flipflopping when you have new information – flexing your thinking in an explicable way – is absolutely a hallmark of effective leadership in the face of accelerating change. Source: Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws Historian Adrian Goldsworthy on concerns over the growth of organizations: “It is only human nature to lose sight of the wider issues and focus on immediate concerns and personal issues.… All human institutions, from countries to businesses, risk creating a similarly short-sighted and selfish culture. Source: How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:03 AM
09.09.21
Leading Thoughts for September 9, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Former vice president and corporate controller at The Boeing Company, Laurette Koellner, on our responsibility to self-empower and self-deploy: “No one asked Amelia Earhart or Charles Lindbergh to do a solo flight across the Atlantic. No one asked Bill Boeing to build an airplane. They did these things because they wanted to. They did them because they wanted to open new frontiers. Similarly, we, as individuals, must decide how we are going to expand frontiers for ourselves — and for others who are working with us or for us. To do that, we must be prepared to do battle from time to time with the internal bureaucracy in our organizations. But even more than that, we have to be prepared to fight against our own inertia — or what one poet described as ‘mind-forges manacles.’” Source: Speech, Managing Your Career: The Ultimate Solo Flight Author and writing teacher Julia Cameron on what it takes to improve: “There will be many times when we won’t look good—to ourselves or anyone else. We need to stop demanding that we do. It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time. Source: The Artist’s Way Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:26 AM
09.02.21
Leading Thoughts for September 2, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Consultant Jeff Davidson on the need for breathing space: “When your brain is always engaged, when your neurons are always firing, when you find yourself in a continual mode of reacting and responding, instead of steering and directing, the best and brightest solutions that you are capable of producing rarely see the light of day. Source: Speech, Taking Back Control of Our Days Philip Yancy on how art can help turn us from the world’s frivolities and given us time for reflection: “Compared to any other time in history, we moderns scream and shout at each other. Listen to the music on any Top 40 station. Visit a museum of contemporary art. The world today contains no subtlety, no silence, no spaces. Source: First Things, “What Art Can—and Can’t—Do” February 2009 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:40 AM
08.26.21
Leading Thoughts for August 26, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: French political philosopher and historian Alexis De Tocqueville on what democratic nations have to fear: “I have no fear that they will meet with tyrants in their rulers but rather with guardians. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Source: Democracy in America Volume 2, Fourth Book Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the need for prudence or commonsense: “Of the four cardinal virtues — courage, temperance, justice, and prudence — it is the last — prudence — that the ancient philosophers traditionally placed at the moral apex. They did so because they understood, quite rightly, that without that practical, seemingly rather dull, virtue none of the others could be correctly applied. You have to know when and how to be brave, or self-controlled or fair-minded, in particular situations. Prudence — or what I would prefer to call a good, hearty helping of commonsense, shows the way.” Source: Ronald Reagan: The Greatness of His Achievements, Speech delivered to The Heritage Foundation’s 25th Aniversary, December 10, 1997 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:51 AM
08.19.21
Leading Thoughts for August 19, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: April Rinne on how to thrive in a fast-paced world: “In an upside-down world that coaxes, cajoles, and coerces you to run ever faster, your key to true success and growth is to do the opposite: learn how to run slower. Source: Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change American educational philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins, former chancellor of the University of Chicago, with a timely comment on a return to critical thought: “As the Renaissance could accuse the Middle Ages of being rich in principles and poor in facts, we are now entitled to inquire whether we are not rich in facts and poor in principles. Our bewilderment has resulted from our notion that salvation depends on information. The remedy may be a return to the process of rational thought.” Source: Robert Maynard Hutchins, Convocation Address 1933 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:37 AM
08.12.21
Leading Thoughts for August 12, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Mark C. Thompson and Bonita S. Thompson on taking action in a crisis: “Challenges don’t come neatly packaged the way we planned them. So when you’re taken by surprise—and you don’t have the tools or support that you’d counted on—the first thing to think about is not what you’ve lost but what tools you still have. Start where you are. Figure out what you do have and use that to your advantage. When in doubt, take stock and then take action. Source: Admired: 21 Ways to Double Your Value John Wooden on self-control: “Leadership starts with self-control. Remember, control of your organization begins with control of yourself. When you lose control, you sanction the same behavior for those under your leadership—the team. There is never an excuse for violating this imperative, and when you do, your credibility and consistency as a leader diminish accordingly.” Source: Wooden on Leadership Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:58 AM
08.05.21
Leading Thoughts for August 5, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: John Maxwell on how adversity introduces us to ourselves: “Adversity always gets our attention. We can’t ignore it. It causes us to stop and look at our situation. And at ourselves if we have the courage. Adversity creates an opportunity for self-discovery. As the great Egyptian leader Anwar el-Sadat said, ‘Great suffering builds up a human being and puts him within the reach of self-knowledge.’” Source: Leading in Tough Times Retired General Ronald Yates on the American tradition of total quality leadership: “During the American Revolution, an officer in civilian clothes rose past a group of soldiers busy repairing a small fortification of rocks and tree limbs. Their commander was shouting instructions but making no attempt to help them. When the passer-by asked the commander why he wasn’t helping, the man in charge replied with great dignity, ‘Sir, I am a corporal!’ Source: Total Quality Leadership: An American Tradition, Speech delivered November 1, 1994 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:16 AM
07.29.21
Leading Thoughts for July 29, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Motivational speaker Les Brown on having an indomitable spirit: “There are negatively charged people who allow events to control their lives, and there are positively charged people who remain in control of their lives no matter what life throws at them. You want to be positively charged. “ Source: Live Your Dreams Reid Hoffman and Ben Casocha say opportunities are the result of doing something—by being motion: “Opportunities do not float like clouds. They are firmly attached to individuals. If you’re looking for an opportunity, you’re really looking for people. If you’re evaluating an opportunity, you’re really evaluating people. If you’re trying to marshal resources to go after an opportunity, you’re really trying to enlist the support and involvement of other people.” Source: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:18 AM
07.22.21
Leading Thoughts for July 22, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Former CEO of Honeywell International, Larry Bossidy, on the behaviors a leader should look for in his or her direct reports: “Over the years, I’ve observed that certain behaviors, on the part of both the subordinate and the boss, are conducive to productive and rewarding relationships. Indeed, I’ll favor someone who exhibits the behaviors I expect over someone who doesn’t, even if the latter’s numbers are slightly better because I know the former has the potential to contribute more to the organization over time.” Source: Harvard Business Review, “What Your Leader Expects of You” Marc and Samantha Hurwitz on the importance of followership on management performance as you move up the organizational ladder: “There is a lot less forgiveness for poor followership at the middle-manager level because much more of the job is about building partnerships, setting an example, and working in the larger organizational context. Being technically strong is no longer enough to shine. At senior management levels, followership becomes the primary consideration. In our experience, senior executives have the highest levels of followership skill and the greatest conceptual understanding of it, and are most likely to acknowledge followership behaviors.” Source: Leadership is Half the Story: A Fresh Look at Followership, Leadership, and Collaboration Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:38 AM
07.15.21
Leading Thoughts for July 15, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Journalist George Leonard on mastery: “How long will it take me to master Aikido?” a prospective student asks. ‘How long do you expect to live?’ is the only respectable response. Source: Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment General Gordon Sullivan and Michael Harper on what to do in uncharted territory: “The old maps, the old ways of doing business, will not work in today’s new territories. Simply improving an existing process will not solve a problem. This is the failure of the ‘R-words’—reshaping, reengineering, reinventing, and reposturing. Doing the same thing you have always done—no matter how much you improve it—will get you only what you had before. The old ways lead to the same old failures.” Source: Hope Is Not a Method: What Business Leaders Can Learn from America's Army Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:06 AM
07.08.21
Leading Thoughts for July 8, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Louis L’Amour on pausing to take stock of yourself and ask: Where am I going? What am I becoming? What do I wish to do and become? “Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.” Source: The Walking Drum Peter Drucker on personal responsibility: “It is the mark of a mature person to ask: ‘What do I want to get out of life?’—and to know that one gets out only as much as one puts in. Tomorrow it will be the mark of a free person to ask: ‘What do I want to get out of organizations?’—and to know that one gets only as much as one puts in.” Source: The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:45 AM
07.01.21
Leading Thoughts for July 1, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Former Chairman and CEO of Pepsico, Indra Nooyi, on assuming positive intent: “My father was an absolutely wonderful human being. From him, I learned to always assume positive intent. Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You will be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different. When you assume negative intent, you’re angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response. You don’t get defensive. You don’t scream. You are trying to understand and listen because at your basic core you are saying, ‘Maybe they are saying something to me that I’m not hearing.’ So, assume positive intent has been a huge piece of advice for me.” Source: Fortune, “The Best Advice I Ever Got” Director, producer, and screenwriter Steven Spielberg on collaboration. In the interview he was asked, “What keeps you excited about making movies?”: “I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That’s never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad’s 8-millimeter movie camera. The thrill hasn’t changed at all. In fact, as I’ve gotten older, it’s actually increased, because now I appreciate the collaboration. Source: The New York Times, “The Adventures of Spielberg: An Interview” by Mekado Murphy, December 20, 2011 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:08 AM
