Exercises / Leadership / Models

A model to promote responsibility

[This post is part of a series on "Mental models and beliefs: an exercise to identify yours." If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Today's model polarizes. That is, it doesn't build consensus or bring people together. While building consensus and bringing people together may sometimes help in politics, if you want to stick to your values, you won't improve your life by living partly by your values while mixing in some other peoples' values you disagree with. So today's model will create a model that, for me at least, separates an embodiment of my values from its antithesis which, for me, helps me live…

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April 28, 2013
A model to find the best in someone, including yourself
Art / Awareness / Exercises / Freedom / Leadership / Models / Tips

A model to find the best in someone, including yourself

[This post is part of a series on "Mental models and beliefs: an exercise to identify yours." If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Today's belief helps overcome a challenge in helping someone's growth. It also helps you shine as a leader or mentor. When you lead or mentor someone or work to improve yourself, it helps to track progress, but you often can't. You can for external things, like how fast they run 100 meters, how they scored on a test, how much they increased revenues, etc. When you develop someone as a person, you can't always see the development externally. Especially with important…

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April 23, 2013
Awareness / Choosing/Decision-Making / Exercises / Models / Tips

A model to improve your environment

[This post is part of a series on "Mental models and beliefs: an exercise to identify yours." If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] How would you like for everything in your life to look better and for everyone to treat you better? For everything in your life to improve? Today's belief is one of the most powerful you can have, as is the strategy it leads to. People also happen to oppose it the most. When I state it simply and abstractly, they agree with it. When I apply it to them, they push back against it. You will too. If I can take…

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April 21, 2013
Exercises / Freedom / Leadership / Models / Tips

A model to allow yourself to fail, which gives you freedom to succeed

[Today is the fifth in a series on my daily and weekly beliefs, in no particular order. See the introduction to the series and the value of flexibility in beliefs for background.] Do you ever not do something for fear you'll fail at it? You've probably heard the phrase that the perfect is the enemy of the good. You may also have noticed that people who achieve greatness don't do things perfectly. How do you become great if you don't do everything perfectly? Here's a model I use to allow yourself to do something without worrying too much about failing -- ironically, the best way to succeed. It's one of my most important ones I think about almost daily. It fits with my practice of having…

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April 6, 2013
Education / Exercises / Leadership / Models / Tips

Top models and strategies for negotiating

[This post is part of a series on "Mental models and beliefs: an exercise to identify yours." If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] You negotiate every day. If you think you only negotiate when you're buying a car or creating a deal, you don't realize you negotiate every time you decide with a friend where to get lunch, with your spouse what movie to see, with your boss if you can work from home another day per week. Any interaction with some give and take involves negotiation. And if you think of negotiation as each of you trying to beat the other, you'll miss…

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April 4, 2013
How not to overspend on things you don’t want
Blog / Entrepreneurship / Fitness / Leadership

How not to overspend on things you don’t want

I can't resist reposting a comment I posted on the forum of one of my favorite other blogs, Mr. Money Mustache. I'm reposting it because two other readers rated my response highly, one giving my response this animated image, making me proud. The post I responded to Alright mustachians [the term for people in the Mr. Money Mustache community who practice his principles of not spending money on stuff that doesn't improve your life] I need your sage advice. In the last three months I have really cut down on my bad habits. I pack my own lunch to work every day. I broke up with cable. I stopped ordering books from amazon on a regular basis. I changed my eating habits from quick and…

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March 28, 2013
Blog / Leadership / Tips

What makes a world-class speech

I was watching the beginning of the movie Patton. If you haven't seen it, it begins with George C. Scott as General Patton giving an incredible speech. YouTube has only the audio, but here it is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b5g1avyCSA Many see giving a speech like that as the pinnacle of leadership -- "I have a dream," the Gettysburg Address, Churchill's great speeches, and so on. If they are the pinnacle of leadership, I can't say, but they do showcase many of history's greatest leaders. So, those interested in leading may ask, how one gets to give such a great speech. Giving such speeches requires two elements -- the skill to deliver and the opportunity. Both come from one place. It may sound too simple and itself sound…

