Education

Audio / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 8/9

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 23, 2015

Audio / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 7/9

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 22, 2015

Audio / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 6/9

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 21, 2015

Audio / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 5/9

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 20, 2015

Audio / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 4/9

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 17, 2015

Audio / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 3/9

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 16, 2015

Audio / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 2/9

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 15, 2015

Audio / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 1/9

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 14, 2015

Audio / Awareness / Education / Exercises / Leadership

Highlights from interviewing the first student of my new online leadership course

[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I'll copy that post here: Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests. Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes) Click here for the full interview (about an hour) Here it is in nine 5—8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 About the course The Fundamentals of Leadership…

January 13, 2015

Education / Entrepreneurship / Exercises

New to the public: My Sales course!

If you think of used car salespeople when you think sales, you're missing out on some of the most important skills and perspectives for life. Not just business, but any interactions with people. Sales also means proposing ideas, job interviews (selling your labor),Â hiring great people (selling your organization), fund-raising (selling equity), and more. Approaching sales from a leadership perspective teaches you to influence and persuade to create long-term, productive, mutually beneficial relationships. As with my leadership courses, I teach skills anyone can use and that will be valuable your whole career and applicable across your life, not just in business. I'm teaching the class at General Assembly. Register here. From the registration page: A strong sales team is essential to any sustainable organization. Sales…

January 12, 2015

Education / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

I don’t remember feeling this much passion for a project since co-founding my first company in the late 90s

I recently wrote how I finished recording the audio for the online leadership course I'm creating. I also posted about the leadership course I start teaching at NYU in a couple weeks. Both courses put into practice material that I've compiled for years, maybe a decade or so. This week I'll start posting the interview I did with Chris, the other guy in the recording for the online course. I played it for a couple friends in person and they described Chris's results as spine-tingling, based on his progress. I don't remember feeling this much passion for a project since co-founding Submedia in the late 90s. You can tell because I'm spending all the time I can find editing the audio, which, from the outside,…

January 5, 2015

Art / Education / Exercises / Habits / Leadership

The value of technique in leadership

An actor told me about a time he forgot his line on Broadway in front of about a thousand people, some who paid hundreds of dollars for their seats. He was in his forties and had acted for decades. Still, sometimes you forget your lines. What do you do when a thousand people are watching you and you don't know what to say? Most of us have faced not knowing what to say or do, though usually only in front of one or two people, which is more than enough to paralyze us with anxiety. Actors know about a technique called the repetition exercise, a cornerstone of Meisner technique, named after Sanford Meisner, one of America's great acting teachers of the twentieth century. There's a…

December 30, 2014

Education / Entrepreneurship / Exercises / Leadership

My next seminar, January 12 at The Yard in NYC!

My next leadership seminar will be January 12 at The Yard, a premier office space and coworking community designed to support business growth whose environment promotes creativity, collaboration, and connections. Perfect for my seminar! If you've thought about attending one of my seminars, this will be a great chance in a beautiful space, conveniently located. Click here for testimonials. HOW TO LEAD PEOPLE ...so they want you to lead them again. ~ Leadership Workshop ~ Click here to register Why you should attend You've ascended to a position of leadership, but how can you ensure that the people you are in charge of will be responsive to your leadership style? In this class, you'll learn effective ways to motivate people in the context of…

December 29, 2014

Education / Nature

Particle Fever

Do you miss an activity you used to feel passionate about, used to work hard on, but don't do anymore? When you feel inspired, you work hard, sometimes very hard, often long hours, often sacrificing other things you would otherwise enjoy. Then when you look back you miss how inspired you felt. You'd rather feel that way and sacrifice again than to have free time or enjoy mild pleasure. You might not feel like you want to go through the process of making it happen, but you know that feeling and you love it. The other day I watched a documentary, Particle Fever, about the high energy particle accelerator in Geneva called the Large Hadronic Collider, some people who helped build it and interpret its…

December 20, 2014

Education / Exercises / Leadership

The Meaning of Leadership — the class

NYU posted my course next semester: "The Meaning of Leadership." I designed it to cover developing the fundamental skills of leadership as comprehensively as one semester allows. I expect many students to find it one of if not the best class they ever take. From the syllabus, the course description begins: The Meaning of Leadership will prepare you to practice effective leadership and teamwork in a variety of contexts—business, politics, community organizing, entrepreneurship, sports, teaching, sales, coaching, etc—without relying on authority, status, hierarchy, or other external conditions. You will learn to create more meaning, value, importance, and purpose in your teammates, work, and professional relationships. As a result, your teams will accomplish more with greater satisfaction. Your teammates will feel inspired and will want to…

December 18, 2014

Education / Exercises / Leadership

You learn behavior through experience, not people telling you what to do

Increasingly my answers to questions about certain topics are not to give information but to tell a process by which the person can find out the answers for themselves. I read a lot of leadership, professional development, and personal development books. Almost all tell people principles instead of how to learn things themselves. Principles sound great, but people who know the principles didn't learn them from being told them, they learned them from doing them. In other fields people know to develop skills through practice---sports, art, dance, music, math, etc. I hope to see leadership change from thinking someone can just tell you intuition to people expect to learn it from experience. Actually, I hope to play a role in creating that change.

