Tag: Leadership
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Tough love on self-care
You can’t care for or lead others unless you care for and lead yourself. It’s counterintuitive but true. You think you’re being selfless when you push yourself beyond healthy limits (in time, relationships, rest, working out). But you’re setting yourself up for failure and letting everyone who relies on you down. In fact, sometimes we…
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Quotes: On changing the world and being a leader
Two unrelated but interesting quotes. (And they’re real. I’ll leave April Fools Day to folks like YouTube or Gmail) “The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have…
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Data + Intuition = Success
Ok, I’ll admit there’s a lot more that goes into that equation for it to work in real life. But it’s a start. Here’s what Jason Kottke says at the end of a post about expensive products that lose money but show the company cares about excellence (think the Corvette and Mac Pro): Normally I’m…
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Follow delight
I should have changed the plan as soon as we got in line. Peter Pan is clearly one of Disneyland’s kids’ rides, but my son looked at the line and said, “no no no.” Being the good parents that we are, we told him he would love it and worked to amp him up for…
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Know what you stand for, and make it accessible
What does your organization or department stand for? What do you stand for? Clearly defining our core values is one of the most difficult and most important things we can do. We’re going to make decisions daily. We can either make them with pre-established guidelines that reflect what we truly value, or we can make them…
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Success and mastery take work
“Almost nothing worthwhile is easy, and it’s hard to just jump in and be good at something difficult right off the bat. Think, say, of Twitter, whose business plan, such that it is, has always been something along the lines of “Get big and popular, then just flip the switch and start making money when…
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You don’t know (and that’s ok)
It’s hard to understand something until you’ve been there. Doing this job with a kid, it suddenly clicked. I’ve always wondered why those parents out there seemed a little (a lot) frazzled at times. But now, I understand. I get how much those parents are juggling. People who haven’t been there don’t. I didn’t. I…
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Put the trash in the leader’s van
On the way back from a recent staff retreat, I was driver of van #2. The bosses were in van 1 with half our group, and I was following with the rest. But on the way to the retreat, my van had the luggage and their van had the food. But on the way back,…
Jon Sampson 