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March 25, 2013
Blog / Education / Fitness / Leadership

More on John Wooden

I found a couple more videos on John Wooden, whom I wrote about yesterday. First, some thoughts on him by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of the top players of all time. He is the NBA's all-time leading scorer, with 38,387 points. During his career with the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers from 1969 to 1989, Abdul-Jabbar won six NBA championships and a record six regular season MVP Awards. In college at UCLA, he played on three consecutive national championship teams, and his high school team won 71 consecutive games. At the time of his retirement, Abdul-Jabbar was the NBA's all-time leader in points scored, games played, minutes played, field goals made, field goal attempts, blocked shots, defensive rebounds, and personal fouls. Look at the…

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March 23, 2013
Blog / Fitness / Leadership

A few minutes on one of the best leaders in U.S. history

While searching for videos on Lou Gehrig for yesterday's post, I happened on a short video on John Wooden, one of the great coaches of any sport. According to Wikipedia John Robert Wooden (October 14, 1910 — June 4, 2010) was an American basketball player and coach. Nicknamed the "Wizard of Westwood", he won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period—seven in a row—as head coach at UCLA, an unprecedented feat. Within this period, his teams won a record 88 consecutive games. He was named national coach of the year six times. As a player, Wooden was the first to be named basketball All-American three times and he won a national championship at Purdue. Wooden was named a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame…

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March 22, 2013
Blog / Freedom / Leadership

The limits of what you can achieve

The changes you can make that will affect your life most are in your personal leadership skills -- how you perceive yourself, others, and your environment; how you manage conflict; how you influence yourself and others; and the other components of leadership. These changes will affect how you experience life more than external things like winning the lottery, where you live, etc, no matter how big they seem. In fact, if you don't change these things, you can win the lottery or any other big change and the important parts of your life won't change much. You might have a fancier car or bigger house, but they won't mean much more to you. You won't have more, fewer, or closer friends. You won't be more…

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March 19, 2013
Blog / Leadership

Do you think leadership is an all-the-time thing? Are you now a great leader?

If, applying Vince Lombardi's quote yesterday to leadership, you believe leadership is an all-the-time thing, and you want to be a great leader, or even just an effective one, are you a great leader now? Are you living a great life now? If you think you will be a great leader ever and you believe it's an all-the-time thing, don't you then think you are a great leader now, as surely as any other great leader was at every point in their careers? If you believe you will become as great a leader as any historical leader and you don't already consider yourself great, why not declare now once-and-for-all, to yourself at least, that you are a great leader and live accordingly? If you don't…

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March 13, 2013
Blog / Leadership

Pick a great historical leader. The leader you know didn’t do what you think they did. And what that means for you now.

The Martin Luther King, Jr you know won the Nobel Prize, was murdered in 1968, has a national holiday in his name, and has hundreds of streets and schools named after him. The man who helped organize and lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, went to jail for his beliefs, and gave the "I Have a Dream" speech had not done any of those things. The man who helped organize and lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a regular guy like you and me. He was a regular 26-year-old guy four years out of college, two years into a marriage, almost finished his doctorate. He didn't know where the boycott would lead.  The March on Washington was eight years away. The Civil Rights Act was nine…

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March 12, 2013
Blog / Leadership

Your life wouldn’t be better if your world was worse

Does it ever occur to you that part of what made Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. so great were the adversity that they had to face and overcome? That if you lived in a world with such injustice, you'd have cause to overcome it too and you might reach that level of greatness? I wonder how many people think, "I'd be a better leader if only I lived at a time like MLK did or Gandhi did so I'd have a noble cause to work on." No way! This is specious thinking. I think people tend to think it internally as a way to excuse not achieving their potential, but I don't think people voice it often. If they voiced it anyone who heard…

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March 10, 2013
Video: Mansudae Hill, location of 20-meter tall statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il
Leadership / NorthKorea