December 15, 2014

The Model: the series

Awareness / Education / Exercises / Leadership / Models / Nonjudgment / Perception

The Model: the series

[EDIT: I covered this series in more depth in Leadership Step by Step, so I recommend the book, but the core is here. I use The Model as a part of my life, basically daily.] Here is The Model---my model for the human emotional system designed for use in leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development---in series form. Click in the table of contents to the left for each page. I find this Model the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life. Why? A model's value comes not from its accuracy but how well it serves its purpose, which improves from effective filtering of information. Street maps, for example, are more useful for driving for having less detail…

December 14, 2014

Education / Leadership

A leader we can learn from

I've worked with people in the upper echelons of business, academia, government, coaching, community organizing, and more. Of them all, I consider Chris Lehmann the most effective and accomplished leader. He happens to be a long time friend and former teammate I competed at Nationals with in the 90s, but that's not why I consider him so effective and accomplished. He is the founding Principal of the Science Leadership Academy public high school in Philadelphia and a major organizer of the community where I learned about inquiry-driven project-based learning, which has become a major part of my practice. He co-founded a major institution that has succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. He has a large, growing, passionate, and effective community around him. This video shows his acceptance…

December 3, 2014

Awareness / Education / Exercises / Habits / Leadership

What happens when you develop empathy and compassion skills

Each exercise in my seminars teaches a fundamental, useful leadership skill. Collectively, when you practice them more than a few times, they teach empathy and compassion, two critically important skills if you want people to want you to lead them. With my one-on-one coaching clients I can see their empathy and compassion skills develop over weeks and months. I've noticed patterns. At first people feel odd asking about emotions and passions, especially at work. "Can I use the word passion?," they ask. "Is it appropriate at work? It will feel funny." They ask if using someone's emotions to motivate them is manipulation. They worry about using the other person. After doing the exercises once or twice, they realize how effectively motivating someone through emotions and…

November 24, 2014

Awareness / Education / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

Join Joshua Spodek’s leadership workshop, Saturday December 6 in Soho

I've been invited to lead a leadership workshop at a great location in Manhattan Saturday, December 6. If you like my material, want to lead better, and like the testimonials of recent attendees, come to the seminar. Below is from their announcement. Click here to register! "How to lead people so they want you to lead them again" by Joshua Spodek Saturday, December 6, 2014 10am to 5pm Soho - NYC Previous University Presentations Columbia, Harvard, MIT, NYU-Stern, INSEAD, New School, New YorkÂ Academy of Sciences Previous Coaching Clients Include Start-up Founders as well as Employees ofÂ McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, A.T. Kearney, UBS, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, American Express, Google, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy Lead…

November 22, 2014

Education / Exercises

Another successful testimonial

Another attendee from a recent seminar wrote about her experience. I hope it helps people get a feeling for what the seminars offer and how quickly you can use the material and get its benefits. I have also been practicing what we learned from Josh's workshop and I have to say I am already seeing a difference in my relationships at work. I was having a very difficult time expressing myself to my boss and the exercises have helped me understand her position and be more empathetic and in tune with what she is up against. The exercises have also been useful for me at networking events! I ended up meeting a really great contact just last week after chatting about his passion for Gaudi.…

November 21, 2014

Two videos from one of the best books I’ve read on the environment, our impact on it, and what we can do about it

Education / Nature

Two videos from one of the best books I’ve read on the environment, our impact on it, and what we can do about it

I posted years ago on "One of the best books I've read on the environment, our impact on it, and what we can do about it." I recommend reading that post and the book I based it on. The author did two videos, one at Harvard slightly over an hour, the other at a TEDx talk for slightly over fifteen minutes. They summarize the book without assuming a science background. I recommend watching them too. I think they bring meaning to our activities that affect our environment and what we can do about them without judgment. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you watch them too. Here's the Harvard one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE Here's the TEDx one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5bVbfWuq-Q

November 14, 2014

Education / Leadership / Perception

Asking “Are leaders born or made?” doesn’t help you develop as a leader

Talk about leadership and someone will ask if leaders are born or made. If you're just idly chatting, it's a fine pointless question to pass the time with. If you want to develop as a leader, I suggest the question will waste your time. No great leader started leading in a vacuum, nor as a child. They all developed somehow. Even if they had a greater potential than you do, you can improve. What works in developing leaders I suggest more relevant questions for people trying to improve their leadership skills include What techniques work to develop leaders? How can I use those techniques? Can we improve those techniques? If so, how much? Am I using techniques that work? If not, how can I start…

November 13, 2014

Choosing/Decision-Making / Creativity / Education / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

The problem determines the solution

"Which is more important as a leader, to work alone or to work in groups?" I heard that question asked of a panel of business leaders last week. The panelists all answered something like "in this day and age you have to be able to work in groups. That's where you get everything done" with some acknowledgment that you had to be able to work solo too sometimes. As soon as the moderator asked the question I thought, "You're asking about solutions in the abstract. The problem determines the solution." You can best solve problems that take solo work to solve solo and problems that take group work to solve by group. We've all seen solutions that were designed by committee that show input from…

November 10, 2014

Awareness / Education / Habits

How you develop social skills

The pattern for developing a new social skill goes like: 1. Lack of awareness of something I want to change 2. Awareness of it 3. Realizing I can do something about it 4. Try do something about it but notice a day later that I missed the opportunity 5. Notice an hour later 6. Notice a minute later 7. Notice in the moment 8. Unconscious mastery Advancing from one step to the next is just a matter of practice and time. If I don't practice I don't advance. If I don't give it enough time I don't advance. If I practice it's only a matter of time until unconscious mastery. I edited this from a response to a client on a question about behavioral change.…

November 4, 2014

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