Leadership

Leaders want to believe they are making a difference. People who see themselves as leaders believe they are creating good results by doing what leaders do. They plan, they budget, they encourage, they focus their resources. They see themselves as pushing the winds of change, sweeping across the land. As we concentrate on the specific steps we need to […]

Building with bricks is not something we do lightly. The strength and integrity of a brick wall depends on working well, not necessarily quickly. Each brick relies on the other bricks around it, especially those that went before it. Each brick must be placed exactly where it belongs and joined to the others around it. While each

Companies, like all groups and organizations made up of people, are like people. They make decisions the way people do, they act the way people act, and they have souls like people. We know companies have souls because their values are so much more powerful than rules. There are quite a few companies around that

Leaders translate values and principles into everyday reality. The leaders who inspire me lead by example. They learn how to lead other people and organizations by leading themselves first. We need to see the picture before we can paint it. The first step in becoming a leader each day is knowing your own core values.

Leaders are beginners, and they always will be. Each moment is an opportunity to begin again. We have no real choice. We are not able to go back and change what we have already done. We cannot apply new knowledge and insight to our past actions. Regret does us no good. We are not able

I have had a passion for ice cream my entire life. As a proud son of America’s Dairyland, I have eaten ice cream longer than I can remember. I went to school at the home of the best ice cream in the world, in Babcock Hall, at the University of Wisconsin. Ice cream is very

I used to believe that leaders were people who told us what to do. When I knew enough of the right answers, then I could be a leader, too. I have learned that leaders are not people who fill us with accurate responses to questions. They do not deposit what they have learned into us to earn

Almost anyone who has read a detective story or watched any television program knows the power of fingerprints. Fingerprints are powerful and reliable clues because of two primary qualities. Our fingerprints are unique. Each person has a different set of fingerprints. Even identical twins can be distinguished through their fingerprints. We leave fingerprints inadvertently. We leave

I live in a culture that makes everything a contest. We take metaphors from sports and try to apply them to every activity of life. We live in a time when the language of athletics has become abbreviations to describe how we live. We have created a culture in which a Hail, Mary has become

I know people who think that being a leader comes from having a certain title, or a position of responsibility. I know people who believe that becoming a leader is a matter of education or experience. Some people think leaders wear particular kinds of clothes, or speak particular languages. They see leaders as behaving in