06.24.21
Leading Thoughts for June 24, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Ron Friedman on how experience begets automaticity and automaticity stifles learning. And the need for the right kind of practice to improve and grow: “Working on our weaknesses is unpleasant, stressful, and hard. But it’s a process that does something crucial for skill development: it breaks the spell of automaticity. Source: Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success Former Navy Seal Brent Gleeson on the difference between planning and preparation: “Planning is certainly part of preparation, but it’s much more than that. Preparation means you know the plan, but you also have the functionality and skill to pivot when things don’t go according to that plan. Source: TakingPoint: A Navy SEAL’s 10 Fail Safe Principles for Leading Through Change Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:46 PM
06.17.21
Leading Thoughts for June 17, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Leadership coach Ruchira Chaudhary on the difference between mentors and coaches: “Mentors provide direction to their mentees, giving them the opportunity to become more like them. Coaches, though, don’t offer directions or even answers. A good coach instead helps the coachee come up with their own answers. As a coach and leader, you—unlike the mentor—do not provide advice from a distance. You are right there where all the action is taking place. You are observing, providing feedback, sometimes nuggets of wisdom and encouragement, sometimes nudging, sometimes directing, and often times proactively seeking them out to help them be a better version of themselves. You (ideally) lead these interactions—not your coachee. In essence, a mentor guides your (career of life) journey, whereas a coach guides your (current) practice.” Source: Coaching: The Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership Evolutionary biologist Rebecca Heiss on how our inter-gender instincts can influence our perceptions of leadership roles: “As soon as we are reminded that women, even powerful, responsible, qualified leaders, are mothers, our sex instinct fires up ancient associations that hold women back. But the flip side of gender bias must also be given due consideration. Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:09 AM
06.10.21
Leading Thoughts for June 10, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: D. Michael Lindsay observed that the best leaders have shown excellent management of the transitional events in their lives: “The challenge with life is that we have to live it moving forward, but we only really understand it looking back. Every day offers the promise of preparing us to best respond to the next hinge moment of our lives. Source: Hinge Moments: Making the Most of Life's Transitions Bruce Feiler on our personal narratives: “Each one of us carries around an unspoken set of assumptions that dictate how we expect our lives to unfold. These expectations come from all corners and influence us more than we admit. We’ve been led to believe that our lives will always ascend, for example, and are shocked to discover they oscillate instead. Our society tells us we should be basking in progress, but our experience tells us we are beset by slip-ups. Might this gap help explain the anxiety so many of us feel?” Source: Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change in a Nonlinear Age Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:19 PM
06.03.21
Leading Thoughts for June 3, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Andrew and Nada Kakabadse and Linda Lee-Davies on knowing when to act as well as being in the right place at the right time: “What makes a leader great in one situation could make them incompetent in another and the increasing pace of change in today’s business environment means then that different qualities will not only be needed at different times but also more quickly and drastically. Perhaps then, it is the ability to provide the appropriate leadership qualities and skills at the appropriate time that s secret to being great. Perhaps, it is the ability to which from the transactional needs of the business to the transformational thinking which links the followers toward the future which is key to successful timing.” Source: Leading for Success: The Seven Sides to Great Leaders Pete Davis on a culture of infinite browsing: “I’ve come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of my generation: keeping our options open. Source: Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:50 AM
05.27.21
Leading Thoughts for May 27, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Teresa Amabile on how to kill creativity: “Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones. The former create distrust and the latter cause burnout. In either case, people feel overcontrolled and unfulfilled—which invariably damages motivation. Moreover, creativity often takes time. It can be slow going to explore new concepts, put together unique solutions, and wander through the maze. Managers who do not allow time for exploration or do not schedule in incubation periods are unwittingly standing in the way of the creative process.” Source: Harvard Business Review: How to Kill Creativity Authors John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison say we often don’t even know what we are looking for or the questions to ask to get there, so it calls for a different approach: “We need serendipitous encounters with people because of the importance of the ideas that these people carry with them and the connections they have. People carry tacit knowledge. … You’ve got to stand next to someone who already knows and learn by doing. Tacit knowledge exists only in people’s heads. As edges arise ever more quickly, all of us must not only find the people who carry the new knowledge but get to know them well enough (and provide them with sufficient reciprocal value) that they’re comfortable trying to share it with us.” Source: The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:19 AM
05.20.21
Leading Thoughts for May 20, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Robert Heinlein on dying cultures: “Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” Source: Friday (1982) Ben Horowitz on what you get is based on who you are: “Trying to screen for ‘good people’ or screen out ‘bad people’ doesn’t necessarily get you a high-integrity culture. A person may come in with high integrity but have to compromise it to succeed in your environment. People become the culture they live in and do what the have to do to survive and thrive.” Source: What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:34 AM
05.13.21
Leading Thoughts for May 13, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Joann Lublin on how parenting can make parents better leaders and bosses: “A high proportion of younger mothers and fathers believe that parenthood makes them better leaders, another study revealed. About 55% of parents under 35 “strongly agree” that’s true—compared with 28% of ones over 45, a 2019 survey of 1,003 individuals with and without children stated. Source: Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life Malcolm Gladwell on the birth of revolutions: “Revolutions are invariably group activities. Rarely does someone start a revolution alone. Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.” Source: The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:38 AM
05.06.21
Leading Thoughts for May 6, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Susan McPherson on making a genuine connection with others: “We’re living in a loneliness epidemic that is causing declines in physical and mental health, as well as decreased work satisfaction and performance. It’s clear that the art of connecting is lost. We’re talking, Zooming, Tweeting, and texting, but we’re not feeling a sense of connection. People have lost their sense of belonging and purpose in their careers and their lives. Why? Because we’ve come to lean too hard on our digital lives. Virtual connections are not the end; they are the means to an end—an authentic relationship with depth, be it professional or personal.” To uncover your what drives you, Victoria Labalme offers the Desert Island Question: “If you were on a deserted island dying and you knew you weren’t going to make it … that this was the end… but there was a young person with you—someone you cared about deeply … and if—before you died—you could give that young person only one piece of advice about life and how they might best live theirs … what would that one piece of advice be?” Source: Risk Forward: Embrace the Unknow and Unlock Your Hidden Genius Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:14 AM
04.29.21
Leading Thoughts for April 29, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Phil Knight on competition: “Emotion would be fatal. I needed to remain cool. I thought back on my running career at Oregon. I’d competed with, and against, men far better, faster, more physically gifted. Many were future Olympians. And yet, I’d trained myself to forget this unhappy fact. People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, ‘Not one more step!’ And when it’s not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it. I thought over all the races in which my mind wanted one thing, and my body wanted another, those laps in which I’d had to tell my body, ‘Yes, you raise some excellent points, but let’s keep going anyway…’” Source: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike Randy Komisar on personal success: “Considering personal risk forces us to define personal success. We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. Personal goals, on the other hand, leave us on our own, without this habit of useless measurement and comparison. Source: The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:42 AM
04.22.21
Leading Thoughts for April 22, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Economist Tim Harford on the problem of using statistical metrics as a proxy to control or as a target to be improved: “Social scientists have long understood that statistical metrics are at their most pernicious when they are being used to control the world, rather than trying to understand it. Economists tend to cite their colleague Charles Goodhart, who wrote in 1975: ‘Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.’ (Or, more pithily: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’) Psychologists turn to Donald T. Campbell, who around the same time explained: ‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’” Source: The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics Jon Acuff on the things we tell ourselves—our soundtracks: “One of the greatest mistakes you can make in life is assuming all of your thoughts are true. We tend to believe that if it’s in our head, it must be accurate. If I think it, it must be real. Despite the wild things our thoughts have told us over the years, we trust them. When you start to ask a soundtrack this question—is it true?—I promise you’ll be shocked by how many lies you have cluttering up your head.” Source: Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:55 AM
04.15.21
