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2018Good Behavior At Bad Moments: The Secret of Great Leaders
I fly a lot. So, it doesn’t take me long to size up a flight attendant’s mood. This is an important skill because the flight attendant’s mood is a good predictor of how enjoyable the flight will be. Recently I was flying from Chicago to Nashville with an angry flight attendant. As a matter of fact, she bluntly announced, “I’m in a bad mood!”—and she…
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2018The Backwards Road to Success
Successful people realize true success is not always outcome based. This truth is not one you will find in most success manuals. It runs counter to what the world says about success. But I believe it may be the most important of the success truths. True success is the determination to do the right thing— no matter what the cost. And realize, it is very…
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20183 Reasons Leaders Avoid Change…and How to Beat Them
Do you dread change? Most of us do. However, one difference between succeeders and failures is that succeeders learn to embrace healthy change. It actually invigorates them. When you boil it all down, most of us resist change for three reasons: 1. Fear of the unknown. It amazes me how people will sometimes live endlessly in a painful situation simply because they’re afraid of trying…
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2017Maximum Leadership: The Secret of Avoiding Conflict
In 1977, Bonnie and I opened our advertising agency. Those first years were tough. We worked lots of seventy and ninety hour weeks. It was typical for me to start early in the morning catching up on paperwork, then to spend most of the day visiting clients and prospects. Since we didn’t yet have an art department, a copywriter, or even a staff media buyer,…
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20173 Insightful Secrets of the Truly Successful Leader
It’s human nature to desire success without effort. But unless you have a big inheritance (or, a mask and a gun), that probably won’t happen. The ancient biblical proverb says, “The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.” Following are three ideas you may find helpful: 1) The most successful people put out the most effort. While the…
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2017Great Leaders Are Mentally Ambidextrous
“Great, so, what does that mean?” you ask. Do you remember that kid in grade school who could write equally well with either her right or left hand? She was said to be ambidextrous. In a similar way, most successful people learn to work from both their right and left-brains. We’re told that there are two groups of people: right-brained thinkers (those who are primarily…
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2017Truth Serum: Commit to Be the Real Deal
I started my advertising agency, in part, because I didn’t want to work for someone else. It wasn’t arrogance that led me to this. It was conviction. As I surveyed the advertising agency world, I wasn’t impressed. Agencies seemed too focused on winning awards and padding expense accounts, and woefully disinterested in their clients’ true needs. Also, there was the morality thing. I didn’t like…
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2017Truth Matters. Your Two Target Markets…
During the 25 years I ran my advertising agency we often spoke of an advertiser’s “target markets.” By this we referred the age, income levels, genders, etc. of the people we hoped to reach with our message. Saying with our advertising metaphor, you need to understand that each of us has two target markets. We should determine to be a ferocious truth teller with both:…
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2017The Great Divide in Today’s Workforce…and How to Deal With It.
There is a great chasm in our culture. This is the reason fifty-five-year-old bosses are clueless when it comes to motivating and dispatching their younger workforce. This is why parents feel adrift when communicating with their pre-teen and teenage children. This is why we don’t get along. What causes this? It is the cultural divide between Modernists and Post-Modernists. In case these are terms with…
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2017Four Tips for Handling Change
Following are four tips that have helped me deal with change. You may want to consider using some of them the next time you are faced with a “change moment.” 1) Don’t wait for all the details. Good leaders want lots of details before they make a decision. That’s great…up to a point. Despite one’s best efforts, in most situations it’s impossible to get all…