The one thing that will keep you from settling is courage. This is the only thing that gives life to the dream once the initial magic wears off. In my experience, there are six ways to find the courage you need to swim against the tide and stand for wow.

Our interaction with the Web and the expectations it creates have shaped what we expect from our leaders. Therefore, if leaders are going to be effective with the current generation of Internet-savvy followers, they must adapt their leadership style. I call this Leadership 2.0.

Saturday night, Gail and I went to the Nashville Symphony with our daughter, Mary, and her husband, Chris. Mary had bought tickets for Gail’s birthday. It was a magnificent evening. Toward the end of the evening, it occurred to me that conducting and leading have a lot in common.

As I got up this morning, I realized how very similar worry and imagination
really are. Both of them involve visualizing the future. In a sense, worry is
simply an unproductive use of imagination.

There are numerous things you have zero control over. You can’t control the weather, the economy, or the actions of others. Many of us spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about these things. It’s a complete waste of time. Worry does nothing to change them. It only makes us miserable. It also turns us into victims.

Everything you say has an effect. Even the things you don’t say—your attitude, your facial expressions, and your body language. All. Have. An. Effect.

Rather than reviewing one book this week, I thought I would share my favorite business books. I get asked this question regularly, most recently when I was lecturing at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Business School earlier this week.

As long as you have to have meetings, you might as well do them well. Before you plan another meeting (and suffer the rest of us to sit through them), make a commitment to do the following:

Last week, in honor of our new dress code, I wore jeans every single day. I loved how much more productive I felt. I don’t know if it was the jeans per say or just the change of pace. Regardless, I like it.

But I am noticing that that a new model of leadership is taking root in many organizations, including our own here at Thomas Nelson. In this model, the leader’s primary role is to initiate conversations that bring out the best thinking of the tribe and direct those conversations toward a positive outcome.

In the Western literary tradition, the silver bullet was the only weapon that could destroy certain types of monsters. As a result, it became a metaphor for a singular solution that solves a giant problem.

You don’t have to make every experience in life a WOW. If everything is a WOW, then pretty soon, nothing is a WOW. But you must be able to identify which experiences you want to make a WOW, and then have a process—or a “technology”—for creating that outcome. I call this “the how of WOW.” It involves asking five questions.

The most important thing you can do as a leader is to keep your heart open.

…Maintaining an open heart—pumping possibility through your organization—is the most important thing you can do as a leader.

Every stream has a current. Throw a twig or a piece of paper into the water, and it will drift with the current. This is natural. It is simply the way things work. Organizations are similar to streams. They too have a flow.

Inspirational leaders set the pace. Inspirational leaders believe in the future.

This is probably the most important question you could ever ask. The answer will determine how fast you advance in your career and, more importantly, how happy you are in your job. Many of us have had to figure it out the hard way—by trial and error.

The secret to staying on top of your personal and professional life is to schedule regular times for review and reflection. You need to assess where you’ve come from and where you are going.

In his book, Getting Things Done he writes: If you’re like me and most people, no matter how good your intentions may be, you’re going to have the world come at you faster than you can keep up…. We book ourselves in back to back meetings all day, go to after-hours events and generate ideas and commitments we need to deal with, and get embroiled in engagements and projects that have the potential to spin our creative intelligence into cosmic orbits…. If the item requires me to take action, I can:  Do it if it takes less than two minutes or add it to my Outlook task list to do later;Defer it by actually scheduling a time on my calendar to deal with it; orDelegate it to someone else for action and enter it into my Outlook task list using the “@WaitingFor” category.

One key to leadership is the willingness to stand up and take responsibility for your mistakes. Good leaders do this even if they are guilty of 10% of the accusation or problem.

I spend more hours in meetings than out. Perhaps you do, too. Over the years, I have cataloged a list of annoying meeting behaviors or just “AMBs” for short. None of these by themselves are that bothersome. But when you combine three or four of them in the same meeting, it can test the patience of Job.

The ability to sell an idea or project to your boss is critical to your success. If you can’t get your boss’s approval when you need it, you are not going to go very far in your career.