I recently watched the movie Air: Courting a Legend on Prime Video. It stars Matt Damon as John Paul Vincent “Sonny” Vaccaro, the former sports marketing executive who worked with Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. The movie tells the story of how Vaccaro got Michael Jordan his first sneaker contract with …
Business Strategy
Adopt Two Principles to Build Pools of Talent
Each year annual surveys of CEOs highlight the need for leaders as a major concern. According to Herminia Ibarra of the London Business School we need leaders who can handle adaptive challenges – which she defines as problems that cannot be solved from the top down, but require people, teams, …
Lead with an Enterprise Mindset
Speaking to a group of Fortune 500 managers, I was asked to share keys to leading with an enterprise mindset. In my experience there are three keys to leading with an enterprise mindset – 1) adopt an infinite mindset; 2) consider multiple perspectives or lenses; and 3) become a solutions …
The Three Yes Rule
I sat at my desk, feeling a mix of disappointment and anger. In less than twenty-four hours I saw months of hard work squandered and $1 million dollars evaporate. I painfully learned what I call the “Three Yes Rule” of strategic execution. I was working in the enterprise strategy department of …
The Power of Questions
My grandmother Martin, when commenting on the difficult adolescent years, would often say, “teenagers have all the answers, it is the questions they are minus.” Good questions can foster creativity, provide insight, and focus the mind to address problems. The ability to construct, ask, and …
Build Broad-Based Coalitions to Become a “Triple Bottom Line” Leader
Building broad-based community coalitions is a key skill, especially as you rise to the upper levels of an organization. But in my experience, leaders fail to recognize the importance of this ability early enough and wait too long to proactively develop. The result is being passed over for …
Celebrate and Appreciate Your Way to Success
“What gets measured gets done,” is an often-quoted business aphorism (FYI, wrongly attributed to management guru Peter Drucker). Proper attribution aside, the veracity of the statement is evident to anyone working in a large organization. Companies allocate their time, money, and human capital to …
The Power of Podcasts
Continually expanding functional knowledge, monitoring industry trends, and gaining insights are keys to business and career success. In the early 1980’s, when I worked as a bank analyst and loan officer, the internet was in its infancy. I spent many hours at Boston’s Kirstein Business Library …
3 Principles for Developing Profit and Loss Leaders
Ten years ago, while working at Aetna, Henry Huang and I designed and launched the successful General Manager / P&L Program. Our primary goal was to increase participants’ ability to manage businesses at various life stages and levels of complexity. A secondary objective was to accelerate …
Think Like a Business Owner
Thinking like a business owner is a great way to add value to an organization and get noticed by senior leaders. An owner understands how the company makes money and the upstream and downstream impacts of their decisions. Two tools you can use to improve your “ownership” skills are the business …
Stop with All the Teams!
Over the past three years the pandemic has changed our workplaces. According to a McKinsey report The Future of Work After COVID (link), the pandemic accelerated existing trends in remote work, e-commerce, automation and people switching occupations. Employees deemed essential workers, remained on …
Leadership is Strategic Execution
I just finished an excellent book on strategy – Plan to Pivot by Gerry Starsia (link). I highly recommend it to anyone starting out in the strategic planning field. Gerry mentions that in the past it was common to put leaders into three buckets: visionaries and operators, planners and …