life on planet earth on Leadership Development

The only real training for leadership is leadership.

Most leaders focus on how to succeed in a task. A far better approach is to focus on who you are.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not c...

[Jonathan] Sacks comments on this passage, tying it back to his study of adaptive leadership concepts. In the first occasion, Moses was faced with a technical challenge: the people needed food. On the...

It’s an argument that may never be fully resolved, but scientific research has shown what most of us probably already suspected: there is some truth to both perspectives. One study focused on factors ...

A leader's failure is never isolated, involving only the leader. Usually the failure of a leader involves basic patterns of hiding and blaming throughout the whole organization, patterns that must...

In their book Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe adaptive challenges as the work confronting a leader when there is no known fix to a problem. It’s when “best practices” ...

Alfred North Whitehead claimed that all true education is religious education. In the same spirit, all true leadership is religious leadership— for religion has to do with cleansing the human self of ...

In his book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, former president of the University of Southern California Steven Sample, details a critical element leaders must possess if they wish to make sound ju...

Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership.… The nature of leadership demands that there always be an element of uncertainty. The temptation is to thin...

Over the years, I’ve read about many leaders who failed ethically in their leadership. Can you guess what they had in common? They all thought it could never happen to them. There was a false sense of...

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.

You know the adage “People resist change.” It is not really true. People are not stupid. People love change when they know it is a good thing. No one gives back a winning lottery ticket. What people r...

There go my people. I must find out where they’re going, so I can lead them.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time.

How to Lead Without Being in Charge: Leveraging Influence When You Lack Authority came out just about a year ago, so for my timing, I'm actually a bit ahead having just finished it. It is really...

A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...

I read of a young man who had just been appointed to the presidency of a bank at the tender age of thirty-two. The promotion was far beyond his wildest dreams and very frightening to him, so he went t...

The final thing leaders will need is courage … the willingness to tell the truth, to say what is not politely or politically acceptable. … The most common expression of the courage to tell the truth i...

I desire to conduct the affairs of this administration in such a way that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall have at least one ...

I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.

“Casey at the Bat” has got to be the most well-known sports poem in American history. The “Mudville nine” are down four to two, with one inning left with two outs. Two men wait at second and third bas...

As a five-year-old at Christmas I remember how excited I was to get my first bike. It was a yellow BMX Huffy, a mean machine for a kid in the late 70s. It is one of my fondest memories because I remem...

Lord God Almighty: our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer: There is no place where You are absent. There is no corner of our world that’s hidden from You. There is nothing about us You do not know, no ac...

O Lord, we are aware of how much we need you, and how much the world needs you. We yearn for your guidance and strength. We pray for your intervention and for your kingdom to come. Today we lift up t...

Gracious God, sometimes I think that I can figure out all the consequences of my decisions. I can become overly impressed with what I perceive to be my strategic vision and analysis. Forgive me for my...

LORD our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth. You set Your glory above the heavens. We see your power in galaxies that spin in space, and see your care in the sparrows feeding in the snow...

I’m a college professor — I have been for almost a decade. I work reasonably hard at my job, and I think I do it fairly well. In fact, in my honest and solitary moments, when there’s no occasion false...

Steve Sample has been described as the greatest university president of his generation. For nineteen years, by his capable leadership, Sample led the University of Southern California to new heights o...

Most of us in the United States know the famous “I have a Dream” speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the 1963 March on Washington. On a sweltering, humid day in the n...