Sometimes you are not in your best game. Things go wrong, and you know what just happened is in no way close to your best effort. You or your team fail your customer, client, or audience. So what should you do as a leader? Recently I ate at a restaurant where everything went wrong. Horribly wrong. From the moment my party arrived to the time we left, the entire experience was a disaster. Sometimes we have an off day. And rarely, an off day can turn into a truly awful day. It happens even to the best. But as I watched my dinner experience deteriorate with every course and exchange, I had hoped that management would at least try to “right” some of the “wrongs,” that in my opinion, were many. But that’s not what happened. After giving the manager a run down of the list of grievances, from poor…

Impacting an emerging generation is not easy work, especially if you want to create a shift in thinking and attitude that lasts a lifetime and not merely create an emotional experience that is only remembered but has little impact. My son Marcus has been part of the Student Leadership University (SLU) for the past 3 summers and the experiential program has had a profound impact in his life. He has spent a week in Orlando going behind the scenes at Sea World and Universal Studios, a week in Washing DC learning about how our nation works and the faith of our founding fathers, and a week in England and France discovering how leadership and faith have transformed that continent. He’s looking forward to going to Jordan next summer to finish the program. For the next few weeks SLU is sponsoring a webinar featuring some of SLU’s staff.  Dr. Jay Strack, the…

A few days ago I saw a very effective political commercial. I have grown tired of attack ads where the opposing candidate is depicted in black and white while the foreboding music plays in the background and the ominous voice-over tells of his or her evil plot to ruin our lives. This commercial was different. It was created and financed by self-made billionaire Thomas Peterffy. Mr. Peterffy, who pioneered electronic trading practices in U.S. markets and now leads discount-brokerage giant Interactive Brokers, embodies the rags-to-riches American dream. Born during World War II in Hungary, he spent his childhood behind the Iron Curtain, where he says the country’s national spirit was eroded by a system that took away the drive of its people to work hard, build businesses, and create jobs. He left for the U.S. as a young man and today his net worth has been estimated at more than…

The more talents and skills you have the more likely you are to take something from nothing to up and running. Talented people who can learn quickly, adapt, and grow are the heart and soul of start-ups. But unless you learn to let go of most of those things, the organization you serve will not be able to grow beyond your incompetence level. Yes, incompetence. No matter how talented you are, you cannot be an expert on all the skills that your business or non profit need to grow and thrive. The skill set that got the organization from ideation to reality are not the same skills that will take it to the next level of growth. Early in my career as a business leader, I used to spend hours learning how to use software so I could design marketing pieces or edit videos. I had to come to grips…

I have been hitting the gym hard the past year and I have seen great results. I went from roughly 15% body fat down to 8% while increasing muscle mass. There are a lot of nuances to get your body on a full transformation schedule, but as I contemplate my journey,  I always come back to three basic foundations. Weight training. I loved to run, cycle, and swim. But the older I got, the more muscle I lost with a cardio-only exercise routine. While training for a marathon, I got so thin that I looked like a starving zombie. It’s not the look anyone is going for. I found that for a significant body transformation, resistance training with weights is a great way to prevent bone mass loss as well as to increase muscle and give me an overall healthy look. And I feel better than I’ve felt in years.…

I need encouragement. For someone who sees the glass half full and opportunity during the tough times, I am not a natural encourager. That’s not an excuse, however. If I need encouragement, why shouldn’t those around me need it as well? They do. We all do. Here’s what I know encouragement does for me: It motivates me. A simple “well done,” a pat on the back, or a nod of the head gives me enough motivation to want to do it again, and better. How many times you and I have done a menial task because we wanted to please someone that matters to us? We do it all the time. Those of us with children do it every day. It abates my insecurities. I remember feeling defeated in a job that was not going well. “I don’t have what it takes to get this done,” I had reasoned. I…

Eventually all our assumptions need to be either validated or disproved. In the world of business, the sooner we have clarity on foundational beliefs the better decisions we make with increasingly better results. Entrepreneurs have a sense of timing and intuitiveness that allow us to take calculated and yet successful risks early in our enterprises. Unfortunately this “beginner’s luck” is not a sustainable business practice and the same skill that got us going early on can lead to our undoing. Take online advertisement for example. Intuitively we think that Generations X and Y would spend more time online than any of the previous generations since they are digital natives as opposed to digital immigrants for the rest of the population. As it turns out, Baby Boomers spend more time online than any other demographic*. As a marketer my understanding that 46-65 year-olds spend more time online than their younger counterparts…

Sometimes your client or potential client needs to fail before you can help him. That was a difficult lesson for me to learn, but has proven to be an important one. And if you’re going to be successful in the service industry, you better learn this one, and fast. Earlier in my career as a consultant, I would try to argue and convince my clients of a course of action that I thought was best for them. Most of the time my advice became strategy or a tool that eventually brought results. But from time to time I encountered, and still do to this day, people who believe they know more than I do and decide that their solution is preferable to mine. As a consultant, this know-it-all attitude has always puzzled me. After all, if you know the “what” and “how,” why hire me in the first place? In…

We are all in sales. No matter what we do for a living, we all represent ourselves, our employer, and our value system to those with whom we come in contact. The very best sales people are not those who will promise anything and harass people to close a deal. People like that don’t last long in any job. They burn too many bridges in the process of getting it done. In my experience, here are some thoughts on what makes a good salesperson: They believe in their product. Whether you’re selling pen, cars, software, or hope, you cannot be great at it without believing in your product. I’m not saying that the product has to be great, but you must believe in it in order to champion it with heart. I once bought hundreds of pen fors my company because of the infectious conversation with the lady who cold-called…