You can’t always choose what happens to you. Accidents and tragedies happen. But you can choose how you respond to those situations. One of the best ways to begin is to ask yourself the right questions.

I face a dragon named Lethargy every morning. It has three heads: spiritual, physical, and intellectual. If I don’t slay this dragon before breakfast, he usually gets the best of me.

At some point, you have to stop procrastinating and launch. The easiest way to do so is to embrace the strategy of “permanent beta.” Here’s how.

When times are tough, vision is the first casualty. Before conditions can improve, it is the first thing we must recover.

This is a guest post by Sean Glaze, a team speaker and motivator. You can check out his blog, and follow him on Twitter. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here. What do penguins have to do with leadership and changing your toxic team culture? More than you […]

Everyone wants to be a leader. However, few are prepared to accept the accountability that goes with it. But you can’t have one without the other.

I am mostly offline, attending a business conference. I have asked several bloggers to post in my absence. This is a guest post by Steve Kaplan. He grew a marketing company from start-up to $250 million in sales with offices in 14 countries before selling it for $2.1 billion. You can visit Steve’s blog, follow him […]

I am mostly offline, attending a business conference. I have asked several bloggers to post in my absence. This is a guest post by Mary DeMuth. She is an author, speaker and book mentor. You can read Mary’s blog or visit her on Twitter. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the […]

I am mostly offline, attending a business conference. I have asked several bloggers to post in my absence. This is a guest post by Craig Jarrow. He is an author, speaker, and blogger on time management and technology. You can read his blog and follow him on Twitter. If you want to guest post on […]

I am mostly offline, attending a business conference. I have asked several bloggers to post in my absence. This is a guest post by Michael Smith, a blogger and associate pastor in Franklin, TN. You can read his blog and follow him on Twitter. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out […]

The successful executives that I interviewed for The Next Level recommend that newly promoted leaders do these things in their first month on the new job: Meet and Greet: A top priority for any new leader is to get to know the key players in the organization. … Find Out What Success Looks Like: The most important question that new leaders need to ask is this: What do you think success looks like for my team six, twelve and twenty four months from now?

I go through about ten psychological states when I speak publicly. It has been helpful to me to identify these, so I am not surprised when they occur.

Last spring, Jim Bradford , Dean of Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, interviewed me on my leadership philosophy and practice. … How social media fits into my role as a CEO and why I think it is critical to my company’s success.

Most leaders talk to their teams about how they value honesty. However, judging by their behavior, very few of these leaders actually encourage it.

Recently, I was tempted to respond to a blogger who had attacked my company. As I was considering what I to say, I heard a politician on the radio responding to an opponent who had called him a liar.

When it comes to your success, your advisors can make you or break you. In the 1990s, I made a terrible financial mistake. As a result of my success as a writer and a speaker, I made some significant extra income. I was also holding down a full-time job. I could barely keep up with it all.

It’s never a good idea to criticize your boss in public. It’s an even worse idea to talk about him or her to the media. If you do, don’t be surprised if you get fired. You were asking for it.

Yet, they wanted us to trust them and invest in their future as though it had already happened. … At the end of the day, you can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

Even though we’ve lost a great coach and teacher with John Wooden’s death, he left a legacy that that is especially relevant today: his virtuous leadership style.

In my answer to Michael’s previous question, I emphasized the formal ways in which we communicate our values at Thomas Nelson. I talked about hiring practices, new employee orientation, rewards and recognition, and annual reviews. All of these are important, but, as I suggested at the end of the post, they are probably not the most important.

“How do you or other leaders in your organization communicate the ‘core values’?” Unless values become behaviors, you only have a set of platitudes. Unfortunately, these platitudes will ultimately create cynicism when smart people realize that your behavior doesn’t line up with your words. At Thomas Nelson we rely on six methods to communicate our values.

At Thomas Nelson, our core ideology is comprised of four key elements. These are distinguishable but inseparable. It’s a little bit like talking about an orange. You can distinguish its shape, its color, its size, and its smell and taste. However, you can’t do away with any of these attributes and still have an orange. So it is with your organization’s core ideology.

What he did have was a strong sense of who he was, and a caring spirit about him that made me want to follow him, listen to him, be in his space as much as possible. … For two reasons: First, it was abundantly clear in our conversations that he cared about me, and second, he lived the kind of life that I wanted to live.

Where do the great ideas come from in your organization? The short answer is anywhere. They can come from at least four sources. More important, there are specific things you can do to ensure your organization nurtures and harvest’s the best ideas.