Whitepapers

We know a lot about the personality style associated with effective leadership, but we don’t know a great deal about what effective leaders actually do on a routine basis. I recently spent some time in Warsaw talking with a brilliant Polish engineer—Maciej Witucki, President and Board Chair, Orange Polska (the French telecom) and Board Chair of LOT-Polish Airlines—discussing lessons…

The concept of “engagement” has become a hot topic in applied psychology over the past two years. Like competency modeling and personality assessment before it, HR practitioners have forced the academic community to pay attention to engagement—it is not something that the academics discovered on their own. The concept of engagement was first described by Yale organizational psychologist William…

The key leadership question of this uncertain era: What can we do to inspire optimism? When I was in my early twenties, a close relative of mine was murdered on the street by someone he didn’t know. It was a random act of violence that threw me into a spiral of sadness, fear, and negativity. I saw danger around every corner. The future was dark; the past was a fairy tale that had morphed…

Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, “He governs best who governs least.” I am a lifetime liberal but on this point, I largely agree with the former President and conservative icon. Several years ago, on a commercial flight to somewhere, I was sitting next to a talkative retired aeronautical engineer. In the course of his monologue, he noted that he had been Ronald Reagan’s boss in…

People who seem naturally motivated really are. If you're not, you can motivate yourself. There are mornings when I look over my to-do-list and just keep staring blankly at it. Instead of getting to work, I keep checking my inbox, news feed, and making a fresh cup of green tea. Then I notice the dirty dishes in the kitchen. I get the dishes cleaned up, but there are also those clothes sitting…