Cohort Reading Resources

One distinguishing characteristic of highly accomplished leaders is being a virtuoso questioner. If you make a habit of this, you will become a better leader. Artful leadership questions express genuine curiosity. Unlike rhetorical questions that are demonstrations of what you know, artful leadership questions demonstrate vulnerability and intellectual humility. When your questions are born and [...]

Leadership, at times, can be brutal. You can find yourself under constant pressure to perform. The demands of your role mean that you must solve problems, prevent problems, direct the organization’s strategic course, correct the course, evaluate threats and opportunities, provision the resources your organization needs, set standards, ensure that your people are working in [...]

Over the past 15 years working with CEOs and business leaders, more than anything else, one thing has become clear: leadership plays an inextricable role in achieving significant success and sustaining it. To be sure, sustainable companies also depend on competent management and solid systems and processes to ensure things run properly. But competent leadership [...]

Through my work, I’ve come to recognize mediocrity as perhaps the most insidious threat to human performance – and why it may ultimately threaten the entirety of the whole of the human race. When you examine the best and worst of what humanity has to offer, rarely, if ever, do you find people aspiring to [...]

When you look at companies that either thrive, manage to survive, or fail, you can cite a multitude of factors as the reasons to explain why. However, broadly success or failure comes down to four things: capital, management, leadership, and luck. There is an intrinsic relationship between business, capital, and risk. Capitalism is a free-market [...]

How much energy do you waste on managing, worrying about, or adjusting your behavior in response to what others think about you? If you happen to be an extrovert like me, chances are impression management is a persistent force in your life. Wanting people to like you tends to be a thankless and exhausting pursuit. [...]

(And a Better Leader) I remember getting captured by the wisdom of “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Richard Carlson popularized the phrase suggesting that it’s all relatively small stuff we face in our daily lives. It seemed like good advice to avoid creating unnecessary and avoidable stress. You will know when the stress is really [...]

Leadership isn’t what you do – it’s what’s in your bones: it is who you are when you are needed. We have leaders because we need them. It isn’t an award given to recognize merit and accomplishment; it is the current that flows within you that drives that accomplishment and makes you meritorious. Leadership is [...]

Leadership has little to do with you know; it’s a set of behaviors. You can know absolutely nothing about leadership on an academic or intellectual level and be an extraordinary leader. Your success as a leader is not a function of what you do; it is a measure of what you accomplish. How you go [...]

There is no shortage of leaders in the world. The problem is that there are far fewer people who distinguish themselves as the exceptional leaders than we need at this moment. It is true in all areas of life —and especially true for businesses throughout the world that the Covid Crisis has changed forever. As [...]