"If you could make God bleed, people will cease to believe in Him... there will be blood in the water, and the sharks will come." Ivan Vanko (actor Mickey Rourke), Iron Man 2. In the movie Iron Man 2, the hero, Tony Stark (actor Robert Downey, Jr.) has made the world aware of his dual identity, [...]
Do you ever feel like you're arguing with idiots? Most of them actually aren't (idiots). Some probably are. For those, remember, "It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument." (Wm. G. MacAdoo) In most business and professional discourse someone has to be the grown up and it might as well be you. Here's [...]
Scenario One: During a recent phone conversation with friend who had just shut down his business of 23 years he reminded me of a scene from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises where the main character, Mike Campbell, is asked "How did you go bankrupt?" The answer was "Gradually... then all of a sudden." Scenario Two: Last week [...]
According to vulture-territory.com, the California Condor has been protected since 1953 and was listed as an endangered species in 1971. By 1986, for a variety of reasons, the wild populations had sunk to single digits. Soon the three remaining California Condors were captured and joined twenty-four others in captivity. The birds have adapted reasonably well [...]
To say that I was an eager first time father would have been a great understatement of the facts. I was excited. Scared. Thrilled. Uncertain. Confident. Expectant (in a somewhat different way than my wife). The main thing I wanted was to be prepared; I'd never been a father before and I didn't want to [...]
"Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you." is one of the most memorable lines from the song Anything You Can Do which was composed by Irving Berlin for the 1946 Broadway musical, Annie Get Your Gun. The song is a spirited duet, with one male singer and [...]
My client began the conversation with, “I hate politics!” As a senior vice president in a large closely held firm she had seen plenty of office politics and she didn’t like what she had seen - and experienced. In my previous post I introduced some thinking about politicians as leaders. The other side of the [...]
Perhaps it’s the season - election season - that’s generating more frequent discussions from my clients and others about how politics fits, or doesn’t fit, into the context of leadership, and vice-versa. My initial reaction to these discussions begins with the Forrest Gump-like assertion that leadership is as leadership does. Before we go any further, [...]
My mother was a third grade teacher. There was a boy in her class one year who had been socially promoted through first and second grades without having learned to read. You can imagine the host of other problems this created for him academically and socially. My mother decided this would not stand and it [...]