Leading Thoughts for April 15, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis reflects on what we are likely to see as we move beyond the COVID-19 pandemic period: “If history is a guide, it seems likely that consumption will come back with a vengeance. Periods of plague-driven austerity have often been followed by periods of liberal spending. If the Roaring Twenties following the 1918 pandemic are a guide, the increased religiosity and reflection of the immediate and intermediate pandemic periods could give way to increased expressions of risk-taking, intemperance, or joie de vivre in the post-pandemic period. The great appeal of cities will be apparent once again. People will relentlessly seek opportunities for social mixing on a larger scale in sporting events, concerts, and political rallies. And after a serious epidemic, people often feel not only a renewed sense of purpose but a renewed sense of possibility.” Source: Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live Authors Robert Galford and Anne Drapeau on the correlation between trust and self-knowledge: “Being a trusted leader is about knowing yourself. Knowing your strengths, your shortcomings, what gives you pleasure, what annoys the hell out of you. Knowing why you go to work, why you react as you do under pressure, what scares you, and what makes you proud. The true trusted leaders we know all have one thing in common, if nothing else: they know themselves very well. Self-knowledge is fundamental to be a rusted leader for a simple reason: trust is built on honesty.” Source: The Trusted Leader: Bringing Out the Best in Your People and Your Company Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:29 PM
04.08.21
Leading Thoughts for April 8, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: The late economic historian professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Carlo M. Cipolla on the five laws of human stupidity: 1. Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals among us. Source: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor on vision: “The only way to succeed in the marketplace today—the marketplace of individuals or products or services or ideas—is to know your own story and to follow it into the future. Define yourself by someone else’s benchmarks, immerse yourself in someone else’s possibilities, and you become the thing you define yourself by and immerse yourself in. Measure yourself against your own rate of change and you stay inside your own story. That way, when the other side ceases to exist, you still have a reason to go on. External and lateral competition is the distraction. Internal and vertical competition is the game. The real battle is against yourself.” Source: The Visionary's Handbook: Ten Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:44 AM
04.01.21
Leading Thoughts for April 1, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Joseph T. Hallinan on how the tail begins to wag the dog when it comes to our perceptions of reality: “Once we have an opinion about how something should be, that expectation often colors our perception of how that thing actually is. When we look, we look with a purpose—we don’t look at something; we look for something. We tend to see what we expect to see and to experience what we expect to experience.” Source: Kidding Ourselves: The Hidden Power of Self-Deception Paul Zak on how fear-based leadership undermines our goals and dumbs us down: “The science shows that fear-based management is a losing proposition because people acclimate to fear quickly. Fear-inducing leaders must ramp up threats to increase productivity, but there are only so may threats one can make. Source: Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:08 AM
03.25.21
Leading Thoughts for March 25, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Fred Kofman on what it means to be a transcendent leader: “Transcendent leaders work to align the individual purposes of those under them into a larger collective purpose that makes each individual larger as well. They understand that if you want to make accountability and cooperation occur at the same time, you need to inspire people and create a culture of commitment and connection to a larger purpose. When this happens, people look beyond their silos and their small decision-making issues. They align their best efforts with the organization’s in natural ways that other systems can’t lead them to do. It is the difference between rowing and sailing. A boat moved by mere muscle is no match for one moved by wind. A boat propelled by the wind flows in harmony with the natural forces. An organization that moves forward by formal authority is like a rowboat. One moved by transcendent purpose is like a sailboat with the wind behind it, filling its sails.” Source: The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership Scientist and mathematician Richard Hamming on the purpose of education: “Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past.” Source: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:30 AM
03.18.21
Leading Thoughts for March 18, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Robert D. Kaplan on the dangers of peace: “Avoiding tragedy requires a sense of it, which in turn requires a sense of history. Peace, however, leads to a preoccupation with presentness, the loss of the past and a consequent disregard of the future. That is because peace by nature is pleasurable, and pleasure is about momentary satisfaction. In an era of extended domestic peace, those who deliver up pleasures are the power brokers. Because pleasure is inseparable from convenience, convenience becomes the vital element in society. Source: The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War American evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers on self-deception: “Together our sensory systems are organized to give us detailed and accurate view of reality, exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms.” Source: The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:32 AM
03.11.21
Leading Thoughts for March 11, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Mike Hayes on delegating and an insight as to why we lead: “We don’t need to assert the greatest amount of authority that we’re entitled to. Our organizations are better served by training the people below us to one day take our place. The more we can pass down the chain of command, the better equipped our organizations will be, with more capable leaders throughout.” Source: Never Enough: A Navy SEAL Commander on Living a Life of Excellence, Agility, and Meaning Mark Thomson on leading transformation: “You are not going to succeed as a CEO if you try to impose a set of ideas or a new culture Day 1. It just doesn’t work. It’s got to be owned. It’s more a question of trying to pull it out of the organization rather than push it in, and that meant trying step-by-step to encourage a deeper conversation about the future.” Source: As quoted in The CEO Test Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:26 AM
03.04.21
Leading Thoughts for March 4, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Performance psychologist Jim Loehr on motivated reasoning: “The facts are facts, but we ignore, alter, or otherwise twist them to allow us to continue doing what we are doing. Once we learn we can get what we want by altering the logic chain, by embracing ‘facts’ that align with the outcome we want and dismissing those facts that don’t, no behavior is safe. No value, no belief is safe.” Source: Leading with Character: 10 Minutes A Day to A Brilliant Legacy David C. Valliere on the need for entrepreneurs to think and to think differently: “Thinking is hard work. If you tell people they are thinking, they will love you. But if you actually make them think, they will hate you. Thinking carefully and precisely is very hard work – perhaps even harder than the physical labor of digging ditches, or the emotional labor of smiling at retail customers. Chess grandmasters can burn thousands of calories as they sit there, motionless, or occasionally lifting one hand to move a small piece weighting only a few grams. Because with their minds, they are expending huge amounts of energy. Most people will go to great lengths to avoid working so hard. They look for shortcuts and simplifications. They rely on ‘common wisdom’ and shared ‘rules of thumb’ without doing the hard work of checking things out for themselves. And these are the shortcuts that sink new entrepreneurs.” Source: Entrepreneurial Thinking: Think Different! Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:08 PM
02.25.21
Leading Thoughts for February 25, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: English philosopher John Stuart Mill on the pursuit of happiness: “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. Source: Autobiography Writer Jay Parini on E. L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow’s contribution to our understanding of the past: “What Doctorow knew, and demonstrated in book after book, is that the past is very much alive, but that it’s not easily accessed. We tell and retell stories, and these stories illuminate our daily lives. What ‘really’ happened – in family stories, in public tales – often eludes our grasp. And yet we need to know, or think we do, what happened, as it keeps happening again. History is never really ‘over,’ or so we discover, as we loop through the same issues again and again. Source: CNN: E.L. Doctorow’s Gift Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:45 AM
02.18.21
Leading Thoughts for February 18, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: British philosopher Owen Barfield giving a gentle provocation to new perspectives: “There may be times when what is most needed is, not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different ‘slant’; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our way of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.” Source: Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry Anders Ericsson, Michael Prietula, and Edward Cokely on the making of an expert: “The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint of heart nor for the impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest, often painful self-assessment. There are no shortcuts. It will take you at least a decade to achieve expertise, and you will need to invest that time wisely, by engaging in “deliberate” practice—practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort. You will need a well-informed coach not only to guide you through deliberate practice but also to help you learn how to coach yourself. Above all, if you want to achieve top performance as a manager and a leader, you’ve got to forget the folklore about genius that makes many people think they cannot take a scientific approach to developing expertise. Source: Harvard Business Review, The Making of an Expert Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:56 AM
02.11.21
Leading Thoughts for February 11, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Historians Will and Ariel Durant on the need for educated citizens: “Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that ‘you can’t fool all of the people all the time,’ but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country. Source: The Lessons of History Retired professor William Kilpatrick on the importance of teaching morals and why teaching leadership is critical to leadership development “None of us wants to go to untrained doctors, or fly with untrained pilots, or have untrained soldiers protect our country, but for some reason, we have come to believe that one can be a good person without any training in goodness. We have succumbed to a myth that claims that morality comes naturally, or at most, with the help of a little reasoning. But it seems increasingly clear that these metaphors and the models that flow from them aren’t working. The ‘natural’ thing to do in most situations is to take the easy way out. The most perfectly rational plan of action is to always put yourself first.” Source: Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: And What We Can Do About It Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:58 PM
02.04.21
