So it happens, that unthinkable thing. A phone call or an unanticipated Friday meeting, pick your poison. Something happens that will change your life forever, or at the very least, place you on a different path. After the shock wears off a little bit, the anger sets in for a long stay and you stop trying to bargain your way out of your new, unwanted reality. Then and only then, you ask yourself and every other person who will listen, “How am I going to survive this?”

Well, you have come to the right place because I, hands down, know how to survive. I never aimed to become a member of the uber-resilience club, but here I am anyway, a charter member. And I want you to know what I have learned, so that when your phone call comes, and it will one day if it hasn’t already, you will know that you can survive.

You see, I woke up one morning to learn my only child, a 21-year-old son, had died when a bass boat collided with a jet ski. Just like that. And thus I was on my way to figuring out if I would live or die.

So, 12 years later, here are my 5 insights for surviving anything. Read More

My research passion for the last ten years has been in the area of top team behavior, specifically how the most senior executives in a company work together and how that level of effectiveness correlates with business performance metrics, over time. Not surprisingly, the linkages are proving to be tight and significant. As you will see on this blog over the coming months, some of the best social scientists in the world have been asking the same questions and running their own experiments. Deloitte’s CIO Journal will get the disscussion going for us, with this article that originally appeared in Deloitte’s CIO Journal in 2012, reposted here with permission:

The Financial Impact of Executive Leadership

Most businesses recognize the role their senior leadership teams play in driving financial performance. Yet measuring the direct impact of company leadership on outcomes such as corporate earnings or equity value has proven difficult for researchers.

Deloitte spent six months (August 2011 to January 2012) studying investment analysts’ perception of the relationship between corporate leadership and performance.

“We wanted to find a quantitative metric for the value of leadership,” says Adam Canwell, a human capital consulting partner with Deloitte Australia. “We set out to understand the impact of leadership on long-term equity value, its relative importance compared with other aspects of company performance, and the size of the potential increase or decrease in value that it can deliver.”

Through interviews and surveys with 445 investment analysts, Deloitte found they routinely factor the quality of a company’s senior leadership team into their valuations, and that effective senior leadership can add 15 percent to a company’s value. (For the specific leadership capabilities investment analysts seek in corporate executives, see “CIO Leadership: The Capabilities Investment Analysts Value”) Read More

I’m frequently asked about the work we do to help corporate Boards become more integrated. How do we get a room full of very successful, outspoken and highly polarized Board members to govern together? Do we build a Board as we might an executive team? Do we coach outside directors as we would those from the inside?

We have developed a reputation over the years for gaining the trust and confidence of very senior leaders, leaders who sit on many Boards. These very busy, brilliant business people don’t suffer fools easily, so it is always with a great sense of privilege   that we find them choosing to buy into our belief that the best Boards have members who are fiercely collaborative. They will surely continue to compete in their own markets, but they recognize the value of adding great teamwork to their leadership repertoire. We have found that these men and women share a deep desire that the entire Board experiences success and that along with that success the business they govern will thrive and prosper.

So what happens that causes a Board member to set aside his or her highly energized agenda to focus on what will most help others become comfortable and feel heard? The answer to this question is complex but the principles are fairly straightforward. So we thought we would start a discussion about effective Board member integration by sharing the underlying beliefs that shape our work. These principles and some practices are chronicled here and all we ask is that you take a look and let us know what you think. Read More

I was sitting in a meeting with a top leadership team that I was working with to introduce a new go-to-market strategy and operating model. Having chosen to build it on a platform of Customer Intimacy, they had set up three teams staffed by high-potentials – their best and brightest – to come back with innovative ways to use Customer Intimacy to drive competitive advantage in their lines of business. The thinking was that forming these teams would create high levels of engagement among the people they saw as the best internal candidates to move onto the executive team and give the top team an opportunity to further assess them in action.

There was a real buzz in the air. You could clearly tell that the teams were excited to get the opportunity to show their progress. As the meeting went on, with the teams presenting some really innovative ideas, I listened to the members of the top team offer feedback – feedback that took the form of comments like:

On a break, I asked one of the high-potentials what he thought about how it was going. He responded that he saw some real breakthrough ideas being presented by the teams. I told him that I did, too. Then he lamented that nothing would come of it. “I don’t know why they keep asking us to do stuff like this. They give it lip service, but they always shoot everything down. It’s like they don’t believe that anyone but them has ever had a good idea. I wish they would just number the excuses and use shorthand. Nope… number 3.”

Thomas Bata, the founder of Bata Shoe, was fond of telling the story of how he sent two salesmen to explore market potential in Africa. One cabled back to the home office: “No one here wears shoes. No potential.” The second salesman cabled: “Everyone here is barefoot. Infinite potential.”Bata believed in that potential long before any of his much larger Western competitors and went on to create the largest shoe company in the world, with over 30,000 employees at production facilities in more than 30 countries and, according to their web site, services more than a million customers a day through 5,000 international retail locations. Read More