Leadership

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[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights.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[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights.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[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights.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 / Freedom / Leadership / Nonjudgment

Malcolm X speaking

This year for Martin Luther King day I listened to two recordings of Malcolm X speaking, posted by WNYC in "Remembering Malcolm X: Rare Interviews and Audio." I recommend listening. People accuse him of racism and inciting violence, but to hear him speak and to hear people who knew him speak about him, it's hard not to feel those critics missed the essence of what he said, and that they neglected to criticize the people and institutions he criticized, which were, and remain, racist and violent. He spoke so clearly and plainly about subjects so few people do, I can't think of anyone today who speaks like that today. I'd love to hear of someone I'm missing. It seems to me he spoke more about…

January 19, 2015

Prince, Oscars, Olympians, and one of the world’s greatest leaders

Art / Leadership

Prince, Oscars, Olympians, and one of the world’s greatest leaders

Last night I went to a release of my friends' sunglasses launch event. They're Coco and Breezy and you can almost see us meeting for the first time here and here. They're famous and becoming more so all the time. They designed the sunglasses Prince is wearing on his recent album: and that he wore on Saturday Night Live: Here I am showing off the sunglasses that aren't for sale yet, with one of the designers, ahead of the fashion curve. Yes, I'm bragging. That's why I'm putting up an extra post today. If it were just for the sunglasses picture, I'd leave it at that. On the way from the store to the subway, I ran into a friend who won an Oscar a…

January 18, 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

Freedom / Leadership

Op/Ed Fridays: Serpico on cops today

News of shootings, grand juries, protests, and more involving race, class, and gender are making front-page news like they haven't in decades. I try to stick to posting original perspectives and ideas, but sometimes I find something relevant I feel compelled to link to. Frank Serpico, the real-life cop Al Pacino played in the movie Serpico, wrote a piece "The Police Are Still Out of Control, I should know," I found relevant from someone with a valuable, unique, and credible perspective. He had the integrity to try to reform the corruption in a system he cared about, taking a bullet to the face in the process. I'll quote the article's beginning here, which talks about decades ago, but its poignancy comes from his views on…

January 9, 2015

Art / Leadership

Integrity in successful leaders: Stella Adler scrubbed the floor

This post follows up, "Integrity in successful leaders: Gandhi cleaned toilets," on integrity and sticking with your values. I came across the anecdote below about Stella Adler from a student of hers. Adler was one of the great acting teachers of the twentieth century. According to Wikipedia she taught Marlon Brando, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolores del RÃo, Lena Horne, Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Manu Tupou, Harvey Keitel, Melanie Griffith, Peter Bogdanovich and Warren Beatty, among others. That's quite a list! She was like royalty in the acting world, coming from a family filled with other great actors. She didn't have to do anything she didn't want, which makes her actions below all the more meaningful (source). The power of Stella's truth…

January 8, 2015

Awareness / Leadership / Models

The overeager salesperson and why just understanding someone can undermine you leading them

Imagine you want a product and you know a store that sells it. You go to the store. Now imagine the moment you walk in, a salesperson walks up to you with the product you want---the same brand, model, color, and everything, even at a great price---and says, "I know what you want. Here's what you're looking for." It would make you suspicious, wouldn't it? Despite them offering what you wanted, you'd feel motivated to wonder how they knew and to look for reasons not to buy it, the opposite of their interest. You might not even buy it. Since they offered it, you know the salesperson wants you to buy it, so it's in their interests but you can't help wondering if it's in…

January 7, 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

Habits / Leadership

A reader asks about integrity and self-control

A reader asked, about my post "Three years of burpees," Integrity is a interesting concept. Its the same thing for me, after having developed some strong daily habits, which are different from yours. It has made developing harder habits, much easier. How is integrity different from self-control? Isnt self-control the same as doing something when nobody is watching? The way I think about it is, that developing any habit requires some amount of stress psychologically. Once you develop a small habit (Habit A), the incremental stress to develop a harder habit (Habit B), is the same as the stress I would encounter if I started habit A initially. On the other hand if I tried to develop habit B, right off the bat, on my…

December 26, 2014

Leadership / Nonjudgment

Why feeling understood feels so good and feeling misunderstood feels so bad

I've posted a lot about the effectiveness of making people feel understood to leading them. It increases your ability to influence them and makes them feel good. It also resolves a lot of arguments. Why does it feeling understood feel so good? Sometimes I describe it in seminars as close to feeling loved and no one has objected. Why does feeling misunderstood feel so bad? I've joked in seminars how if you want to break up with someone but can't bring yourself to do it, you only have to intentionally misunderstand them. Do it consistently for long enough and they'll break up with you. No one has ever disagreed, feeling something true in it. I expect the more deeply you understand the answers to these…

December 24, 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

Is effective leadership manipulation?

Every seminar I lead and client I coach, when I describe how to lead by evoking people's passions, somebody asks if the technique isn't manipulation. I understand the question from how effective I say the techniques work. The question also saddens me, as I'll describe. It passes the Golden Rule People don't ask if it's manipulation after someone uses the technique on them, which is one of the exercises we do. When you feel how it feels for someone to understand you and connect that passion to a task, you feel great. I don't know how else to describe it. You feel like, "Finally, I can talk about these things I care about," and "Finally, I can work for the reasons I've wanted to." When…

December 13, 2014

Awareness / Leadership / Tips

You need to read this post

"Need" is a powerful word. People use it wrong a lot. If you do, you're probably hurting your credibility and ability to influence. It implies sloppy communication and probably sloppy thinking. People often say things like: "You need to calm down," when they want you calm, "You need to be quiet," when they want you quiet, "You need to listen more," when they want you to understand them, and so on. I associate such phrases with people with authority trying to get others to comply. Videos online of cops subduing people often show them "You need to get down on the ground!" Since neediness is so unattractive, I think most people are sensitive to someone telling them they need something. I am. So when you…

December 9, 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

Leadership / Nonjudgment

How you feel when you feel misunderstood

Want to know how people feel when you lead poorly? Think of a time when you've felt misunderstood. Not making people feel understood undermines your ability to lead them. Try pausing for a minute to remember a time someone you cared about didn't understand you. How did it feel? Do you want people you lead feeling that way toward you? As for me, it makes me feel Frustrated Futility that there's no point in trying to communicate with this person. If they don't understand me on this important thing, they won't understand me on anything less important Angry, especially if the person thinks they do understand me. Alone, not part of a team, even alienated I want to look for alternatives, like different places to…

December 2, 2014

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