Leading Thoughts for February 4, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University Todd Gitlin, on the experience of media: “The media are, in relation to social reality, fun-house mirrors, selective in their appetites, skewed in their imagery. The news is not in any simple way a ‘mirror’ on the world; it is a conduit for ideas and symbols, an industrial product that promotes packages of ideas and ideologies, and serves, consequently, as social ballast, though at times also a harbinger of social change. The news is a cognitive warp.” Source: Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives Thomas Sowell on the media gimmick of turning questions of fact into questions of emotion: “Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any rational adult understood this. But years of dumbed-down education and emphasis on how people “feel” have left too many people unable to see through this media gimmick.” Source: The Media’s Role Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:14 PM
01.28.21
Leading Thoughts for January 28, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Charles Sykes on victimization: “A formula for social gridlock: the irresistible search for someone or something to blame colliding with the unmovable unwillingness to accept responsibility. Now enshrined in law and jurisprudence, victimism is reshaping the fabric of society, including employment policies, criminal justice, education, urban politics, and, in an increasingly Orwellian emphasis on ‘sensitivity’ in language. A community of interdependent citizens has been displaced by a society of resentful, competing, and self-interested individuals who have dressed their private annoyances in the garb of victimism.” Source: Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character Tom Wheeler on how we are not alone in facing our challenges: “Limiting our horizons by ignoring our history denies us an essential appreciation: that the greatness of a people comes not from a retreat into halcyon memory but from the advances they make as they respond to newly created challenges.” Source: From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:39 AM
01.21.21
Leading Thoughts for January 21, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Brent Gleeson on resilience: “A growth mindset is the bedrock of resilience. With a growth mindset you know that skills and success come from hard work and dedication, and the status quo is never enough. People with this mindset are comfortable being uncomfortable. Transparent feedback is not just accepted but craved, and setbacks are just another bump in the road fueling the fire to push forward. ” Source: Embrace the Suck: The Navy SEAL Way to an Extraordinary Life Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay on the Unread Library Effect or how to help people understand that they are relying upon borrowed knowledge and moderate their views: “Explicitly invite explanations, ask for specifics, follow up with pointed questions that revolve around soliciting how someone knows the details, and continue to openly admit your own ignorance. In many conversations, the more ignorance you admit, the more readily your partner in the conversation will step in with an explanation to help you understand. And the more they attempt to explain, the more likely they are to realize the limits of their own knowledge. This strategy not only helps moderate strong views, it models openness, willingness to admit ignorance, and readiness to revise beliefs.” Source: How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:49 AM
01.14.21
Leading Thoughts for January 14, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Elaine Kamarck on presidential responsibility: “Despite of all the trappings of power—the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue, Camp David, Air Force One, never having to sit in a traffic jam (ever!)—the president is in charge of an entity over which he has fairly limited power. This is, of course, exactly the way the Founding Fathers wanted it. And yet, try telling that to the American public or to the world when something goes really wrong. As we have seen, large-scale governmental failure becomes presidential failure, whether the president likes it or not.” Source: Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again Brad Stulberg and Steve Magnes on how to be passionate: “Mindfully living with passion starts with realizing that passion in and of itself doesn’t start off as either good or bad; it just is—a powerful emotion rooted in our biology and psychology. It’s not something we magically find, but something that we develop by following our interests and incrementally devoting more of our time and energy to them. The next step to mindfully living with passion is to become aware of its dark side. Only by understanding the pitfalls of obsessive and fear-driven passion—and taking deliberate steps to avoid them—does passion gain the potential to be productive. But avoiding pitfalls is not enough. An equal challenge is bucking current trends that favor instant gratification and instead actively adopting the mastery mind-set: maintaining drive from within; focusing on the process over results; not worrying about being the best but worrying about being the best at getting better; embracing acute failure for chronic gains; practicing patience; and paying full attention to our pursuits.” Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:00 PM
01.12.21
Leading Thoughts: Pass Them On
BRITISH statesman Benjamin Disraeli said, “The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation.” The ideas of others have the power to slow us down and consider perspectives beyond our own. Left alone, our thoughts become too narrow—too vulnerable to blind spots. This learning process may deepen our own thoughts, give us concepts to build on, and start great conversations. It’s also good to know that we are not alone and that others have lived through the same things that we now experience. We share two ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog or sign up for our newsletter. Read them and pass them on! Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:56 AM
01.07.21
Leading Thoughts for January 7, 2021
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Geoff Colvin on self-knowledge: “The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going. Researchers call this metacognition—knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.” Source: Talent Is Overrated Charlie Munger on turning yourself into a learning machine: “I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than when they got up and boy does that help—particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.” Source: University of Southern California Law School Commencement Speech, May 13, 2007 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:46 AM
12.24.20
Leading Thoughts for December 24, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Frank Wilczek on the truth of science: “Science tells us many important things about how things are, but it does not pronounce how things should be, nor forbid us from imagining things that are not. Science contains beautiful ideas, but it does not exhaust beauty. It offers a uniquely fruitful way to understand the physical world, but it is not a complete guide to life.” Source: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality Cistercian monk Michael Casey on the need to listen: “In the short term it is easier to interact by assuming a surface calm. Mostly we do not want to listen to pressures building up inside others; we prefer to hope they will muddle through, and (anyhow) we have enough worries on our own account. Perhaps the most necessary of all skills today is the timeless knack of being able to listen to others, allowing them to tell their story, knowing that telling it will ease their burden and help them become stronger.” Source: Toward God: The Ancient Wisdom of Western Prayer Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:23 AM
12.17.20
Leading Thoughts for December 17, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Margaret Heffernan on what it takes to make your predictions more thoughtful and accurate: “Ordinary people who were open-minded, educated, prepared to change their minds, humble, and attentive could gain real insight and awareness into what might happen in the next year or so. These were people who were prepared to see multiple, not single, causes of events and who were comfortable updating or changing their initial expectations.” Source: Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future George Schultz, who turned 100 on December 13th, on creating a learning environment: “I always have found that if I could create an environment around me in which everybody felt they were learning, I would have a hot group. I have always tried to include people in what I was doing, to encourage them to sat what they think, to let them see the problems that were confronting us all, and to create an atmosphere in which everyone could feel at the end of the day, or the end of a week or a month, that he or she had learned something.” Source: Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:48 AM
12.10.20
Leading Thoughts for December 10, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Morgan Housel on finding the sensible balance between optimism and pessimism: “Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that’s incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact you know it will be filled with misery. You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines, and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Source: The Psychology of Money Arthur Jensen on what brings out genius: “Genius requires giftedness (consisting essentially of some special aptitude or talent, such as mathematical, spatial, musical, or artistic talent). But obviously there are other antecedents that are elusive to us. Nonetheless, we do know of at least two key attributes, beyond ability, that appear to function as catalysts for the creation of that special class of behavioral products specifically indicative of genius. They are productivity and creativity.” Source: Giftedness and Genius: Crucial Differences found in Intellectual Talent: Psychometric and Social Issues Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:39 PM
12.03.20
Leading Thoughts for December 3, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Wright Thompson on doing the work: “More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding—modern, fancy words than mean lie.” Source: Pappyland: The Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last Arsène Wenger on coaching: “The coach’s role is to make the player understand everything that serves the interests of the game. To do this, he must speak to the child within each player, to the adolescent he was and the adult he is now. Too often a coach tends only to speak to the adult, issuing commands for performance, victory, reflection, to the detriment of the child who is playing for pleasure.” Source: Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:01 AM
11.26.20
Leading Thoughts for November 26, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing to his parents from prison on gratefulness: “In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. It’s very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe to others.” Source: Letters and Papers from Prison (1943) Diana Butler Bass on finding gratitude: “Practicing gratitude calls us to better lives, and a better world. And begin before you are ready. Even when a million reasons to not feel grateful stand in your way. That is when gratitude is at its best. Source: Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:16 AM
11.19.20
