Restore the Fourth

Independence Day is one of the holidays I like to take time to think about its meaning. Today I'm thinking about the U.S. Bill of Rights, as timely today as ever. Why are they as important today as ever? They limit the power of government. It seems unchecked governments tend to try to seize more power. That doesn't mean they're bad or the people in them are bad. Just that people in positions of power feel motivations to increase that power, often for what many people would consider noble reasons. If you've read my posts lately you've read how I…

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Managing difficult teammates, managers, employees, and people

We've all had to deal with difficult team members. Those who have led have had to deal with difficult people reporting to us. Most of us have had to deal with difficult managers and bosses. We've also had to deal with difficult people in general. When someone makes our jobs and lives difficult we want to influence them to stop challenging us and start helping us, or at least getting out of the way (and sometimes to be open to them influencing us, accepting that sometimes we are the difficult ones). When the difficult person is our manager or boss,…

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Morality and the development of language

I write a lot here about how counterproductive judging others or imposing your values on them is for leadership or influencing them. (Here are five posts on it, for example: Instead of calling something right, wrong, good, or bad, consider the consequences of your actions, What is morality?, On the counterproductivity of motivating people with guilt and blame — aka moralizing, Talking about “truth” or “reality” always confuses things, How willing are you not to judge?) Thinking about the development of language gave me a new perspective that, I think, helps undermine people's attachment to calling things right, wrong, good,…

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People who succeeded despite adversity

[This post is part of a series on people who succeed despite adversity. 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.] Do you ever feel like things are stacked against you? Consider how many people succeeded despite the odds. Ask yourself which helps more -- having advantages or learning to overcome adversity? I've noticed how many extremely successful people had problems that mediocre people claim hold them back. I started noticing it with actors on Inside the Actor's Studio, but then…

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Leadership and United States’ spying

I'd like to look at some headlines from a leadership perspective. I don't intend for today's post to be political. Governments have needed secrecy and spying since before Sun Tzu's The Art of War over two thousand years ago. People will also oppose governments that overreach their influence into their lives. Different people oppose different levels of intrusion so that the more a government intrudes the more people will oppose the government. One of the main roles of a government's highest leaders is to balance the government's secrecy and spying with its citizens' private interests. Government officials and decision-makers have…

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“Needs as understood”: How to start sales presentations — and conversations where you want to influence someone

I've written before about a student group from Columbia Business School I still contribute to long after graduation called InSITE that promotes entrepreneurship and connects students at several schools including Columbia, NYU, Harvard, and Stanford to entrepreneurs. A recent post on InSITE's blog by Lukasz Strozek, Stanford Business School 2014, described a challenge common in product development and entrepreneurship. It reminded me of a great solution I'll write below applicable to many situations where you want to influence people. The challenge Read that post for the details, but broadly it points out We care about products we create We want…

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Google, strategy, and what your strategy says about you

I've read a few articles recently how people are using search engines that track you less than Google in light of the spying. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while since I find Google so spooky. Nobody is challenging in Google's dominance, but competition is increasing. Its search results aren't as good as Google's, but I prefer it, as I'll explain. Nearly every successful company has a strategy or it will lose focus and fail. Same with people, for that matter. Whatever a company or person says, if you know their strategy you can predict their behavior. Usually if you…

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More thoughts on centralized power without accountability

Comparisons to Nazis and Hitler happen all the time, usually backfiring on the people making the comparison. Since almost no one has tried to take over the world or kill everyone they could based on religion, whomever you're comparing looks better. This comparison makes things so black-and-white you lose the ability to learn from the past. Today we know how Nazism ended, but while it developed and grew, nobody knew. When most people talk about the topic, they talk about after their power passed a point of no return. The problem with looking only there is that there was little…

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My main problem with centralized power without accountability

I once read that in the build-up to WWII, people in America were concerned that democracy would hold them back in a conflict with the nations creating strong centralized authorities. They speculated that in a war, while they deliberated, nations with centralized power would win for not having to take time making decisions. Apparently they were right, but only at the beginning. When the strong central leaders made effective decisions, their nations won. Things changed when the strong central leaders started making bad decisions when things got out of their depth. The powerful leaders continued making decisions and nobody could…

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Ad hominem attacks are easy but counterproductive and best ignored

I'm following the story of the government spying more closely than most issues and writing about it here because I see it as a failure of leadership in many ways, most importantly that the system seems to be out of control with the person in charge -- the President of the United States -- exercising little accountability if not outright lying. Yesterday an opinion piece in the New York Times ignored the issues and attacked the character of the whistle-blower, using malevolent tones to insinuate problems. Today the New Yorker challenged that piece, still respecting the Times writer, as if…

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A model and strategy to lead people so they appreciate and thank you for being led

[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.] Want to know a great way to lead people so they appreciate that you led them? Today's model and strategy show how. Often they'll thank you and look forward to being led again by you later. Note that it works when you and they both care about the goal. It may not work on projects that…

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My Seminar on Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence and Self-awareness in four evening sessions starting June 17, 6:30pm-9:30pm in New York

I'll be leading the next session of my leadership seminar in New York in June. I'm experimenting as four three-hour evening sessions Session 1: Monday, June 17 Session 2: Wednesday, June 19 Session 3: Monday, June 24 Session 4: Wednesday, June 26 I'll give the same full attention I do for a weekend session. Sign up here. Here's the course description: What You’ll Learn If you don't know how to lead, you can only do what you can do yourself. If you can lead, you can achieve anything anyone else did with a team. Even if you want only to…

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A model to live like beautiful people do

[Today is the forty-second in a series on daily and weekly beliefs that improve my life and may improve yours, in no particular order. See the introduction to the series and the value of flexibility in beliefs for background.] People commonly believe that beautiful women have better lives than everybody else and that they have access to more valuable things. I came across that belief a lot when I used to go out dancing a lot. The evidence seemed overwhelming -- they automatically get invited to the best parties, they get past the doorpeople, men buy them drinks if the…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.…

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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…

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