You can dream and dream, but unless you focus on what you want to get done and how you want to get it done—it’s not going to happen.
It’s all nice and good that our friends on Occupy Wall Street are above institutional politics. It’s fine that they want to maintain a Don Quixote air and struggle with windmills. It’s great that they have a vision and have hope in a dream.
But nothing burns out more …

This week a massive earthquake rocked the country and left people buzzing from coast to coast. While it may be too early to determine the exact damages from the quake, it produced instant market swings and potentially affected nuclear sites in the D.C./Virginia metro area. Luckily finely tuned preparation plans created in anticipation of such an event generally surged into action and thwarted any immediate, major repercussions. Now the world steps back and anxiously watches …

In the business world most executives pay minimal attention to succession planning. When they do attend to matters of succession they only pay token amounts of lip service because of the impact it has on the perceptions of the company’s future.
Truth is, few CEO’s want to think about life after themselves. As a result, succession planning typically gets short shrift in far too many organizations. For instance, how many Boards of …

In the latest issue of Fortune, Adam Lashinsky details Steve Jobs’ hands-on managerial style as well as his meltdown after the rocky and buggy 2008 debut of Apple’s cloud based storage service MobileMe. After a number of horrible reviews of the service, Lashinsky claims that Jobs let the executives responsible for the debacle have it, and have it good. Jobs’ reportedly told the offending team that they “…should hate each other for having let each …

On a daily basis someone asks me “how do I motivate those I lead?” It’s an age-old question. Whether you have tens of thousands of direct reports or only two or three, in order to get things done, in order to be successful, you have to find a consistently productive way to motivate and sustain momentum.  
I have always taught that motivation is about people’s willingness to expend effort to achieve a goal. You must discover …

Can you build a better boss? According to the brilliant minds at Google, you can.  It’s odd because I personally  thought that Apple would beat Google to the punch on this one (i.e. iBoss) I am sure as we speak, the big brains/egos down at 1 Infinite Loop are being told by their perfect boss to come up with the perfect boss. But I digress.
The New York Times’ Adam Bryant recently reported on Google’s Project …