Leading Thoughts for November 19, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Gary Burnison on anticipating what lies ahead: “You don’t need a crysal ball to anticipate. Rather, you need to be acutely attuned to what’s happening around you and in the world at the present moment. Once you see reality clearly, then—and only then—can you make the leap to extrapolate the meaning. You move from seeing only “this is what is happening now” to the lens “what this means for the future.” In other words, based on what you know now, what are he consequences—both positive and negative?” Source: Leadership U: Accelerating Through the Crisis Curve Ross Ellenhorn on personal accountability: “That’s how life works for most of us most of the time: we authentically take control of our existence only sparingly, and mainly pretend we’re not in control when we actually are. All the theatrics stop, however, when we head twowaard personal change. Source: How We Change (And Ten Reasons Why We Don’t) Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:39 AM
11.12.20
Leading Thoughts for November 12, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Margaret Wheatley on dealing with change and developing new capacities: “It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another.” Source: “When Change Is Out of Control” in Human Resources in the 21st Century Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness on the downside of obsessive passion: “Those who are most focused on reaching some external barometer of success are often the same people who struggle most to enjoy it. That’s because they’ll always crave more. More money. More fame. More medals. More followers.” Source: The Passion Paradox Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:00 AM
11.05.20
Leading Thoughts for November 5, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Neil Postman on information overload: “Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves.” Source: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology Tod Bolsinger on what is leadership: “Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world. We know we are facing a leadership challenge if it requires us to grow as leaders and as a people, to be transformed int something more than we have been—without losing our core identity—in order to accomplish the mission we have been called to.” Source: Canoeing the Mountains Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:10 AM
10.29.20
Leading Thoughts for October 29, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Carl Schorske on the need to think not just about but to think with history; to employ the materials of the past and the configurations in which we organize and comprehend them to orient ourselves in the living present:: “In most fields of intellectual and artistic culture, twentieth-century Europe and America learned to think without history. The very word “modernism” has come to distinguish our lives and times from what had gone before, from history as a whole, as such. Modern architecture, modern music, modern science—all these have defined themselves not so much out of the past, indeed scarcely against the past, but detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space, The modern mind grew indifferent to history, for history, conceived as a continuous nourishing tradition, became useless to its projects.” Source: Thinking with History Robert D. Kaplan on the connection between past, present, and future: “The greater the disregard of history, the greater he delusions regarding the future. The classics help counter … historical amnesia. Machiavelli writes: Source: Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:23 AM
10.22.20
Leading Thoughts for October 22, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman on the importance of value: “All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people. Source: The Only Way to Grow Huge East Rock Capital co-founder Graham Duncan on taking responsibility for your life: “One great portfolio manager I know told the story of being driven somewhere by an analyst on a rainy night when a truck swerved and almost ran them off the road. ‘Why is stuff like this always happening to me?’ the analyst instinctively responded. But to the portfolio manager, that response reflected a terrible mindset, whether on the road or in the market: a sense that the world is acting on you as opposed to your acting on the world. It is a mindset that is hard to change. But from what I’ve seen, great investors don’t have it. Instead, they’ve come to understand which factors in the market they can control and which factors they cannot.” Source: The Playing Field Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:24 AM
10.15.20
Leading Thoughts for October 15, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Fritjof Capra on making change in a living organization: “A machine can be controlled; a living system, according to the systemic understanding of life, can only be disturbed. In other words, organizations cannot be controlled through direct interventions, but they can be influenced by giving impulses rather than instructions. To change the conventional style of management requires a shift of perception that is anything but easy, but it also brings great rewards. Working with the processes inherent in living systems means that we do not need to spend a lot of energy to move an organization. There is no need to push, pull, or bully it to make it change. Force or energy are not the issue; the issue is meaning. Meaningful disturbances will get the organization’s attention and will trigger structural changes.” Source: The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living Christina Sommers and Sally Satel on the perils of overthinking: “[There is] the common assumption that intense reflection on troubling thoughts and emotions is rewarded by a clearer vision. What [Stanford University psychologist, Susan] Nolen-Hoeksmea and others have repeatedly shown, however, is that overthinking tends to “impose a lens that shows a distorted, narrow view of the world.” Things that are wrong, not the solutions, are what come most sharply into view. “When you are sad,” Nolen-Hoeksmea explains, “your brain has greater access to sad thoughts and memories, and you are more likely to interpret events in a sad way.” Neural connections between memories with similar emotional color are activated even when we think about depressing incidents that have no apparent relationship to those memories. Source: One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 05:00 PM
10.08.20
Leading Thoughts for October 8, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Hierarchies are not the problem, says Morris Shechtman: “The criticism often leveled at hierarchies has nothing to do with the essential structure and function of the pyramidal model. These problems all come from one source, conflict avoidance. Hierarchies become dysfunctional when decision-makers don’t want to confront redundancy and incompetence and instead bury the problems in another organizational layer. Or they find it too painful to confront difficult but key people who use legitimate roles and functions in illegitimate, destructive ways. Hierarchies don’t do damage to businesses any more than alcohol creates problem drinking. Structures don’t create problems; people do.” Source: Working Without a Net: How to Survive and Thrive in Today's High Risk Business World Robert Pirsig on dynamic learning or being at one with the process: “Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right.” Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:07 AM
10.01.20
Leading Thoughts for October 1, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Tasha Eurich on the two aspects of self-awarenesss: “Put simply, self-awareness is not one truth. It’s a complex interweaving of our views and others’ views of us. Indeed, according to studies on this topic, these two different perspectives, rather than capturing redundant information, may simply capture different aspects of who we are. If we have only internal or only external self-awareness, we’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle.” Robert Quinn on real leadership: “Leadership is not about results. It is about commitment. The entire management literature fails to understand this. Leadership authors do not understand that leadership means “Go forth and die.” If hey did understand it, they would not be enticed to write about it—because people do not want to hear this message. Most people want to be told how to get extraordinary results with minimum risk.” Source: Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:10 AM
09.24.20
Leading Thoughts for September 24, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Steve Farber on doing what you love in the service of people: “It doesn’t matter whether the leaders are in the front or the rear. What matters is the way they are leading the pack. In either case, the leaders are serving other members. The leaders in the front are forging the path, providing direction, and making it easier for others to go where the pack needs to travel. The leaders in the rear are providing support. They are watching over the pack and ensuring that no one is left behind. There might even be some leaders in the middle of the pack because here’s the thing about leaders: they serve others no matter where they find themselves.” Source: Love is Just Damn Good Business Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness on how our passion can eventually lead us astray: “Those who are most focused on reaching some external barometer of success are often the same people who struggle most to enjoy it. That’s because they’ll always crave more. More money. More fame. More medals. More followers. Source: The Passion Paradox Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:22 AM
09.17.20
Leading Thoughts for September 17, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Jay-Z on excellence: “I think excellence is being able to perform at a higher level over and over again. You can hit a half-court shot once. That's just the luck of the draw. If you can consistently do it through eleven championships like Bill Russell, then that's excellence. Having success for a year or two—that's being hot. We call that hot. That's being in demand for a short span of time. Excellence is being able to perform at a higher level for a long period of time.” Source: Oprah’s Master Class: The Jay-Z Podcast Philosophers Willard Van Orman Quine and J.S. Ullian on the difference between the desire to be right and the desire to have been right: “The desire to be right and the desire to have been right are two desires, and the sooner we separate them the better off we are. The desire to be right is the thirst for truth. On all counts, both practical and theoretical, there is nothing but good to be said for it. The desire to have been right, on the other hand, is the pride that goeth before a fall. It stands in the way of our seeing we were wrong, and thus blocks the progress of our knowledge.” Source: The Web of Belief Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:36 AM
09.10.20
Leading Thoughts for September 10, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: King of Bhutan, Jigme Khesar, on the importance of self-leadership: “Do not feel alone, small or inconsequential. Too often leadership is associated with one great person giving an inspiring sermon to the masses and leading them to greater heights. Source: Convocation Address at Calcutta University, October 5, 2010 Prime Minister of Albania and former basketball player, Edi Rama on teamwork: “The other team had a superior culture, less focused on individual talent, more on team strength. Culture comes from values and from leadership. To the eternal champions the victory was everything and they were ready to accept any part they had to for the sake of winning; victory was naturally very important to us also, but less important than the performance of each individual. And that meant we were not a team. So we lost. The other team won. Because they were a team. Simple.” Source: Winners: And How They Succeed Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:07 AM
09.03.20
Leading Thoughts for September 3, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: How to relive stress. It’s not what you instinctively do: “According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. (The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.)” Sleep helps to beat negativity: “Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine. Source: NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 05:05 AM