Video: Mansudae Hill, location of 20-meter tall statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il

Here we are approaching Mansudae Hill, the location of 20-meter tall statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.  Love the men or hate them, they ruled the country for seventy years, so they're important for the people here. We see children leaving the giant statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. At the start I was holding the camera at my side to be more respectful but picked it up when I saw everyone else holding their cameras up. Toward the end I show the 20-meter tall statues and their grand surroundings. Kim Jong Il's statue was just unveiled by his father's. The last clip in the video shows North Korean people and families departing after paying respects to Kims' statues.…

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March 1, 2013
Video: Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery on the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth
Freedom / Leadership / NorthKorea

Video: Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery on the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth

A video of the Revolutionary Martyrs' Cemetery on the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth -- roughly like being at Arlington on July 4, 1976. There were many soldiers and foreign tourists, making for an odd mix. Normally the government prohibits tourists from taking pictures of the military, but perhaps for the special day, since they were there ceremonially, and since there were so many of them they let us take pictures and video of them. The cemetery also overlooks Pyongyang and the Mausoleum holding the bodies of Kim Il Sung and, presumably by this point, Kim Jong Il, though they hadn't yet reopened the mausoleum after Kim Jong Il's death by this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voIgE4XraSs More footage of the cemetery More footage of the…

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February 27, 2013
Blog / Leadership

George Clooney on being yourself in the face of adversity

For my third post on George Clooney's Inside the Actors Studio interview, here he speaks on being yourself in challenging situations. I've written on the overlap I see between the art and craft of leadership and acting, how both deeply involve being aware of knowing and managing your emotions so you can know and evoke emotions in others. I think the training of leaders can benefit from the more mature field of training actors, and I'll write more on that later. What Clooney says about actors I believe applies to leaders as well, since leaders necessarily work where others can judge them. Leaders can't hide. Leaders have to be present and themselves, so criticism and judgment of their work and their team's work always has…

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February 27, 2013
Video: Bringing peace sooner: High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square, part 2
Blog / Freedom / Leadership / NorthKorea

Video: Bringing peace sooner: High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square, part 2

Shortly after last post's videos, we returned to Kim Il Sung Square and interacted with more North Koreans, overcoming language obstacles in North Korea with friendly body language. If our would-be leaders don't create peace, understanding, and communication between us, we have to lead them. The more we interact the more we understand each other. That's how we show we aren't the monsters or dupes their government says we are and vice versa. When was the last time you saw so many North Koreans smiling, shaking hands, high-fiving, and laughing with Americans? The woman you see returning my camera after the middle segment was our North Korean guide, who held the camera for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxWImTKf57I Images of our arrival at Kim Il Sung Square (repeated…

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February 26, 2013
Blog / Leadership

George Clooney on accountability

Following up yesterday's post on George Clooney on living well, I sampled another clip from the same interview in which he talked about accountability. The context is his winning an award for his work on Darfur. I think the clip illustrates how to keep focused on results, not accolades. And even to remember that the results you can achieve don't necessarily mean results that you want to achieve in the long run. Reporting on hidden problems helps -- how else can you try to solve them -- but it doesn't solve them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyl5vQCiOrk Accountability: without it things don't get done. Leaders almost necessarily have it because their team depends on them. Even if they don't have accountability, effective people ask for it.

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February 26, 2013
Video: Bringing peace sooner: High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square
Blog / Freedom / Leadership / NorthKorea

Video: Bringing peace sooner: High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square

Usually I post North Korea posts separate from my main page, but I consider today's videos too-good examples of leadership not to include in the main page (despite being in the middle of a series of George Clooney posts). The scene: Kim Il Sung Square, Pyongyang, April 14, 2012 -- the day before the celebration of the hundred-year anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth. Whether you like him or not, his country reveres and honors him. The equivalent in America would be the Mall in D.C. on July 3, 1976. When you see military parades of North Korea, you're seeing this site. Many North Koreans were there, mostly sitting in groups, as you'll see. I guess they wanted to celebrate the day before the main…

