Resilient Wednesday Weekly Memo

One of the ways that our new book, Strategy Driven Leadership and my work in resilience have dovetailed together is in how we’ve worked to identify and destroy the Negativity Bias. You probably remember (or will experience today) our biological and cultural expectation to be overly critical and disapproving of any variety of behaviors we […]

When I was 16, I broke my wrist playing quarterback in a sandlot football game. I did complete the pass for the touchdown but when I got up from being tackled, I noticed my wrist was bent in a most unusual way. My parents called our doctor who referred us to an orthopedic surgeon who

I had an advisory call with a senior leader who mentioned about one of his direct reports who was having difficulty in establishing the priorities of a key project. While this employee seemed to understand the overall goal, he kept focusing on multiple tasks at the same time and even worse, was often influenced by

In addition to my neighborhood kids waiting for the school bus when I’m out walking Cody, I can also tell that it is back to school time because of the myriad Facebook posts I’ve seen in the past few weeks showing preschoolers to college freshman proudly announcing their return to the halls of learning. Most

I’m in New York this week and today this City will go take some time at 8:46 AM to remember the fallen from that tragic day. The modern-day resilience movement began 18 years ago today. We all began to understand that we could not control highly unpredictable events from happening and so we somehow had

It seemed like a simple enough question coming from a colleague over lunch last week. “Pretty good,” I told him and went on to share with him that I attended a program Sheila did last week where she spoke about her work in grief and loss. To a room full of participants, Sheila shared about

One of the fun concepts my co-author Michael Couch and I introduce in our soon to be released book, Strategy Driven Leadership (here is our new cover!) is the idea of using mantras to help people find short cuts that change behavior and are easy to remember. In working with one leader who tended to

Ever since Daniel Kahneman came up with the ideas for cognitive biases in 1973, the world has been heading steadily downhill. We used to think that the brain was a clever thinking machine, working 24/7, creating new ideas that advanced the world. Instead, this Nobel Laureate showed us the brain is basically a lazy organ,

One thing that I hear from senior leaders is how much enjoyment they get from coaching and guiding members of their team. They recognize that today’s aspiring leaders want guidance and want to get it in a way that is tasty and digestible. My colleague, Michael Couch and I discuss some of these strategies in

We think we can do it all. We call it multi-tasking, but it should more properly be called “serial-tasking.” If you don’t believe me try this exercise. Draw 2 parallel lines. On the top line write, “Multi-tasking is a myth.” On the second line write the numbers 1-20 below the line. That task should take