08.27.20
Leading Thoughts for August 27, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: On how to be happy even in a crazy, unpredictable world: “Some one in five U.S. adults is taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem; nearly one in four middle-aged women in the United States is taking antidepressants at any given time… You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day. Source: Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions On how thinking about death can lead to a good life: “Thinking about death can actually be a good thing. An awareness of mortality can improve physical health and help us re-prioritize our goals and values, according to a new analysis of recent scientific studies. Even non-conscious thinking about death—say walking by a cemetery—could prompt positive changes and promote helping others. Source: How Thinking About Death Can Lead to A Good Life Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:30 PM
08.20.20
Leading Thoughts for August 20, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay call it the Unread Library Effect. Most of us don’t know all we think we know. We rely on borrowed knowledge, ideas and beliefs. We haven’t really checked it out for ourselves. Asking people why they think something can open up their thinking to new knowledge: “Explicitly invite explanations, ask for specifics, follow up with pointed questions that revolve around soliciting how someone knows the details, and continue to openly admit your own ignorance. In many conversations, the more ignorance you admit, the more readily your partner in the conversation will step in with an explanation to help you understand. And the more they attempt to explain, the more likely they are to realize the limits of their own knowledge. This strategy not only helps moderate strong views, it models openness, willingness to admit ignorance, and readiness to revise beliefs.” Source: How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide George Simon on how people can and do manipulate the truth: “One of the most subtle forms of distortion is being deliberately vague. This is a favorite tactic of manipulators. They will carefully craft their stories so that you form the impression that you’ve been given information but leave out essential details that would have otherwise made it possible for you to know the larger truth.” Source: In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:32 AM
08.13.20
Leading Thoughts for August 13, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Tom Rath on self-absorption: “Life is not about you. It’s about what you do for others. The faster you are able to get over yourself, the more you can do for the people who matter most. Yet external forces keep pulling you toward self-centered pursuits. From books pushing “happiness” to advertisements convincing you that consumption leads to adoration, these messages tempt you to focus inward. That is all a trap (and a load of crap).” Source: It’s Not About You: A Brief Guide Scientist Marie Curie on the importance of self-improvement: “You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.” Source: Pierre Curie: With Autobiographical Notes Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 04:36 PM
08.06.20
Leading Thoughts for August 6, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Alan Weiss on the fact that most fears are learned as are leadership behaviors, and we have to understand the causes: “We cannot create improved behavior contingently, that is, simply patching up leaks and putting on band-aids. We have to prevent the fearful behavior in the future by eliminating the probable causes. The therapist’s admonition to “face our fears” is really an attempt to find the cause of them.” Source: Fearless Leadership Brian Resnick on what is reality: “Our brains work hard to bend reality to meet our prior experiences, our emotions, and our discomfort with uncertainty. This happens with vision. But it also happens with more complicated processes, like thinking about politics, the pandemic, or the reality of climate change.” Source: “Reality” Is Constructed By Your Brain. Here’s What That Means, And Why It Matters Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:49 PM
07.30.20
Leading Thoughts for July 30, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Jocko Willink on subordinating your ego, building relationships, and winning the long game: “Ego is like reactive armor; the harder you push against it, the more it pushes back. You might be afraid that if you subordinate your ego, you will get trampled. But that normally doesn’t happen because subordinating your ego is actually the ultimate form of self-confidence. That level of confidence earns respect. So while the initial thought or feeling might be that you backed down, you have actually shown you have the strength and confidence to give the other person credit, and they will recognize and respect that confidence, either consciously or subconsciously.” Source: Leadership Strategy and Tactics Writer Ralph Marston on the power of confident humility: “Whatever you’re doing, a sense of superiority will make you worse at it. Humility, on the other hand, will make you better. The moment you think you’ve got it all figured out, your progress stops. Instead, continue to advance and improve by reminding yourself how much more there will always be to discover. Confidence is positive and empowering, but arrogance is deadly. Be confident, but not at the expense of your respect for others.” Source: Blog Post Confident Humility Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:37 PM
07.23.20
Leading Thoughts for July 23, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: James MacGregor Burns on the changing dynamic of political leadership: “American leadership went into decline after the revolution. The leaders were generally the same men, many far-famed and even venerated, but they were projected now into a different situation. They had been united behind transcending goals. Now they were divided over mundane policies. They had offered a striking example of bold, collective—even transforming—leadership. Now they were expected to practice piecemeal, transactional leadership.” Source: Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World Frank Partnoy on the need for reflection: “Life might be a race against time, but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires a pause.” Source: Wait: The Art and Science of Delay Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 05:36 PM
07.16.20
Leading Thoughts for July 16, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Scientist and programmer Michael Nielsen on developing disciplined work habits: “Effective people are proactive and take personal responsibility for the events in their lives. They form a vision of how they want their life to be, and work toward achieving that vision. They identify problems in their lives, and work toward solutions to those problems.” Source: Principles of Effective Research Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the destructive nature of the victim culture: “It leads people to see themselves a objects, not subjects. They are done to, not doers; passive, not active. The results are anger, resentment, rage, and a burning sense of injustice. None of these, however, ever leads to freedom, since by its very logic this mindset abdicates responsibility for the current circumstances in which one finds oneself. Blaming others is the suicide of liberty.” Source: Essays on Ethics Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:45 PM
07.09.20
Leading Thoughts for July 9, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Michael Fanuele on the “right-brain, left-brain” myth: “While different regions of our brain exert motor control over specific parts of our body, thinking is a far messier process. In matters of decision-making, there is no ‘right brain’ or ‘left brain’— there is only a brain, an integrated and complex organ in which feeling informs thinking; in fact, good thinking is impossible without feeling.” Source: Stop Making Sense: The Art of Inspiring Anybody Robert Gates on presidential decision making: “Personalities matter hugely in decision making, even at the top. Some presidents are more manipulative than others. FDR, Nixon, Reagan, and, I suspect, Trump, knowingly foster disagreements among their senior advisors—or at least tolerated them—because such infighting actually gives the president more latitude in making decisions. Whereas a unified front among advisors tends to box in the present, divided counsel lets him pick and choose among options.” Source: Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:42 PM
07.02.20
Leading Thoughts for July 2, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Two signs hanging on the wall of the Burnley Football Club training facility in Burnley, Lancashire, England: “Only the person who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.” Source: Alastair Campbell in Winners and How They Succeed Earl Nightingale on service: “Never before in the history of the world have human beings been so interdependent. It is as impossible to live without serving others as it would be to live if others were not constantly serving us. And this is good. The more closely knit this interdependence becomes, the greater will be human achievement. We need each other, and we literally cannot live without each other. Every time we strike a match, drink a glass of water, turn on the lights, pick up the telephone, drive our car, put on our clothes, take a bath, mow the lawn, or go fishing, we’re being served by other human beings. But remember this: Whatever you seek in the form of rewards, you must first earn in the form of service to others. All attempts to sidestep this law will end in failure, frustration, and ultimately, demoralization.” Source: Lead the Field Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:13 PM
06.25.20
Leading Thoughts for June 25, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan on humility: “The more you can contain your ego, the more realistic you are about your problems. You learn how to listen and admit that you don’t know all the answers. You exhibit the attitude that you can learn from anyone at any time. Your pride doesn’t get in the way of gathering the information you need to achieve the best results.” Source: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done Michael Fanuele on inspiring others and finding the balance between emotions—the fuel of inspiration—and reason—it’s speedbump: “Use your reason and logic and the full force of your big brain in figuring out what’s right and wrong, what you want to do and what you don’t, in composing your strategy. Bu them, when it comes to moving people, to inspiring, I’m sorry, but Passion and Reason are indeed enemies. You’ll have to find the right balance between adding one and subtracting the other.” Source: Stop Making Sense: The Art of Inspiring Anybody Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:40 AM
06.18.20
Leading Thoughts for June 18, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Richard Feynman on living with uncertainty: “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” Source: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman On the challenge shifting from solo to shared credit: “Getting beyond blame requires a shift in thinking and culture. Getting beyond ego requires a shift in behavior and attitude. Leadership, with all its attention and perks, does attract people with aggrandized self-esteem. They mistake the collected efforts of many people for their own and expect solo credit. They are jealous of attention given to others. They are “me”—centric. Everyone has an ego—after all, it serves certain purposes—thought when overgrown, the inflated ego defies surgical extraction.” Source: You’re It: You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When It Matters Most Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:39 AM