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February 26, 2013
Art / Blog / Leadership

Observations on leadership and success from Inside the Actors Studio

I've watched a lot of episodes of Inside the Actors Studio. I've referred to it before and I'll keep referring to it as a resource for leadership because actors and leaders share this common element to their craft: part of our jobs is to recognize and manage emotions in ourselves to communicate them and create and inspire emotions in others. Actors tend to inspire laughter, tears, and catharsis whereas leaders tend to inspire motivation, dedication, and action, but those are just different ranges of emotions. Both crafts inspire emotions in others through identifying and creating emotions in ourselves. That common part of our crafts means the training of both crafts requires developing emotional intelligence and self-awareness. The field of acting makes that requirement obvious to…

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February 22, 2013
Blog / Leadership

How to take risks

I've written about my models for how to motivate doing things you aren't good at. Such skills are important in many fields, but especially so in leadership. More than having to motivate yourself to do things for the first time, you often have to motivate many others to do things they haven't done. One is my practice of having low standards the first time I do something, which motivates doing things the first time at all. I can always improve later. But I have to try once to get to later tries. Another is Martha Graham's statement: Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.…

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February 13, 2013
Blog / Entrepreneurship / Leadership / Nature

Leadership in garbage we can learn from

I just read that Sweden is separating their trash so effectively, they're buying garbage from other countries. That is, their reducing-reusing-and-recycling programs work so well, their waste-incineration program is running low. Needless to say, reducing waste reduces pollution more than incinerating garbage, so one program starving the other helps the environment. According to Phys.org, Europe's average amount of trash ending up as waste if 38 percent. Sweden's is 1 percent. I shudder at what the United States' is. My home country doesn't lead in this area. It follows. Probably embarrassingly, at least for people who don't like to pollute the air and water their children breathe and drink. Since I started composting, my garbage amount decreased a lot. Cutting back on processed food reduces my…

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February 7, 2013
An entrepreneurial example of leading by example
Blog / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

An entrepreneurial example of leading by example

In September, 2001, the company I co-founded, Submedia, was installing its first display in Atlanta for our first big launch. We anticipated a lot of press. Giving away part of how the story ends, we did get a lot of media attention. The night before launch was crazy -- we had a few hours to finish installing the display, we had to prepare for the Fire Marshall's inspection the morning before the launch, and we had national, Atlanta-based, and possibly some New York-based press scheduled to attend the launch. At the pace we had worked before, we'd need more than a few hours to finish. Needless to say, we, nor anyone else, had ever installed or launched a commercial display like ours. We had no…

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February 6, 2013
Blog / Leadership

Why football is better than soccer. Actually, why any sport is better than soccer.

This post is about integrity. I like watching football. Watching a game or two on a Sunday is one of the main reasons I haven't gotten rid of my tv. Watching the Super Bowl in another country inevitably leads to people raised outside the U.S. talking about the superiority of soccer. They talk about how football has so many breaks in the action and something about grace or strategy. I see preferences between sports as a matter of personal taste so I don't find their arguments compelling. I don't argue back that football is better for the reasons I watch -- like how great players do such incredible things at the limits of what humans can do. Different sports have different rules resulting in different…

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February 4, 2013
What is your model for leadership?, part 2
Blog / Leadership

What is your model for leadership?, part 2

Following yesterday's post asking you about your model for leadership, you might wonder mine. I looked at my paper from the business school leadership class, but my model has evolved so much from then -- the beginning of my even asking the questions -- I don't see value in posting it. Elements of my leadership model Since then I've developed my Model of the human emotional system, which I've found tremendously useful in motivation, understanding, and leading others and myself, so I consider it an essential and prominent part of my model for leadership. Even that Model I've built on, for example how it interacts with the rest of you and how to use it (the Method). I also like Columbia's modeling leadership as six…

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February 3, 2013

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