The cohort of leaders who will reclaim leadership to achieve great things in the world won't succeed out of idealism, an extreme sense of perfection or personal heroism. We will succeed because we see ourselves and the world for what is and because we master the ability to motivate groups we lead...
A simple reality of the working world is that meetings dominate our time, and the higher you go in your career, the more pressure there is to spend every waking moment in a meeting somewhere. I think we should cancel most of the meetings we attend, but what about the ones where you need to be...
When I interviewed Mike Howard, Chief Security Officer at Microsoft, on the subject of leadership, we also had a great conversation about the role he sees gender and diversity playing in modern organizations. I listened to understand Gendership – the partnership of women and men working and...
I have been honored with a regular writing gig at the Smartblog on Leadership - an extention of the Smartbrief empire. This was my first post as a contributing author and it generated a lot of interesting comments (read them here). The comments reminded me that there are plenty of people (men AND...
Sure, sometimes you’re the lucky recipient of spontaneous innovation, but according to business gurus, consistently good innovators actually have strategies for leveraging luck (the good and the bad) when it trips across their paths. In “Great by Choice” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have...
Fortunately, humans love happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Unfortunately, it turns out that plenty of us don’t seem to, based on the way we stick our noses to the grindstone and assume that if we work harder we’ll achieve success and happiness. Fortunately, the relatively new science of...
Most leadership books and gurus will tell you that leaders are learners and full of curiosity. Sometimes, this penchant can get you into trouble and – as many entrepreneurs learn the hard way – lead you traipsing off after some little bright shiny thing, letting your business languish. This kind...
Dana Theus appeared last month on It's a Woman's World with Carolyn Bruna. In this 30 minute video Dana discusses InPower Women, the nature of INpowerment and The Woman Effect. Posted on YouTube (please share!)
Have you ever been in an airplane when it stalls? I was twelve when dad tipped us straight up into the solid blue expanse of sky - allowing gravity to grip our chests - and gunned our little single prop Cessna vertical. We chugged forward briefly until the lift over the wings dissipated, the...
How do you measure leadership? It’s an odd question, isn’t it? Leadership is inherently challenging to even describe because it’s a quality of being human. Psychologists and Change Management Consultants find ways to measure everything and I’m sure they have some metrics for this. However, my...