06.11.20
Leading Thoughts for June 11, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Rocket scientist and law professor Ozan Varol on the need for critical thinking: “Companies fail because they stare at the rearview mirror and keep calling the same plays from the same playbook. Instead of risking failure, they stick with the status quo. In our daily lives, we fail to exercise our critical-thinking muscles and instead leave it to others to draw conclusions. As a result, these muscles atrophy over time. Without an informed public willing to question confident claims, democracy decays and misinformation spreads. Once alternative facts are reported and retweeted, they become the truth. Pseudoscience becomes indistinguishable from real science.” Source: Think Like a Rocket Scientist Albert Gray, a life insurance executive at Prudential, on the importance of habits: “Every single qualification for success is acquired through habit. People form habits and habits form futures. If you do not deliberately form good habits, then unconsciously you will form bad ones. You are the kind of person you are because you have formed the habit of being that kind of person, and the only way you can change is through habit.” Source: The Common Denominator of Success Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:24 AM
06.04.20
Leading Thoughts for June 4, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Consultant Robert J. Thomas on learning to think like a leader: “If you desire to be a leader, you have to think like one. At the heart of that process is a form of deliberate practice that would look familiar to students and teachers of music, chess, or any of a number of complex, highly intentional pursuits—most emphatically in terms of approaches like the Suzuki Method. In this case, deliberate practice revolves round crafting stories that contain statements and directions that are consistent with the core ideas about interactive leadership.” Source: Crucibles of Leadership Consultant Alain Hunkins on learning to lead: “The idea that effective leaders can plot their progression on a straight line is a myth. Progress is messy. Sometimes it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it feels like failure. You need to learn to accept the messiness and all the feelings associated with it. It’s a surefire sign that you’re growing. Exceptional leaders are exceptional learners—imperfect people who take each mistake along he way and figure out what they need to learn from it. Then, they do something to get back on course and keep moving.” Source: Cracking the Leadership Code Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:23 PM
05.28.20
Leading Thoughts for May 28, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Chief Technology Officer at Better.com, Erik Bernhardsson on ruthless prioritization: “What I have come to believe is that: prioritization is the most value creating activity in any company. Generating ideas and executing things is of course also important! But what I've seen to set apart great teams from good is a brutal focus on prioritization. This means generating an absurd amount of ideas and throwing 99% of them out of the window, to focus on the 1% that have the highest impact.” Source: Never Attribute to Stupidity That Which Is Adequately Explained by Opportunity Cost Alex Kantrowitz on the burden of execution: “Drowning in execution work, today’s companies devote themselves to refinement, not invention. Their leaders might desire to run inventive cultures, but they do not have the bandwidth. So they deliver a limited set of ideas from the top, and everyone else executes and polishes.” Source: Always Day One Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:37 PM
05.21.20
Leading Thoughts for May 21, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: The New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, on educating yourself: “The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life. If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. The wisdom of the ages is your inheritance; it can make your life easier. Source: A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person Management consultant and educator Gary Hamel, on seeing the future: “Companies fail to create the future not because they fail to predict it but because they fail to imagine it. It is curiosity and creativity they lack, not perspicuity. So it is vitally important that you understand the distinction between “the future” and “the unimagined,” between knowing what’s next and imagining what’s next.” Source: Leading the Revolution Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 04:57 PM
05.14.20
Leading Thoughts for May 14, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Kevin Kelly, the founder of WIRED magazine, recently turned 68 and offered 68 lessons on life. Here are six: “Learn how to learn from those you disagree with or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe. Source: 68 Bit of Unsolicited Advice Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour on not comparing yourself: “You are driven by your heart, you’re driven by your talent, and you’re driven by your instinct. And if you start to question and look at what people are doing to the left of you or to the right of you, you are going to lose that clarity of thought. Listen to the information. In the end it has to come from who you are. Own your decisions and own who you are but without apology.” Source: Anna Wintour MasterClass: Anna Wintour Teaches Creativity and Leadership Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:15 AM
05.07.20
Leading Thoughts for May 7, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Lance Secretan on doing the hard thing and playing to people’s strengths instead of complaining about their weaknesses: “We cannot guide the brilliance of others by getting everyone to do something the same way; we guide the brilliance of others by playing to their strengths, teasing greatness from them by honoring their gifts, and making it as easy as possible for them to be brilliant at what they do. Sameness and conformity are easier to manage, but their price is mediocrity and demotivation. On the other hand, even though guiding brilliance sometimes feels like putting sock on an octopus, it is a gift to the soul—inspiration.” Source: Inspire: What Great Leaders Do English journalist and author Clifford Longley on the purpose of life: “Western civilization suffers from a strong sense of moral and spiritual exhaustion. Having constructed a society of unprecedented sophistication, convenience and prosperity, nobody can remember what it was supposed to be for. Just enjoying it does not seem to be enough. Indeed, enjoyment as an end in itself quickly turns to ashes in the mouth. Not only is it boringly bland, it is even more boringly purposeless. There is more to human life than comfort, entertainment, and the avoidance of suffering. Or there ought to be.” Source: From the introduction to Faith in the Future by Jonathan Sacks Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:53 AM
04.30.20
Leading Thoughts for April 30, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Astronaut Chris Hadfield on the power of knowing what could go wrong: “In order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge. … Feeling ready to do something doesn’t mean feeling certain you’ll succeed, though of course that’s what you’re hoping to do. Truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong—and having a plan to deal with it. … Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on—to study it, dissect it, tease apart all it’s components and consequences—really works. After a few years of doing that pretty much daily, you’ve forged the strongest possible armor to defend against fear: hard-one competence.” Source: An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything Richard P. Feynman on leaving room for doubt so that the door is open to critical thinking and learning: “A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. … Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” Source: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:13 AM
04.23.20
Leading Thoughts for April 23, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: John W. Gardner on dealing with the divisions in our society: “No society can successfully resolve its internal conflicts if its only asset is cleverness in the management of these conflicts. It must also have compelling goals that are shared by the conflicting parties; and it must have a sense of movement toward these goals. All conflicting groups must have a vision that lifts their minds and spirits above the tensions of the moment.” Source: Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? In a tribute to John Foster Dulles who died on May 24, 1959, Walter Lippmann comments on the duty of public servants: “Perhaps the highest function of a public servant in a free and democratic society is to preserve its oneness as a community while he fights the battle which divide it. John Foster Dulles never lost sight of that. He never forgot, as so many public men do, that after the issue which is up for debate is settled, those who took part in the debate must still live and work together. That is the reason way among his countrymen there is no rancor, and why the sorrow of his opponents and critics is genuine.” Source: Dulles: A Tribute, Today and Tomorrow, May 26, 1959 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:22 AM
04.16.20
Leading Thoughts for April 16, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Jack Trout on the simple approach to success: “Trying harder, believing in yourself, walking on fire, and saying, ‘yes I can’ are not steps up the ladder of success. The surprising truth is that success does not spring from anything inside yourself at all. Success is something given to you by others. Source: The Power of Simplicity by Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin Jack Welch on communicating simply: “For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple. For a large organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity. Frightened, nervous managers use thick, convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they’ve known since childhood. Real leaders don’t need clutter. People must have the self-confidence to be clear, precise, to be sure that every person in their organization—highest to lowest—understands what the business is trying to achieve. But it’s not easy. You can’t believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simpleminded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, tough-minded people are the most simple.” Source: Harvard Business Review: Speed, Simpicity, Self-Confidence: An Interview with Jack Welch Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:43 AM
04.09.20
Leading Thoughts for April 9, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Management professor and social philosopher Charles Handy on the inevitability of paradox: “We need a new way of thinking about our problems and our futures. My suggestion is the management of paradox, an idea which is itself a paradox, in that paradox can only be “managed” in the sense of coping with. Source: The Age of Paradox John Silber, former President and Chancellor of Boston University, on the role of journalists: “Like all of us, journalists are subject to the temptations of power. Power tends to corrupt them no less than it corrupts politicians. And as the fourth estate has become vastly more powerful through television, the journalists in the electronic media should be aware of their increasing vulnerability to corruption. Many journalists come to think of themselves not so much as objective reporters but as the loyal opposition. But this is not the proper function of reporters. The adversary relationship is not a relationship of objectivity. To be in opposition may be the duty of a politician or a party, but it is a violation of the responsibility of the journalist, which is to report on what happens as objectively and as dispassionately as possible.” Source: Straight Shooting: What’s Wrong with America and How to Fix It Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 04:37 PM
04.02.20
Leading Thoughts for April 2, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: A philosopher at Oxford University, Toby Ord explains the risks we are taking here on spaceship earth: “We have done many things to exacerbate the risk: some that could make pandemics more likely to occur, and some that could increase their damage. Thus even “natural” pandemics should be seen as a partly anthropogenic risk. Our population now is a thousand times greater than over most of human history, so there are vastly more opportunities for new human diseases to originate. And our farming practices have created vast numbers of animals living in unhealthy conditions within close proximity to humans. This increases the risk, as many major diseases originate in animals before crossing over to humans. Examples include HIV (chimpanzees), Ebola (bats), SARS (probably bats) and influenza (usually pigs or birds). Evidence suggests that diseases are crossing over into human populations from animals at an increasing rate. Source: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity Franklin Delano Roosevelt on fear in a time of crisis: “This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.” Source: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1933 Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:56 AM
03.26.20
Leading Thoughts for March 26, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Bill Welter and Jean Egmon on the difficulty on truly seeing the world as it is: “Paradigms are wonderful shortcuts as we think about the world, but they are deadly if they are not attuned with reality. All of us are bombarded with increasing waves of data and sensory inputs, and whether we realize it or not, we have become increasingly resistant. It’s not so much a case of having to pay attention to the news of the world as it is a case of knowing when to change our filters so that the important stuff comes in.” Source: The Prepared Mind of a Leader: Eight Skills Leaders Use to Innovate, Make Decisions, and Solve Problems The American entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman on persistence and luck: “A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential. Source: How To Be Successful Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:19 AM
03.19.20
Leading Thoughts for March 19, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Erik Larson commenting on Winston Churchill’s belief that leaders should make people feel “loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous:” “Recognizing that confidence and fearlessness were attitudes that could be adopted and taught by example, Churchill issued a directive to all ministers to put on a strong positive front. ‘In these dark days the Prime minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the Government, as well as high officials, would maintain a high moral in their circles; not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination.’” Source: The Splendid and the Vile Jared Diamond on dealing with a crisis: “Typically when one is first plunged into a state of crisis, one feels overwhelmed by the sense that everything in one’s life has gone wrong. As long as one remains thus paralyzed, it’s difficult to make progress dealing with one thing at a time. Hence a therapist’s immediate goal in the first session—or else the first step if one is dealing with an acknowledgment crisis by oneself or with the help of friends—is to overcome that paralysis by means of what is termed ‘building a fence.’ That means identifying the specific things that really have gone wrong during the crisis, so that one can say, ‘Here, inside the fence, are the particular problems in my life, but everything else outside the fence is normal and OK.’ Often, a person in crisis feels relieved as soon as he or she starts to formulate the problem and to build a fence around it. The therapist can then help the client to explore alternative ways of coping with the specific problem inside the fence. The client thereby embarks on a process of selective change, which is possible, rather then remaining paralyzed by the seeming necessity of total change, which would be impossible.” Source: Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:49 AM
03.12.20
Leading Thoughts for March 12, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Erich Bühler on the persistence of old mental models: “We generally stick to old mental models until new ways of thinking appear. During the change process, however, we tend to see the new only through the old lens. When the first motorized vehicles were built in the nineteenth century, cars looked more like carriages than automobiles. This was because people imagined them as an extension of horse-drawn transport. New ideas, concepts, and words were introduced, but old ways of thinking continued to be used to analyze and solve problems.” Source: Leading Exponential Change: Go Beyond Agile and Scrum to Run Even Better Business Transformations Betsy Myers on leadership is self-knowledge: “Leadership is self-knowledge. Successful leaders are those who are conscious about their behavior and he impact it has on the people around them. They are willing to examine what behaviors of their own may be getting in the way. Successful leaders understand that it we don’t lead consciously, it’s easy to repeat patterns that could be keeping us from achieving the results we are hoping for. The toughest person you will ever lead is yourself. We can’t effectively lead others unless we can lead ourselves.” Source: Take the Lead: Motivate, Inspire, and Bring Out the Best in Yourself and Everyone Around You Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:11 AM
03.05.20
Leading Thoughts for March 5, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Robert E. Quinn on the connection between changing a system and understanding it: “Kurt Lewin argued that we cannot really begin to understand a system until we try to change it. He understood that individual as well as collective scripts would stay hidden until the normal way that the organization operates is challenged. As soon as a change agent introduces a variation to that system, he or she will quickly learn about the scripts that are holding that system together. Once the scripts are brought to the light they tell us a lot about how that system handles variations.” Source: Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Accomplish Extraordinary Results Change consultant David Jones on the challenges to expect when initiating change: “Once you get past the novelty of a change, you’ll find that every system in your organization is set up to reject it. You’ve got to have the resolve, the courage, and the fortitude to see change through that part of the process, because it’s the most difficult part of the transition. You’ll only accomplish that if you’re able to successfully communicate why you’re changing, how it will be measured, why it is critical, and why people need to get on board and make it successful. It’s easy to get out of touch with the emotions of the people most affected by change.” Source: Decade of Change: Managing in Times of Uncertainty Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:21 AM
02.27.20
Leading Thoughts for February 27, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shares his love of learning: “The one thing that I would say that defines me is I love to learn. I get excited about new things. I buy more books than I read or finish. I sign up for more online courses than I can actually finish. But the thing about being able to watch people do great things, learn new concepts, is something that truly excites me.” Source: Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s chief storyteller, interviews CEO Satya Nadella. YouTube (4:44) Jon Gordon on leading with optimism, positivity, and belief: “Ultimately, being a positive leader is all about leading with faith in a world filled with cynicism, negativity, and fear. We all face this battle between faith and fear. A leader’s job is to fill your people with faith. How we respond to our world depends on the stories we tell ourselves. When you face adversity you can tell a positive story and then work to create a positive outcome. It’s always your state of mind and your thinking that produces how you feel and respond. When you see that the world has no power over you, you will lead more powerfully in the world.” Source: The Power of Positive Leadership Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:43 PM
02.20.20
Leading Thoughts for February 20, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: I. Porter Moser, head coach of the Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team, on how to find success: “How you think is how you feel, how you feel is how you act, and how you act is what defines you. I believe completely in the progression of these three statements. If you’re thinking good thoughts, you’re going to have a bounce in your step. You’re going to act in a certain way. Likewise, if you’re thinking negative thoughts, if you have a ‘poor me’ attitude, that’s how people will perceive you.” Source: All In: Driven by Passion, Energy, and Purpose II. Jeffrey Hull on being a beta leader: “Beta is a shift in mind-set from a goal-oriented, top-down figuration to a growth-oriented, process-based one. When we live in beta, we are in flux, always improving, and always aware of the need to disrupt the status quo. Beta means being comfortable in a state of constant growth, not aspiring so much to ascend the hierarchy and dominate from above, but to lead from anywhere, anytime.” Source: Flex: The Art and Science of Leadership in a Changing World Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:48 AM
02.13.20
Leading Thoughts for February 13, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: I. Rachel Botsman discussing trust issues that revolve not just around trust and technology, but trust issues around size: “I think so much of what we need in our lives are smaller systems, where you can really serve people’s best interests. I am a huge supporter of local news, I’m a huge supporter of community practices, all these things are very important touchpoints where people can say “that thing is really there for me” versus “this massive system in the world that I have no control of” which I think is really tied to the huge rise in anxiety that we’re seeing in the world today.” Source: 6 Things 2020 Holds for Us According to An Expert II. Economist and professor John Kenneth Galbraith on how seemingly hopeless situations invite scoundrels who promise by magic to put everything right: “Men who are desperate for a solution are easy to persuade because they wish desperately to be persuaded.” Source: The Age of Uncertainty Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:10 AM
02.06.20
Leading Thoughts for February 6, 2020
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: I. Samuel R. Chand, a leadership author and consultant, on disruption: “A fighter pilot knows he's in the right spot when he's getting anti-aircraft fire. If you're not catching flack for your disruptive idea, you're not over your target yet. Keep flying.” Source: New Thinking, New Future II. Michelle King in stressing that gender equality is not about fixing women, but fixing workplaces, says: “Gender equality is not about raising women up at the expense of men. It is not about making men feel bad or listing all the ways than men need to change. Quite the contrary. It is about creating a workplace that values men and women equally and gives everyone the freedom to be themselves.” Source: The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Like us on Instagram and Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:19 AM
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