The three obvious answers are yes, no, and maybe. I’ll start with an easy yes. You see, as adjunct faculty, that’s what I do. Yesterday, I finished “teaching” a three-hour course in the entrepreneurship program of the Cox School of Business at SMU. The course’s title was Leading a Growing Company; so literally, I just […]
Strategic Thinking
Harvard’s Elegant Leadership Solution: The Third Stage
Kudos to Harvard for asking a provacative question and delivering an even more compelling answer. The question I reference was posed six years ago by three B-school professors among them Rosabeth Moss Kanter, ” How might the mission of a university change in the 21st century?” The answer is even better than the question, “Throw […]
What Can You Do to Build a Fully Sighted Organization?
A fully sighted company anticipates and “sees” the obvious and the not-so-obvious events, dynamics, and influences that are critical to success versus ignoring it. According to author Margaret Heffernan who wrote Willfull Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril says such blindness happens when there are things we should know, could know, but […]
This Lemon’s a $4.9 Billion Lulu
Lululemon founder Chip Wilson says that the famous Lululemon name had nothing to do with either lemons or any gal named Lulu. The truth is, he sold an earlier company to a group of Asians at a premium in large part because the name of that company had a lot of l’s in it….For […]
Alex Ramsey Challenges You: A Non-IQ Quiz on Logic for Leaders
When asked to prove if something is true or false, people tend to focus on confirming “the rule” as stated, rather than falsifying it. Humm that’s sort of a brain twister, isn’t it? As a result, even supposedly smart people can be quite illogical. That is, according to research psychologist Keith Stanovich, a prof […]
Revisiting Ike
Until yesterday, when I heard David Eisenhower discuss his grandfather’s iconic 1961 farewell speech, I never fully grasped the full wisdom of President Dwight Eisenhower‘s words. David, in his new book Going Home to Glory, a memoir about life with his illustrious grandfather, puts the famous Military-Industrial Complex speech into a broader context, explaining why […]
Chick-fil-A’s CEO Dan Cathy
This August, my LodeStar Universal monthly newsletter was all about the importance of leadership being more attuned to customer service. We tend to give it more lip service than genuine attention. As luck would have it, SMU invited me this week to the Executive Center to hear Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy. I was swamped Wednesday, […]
Leadership as Theatre: General Petraeus
If you don’t define yourself, others will. This often-quoted concept is not one I thought particularly applicable to military officers until I read the May 2010 Vanity Fair article on General David Petraeus, a man I’d never thought too much about. Sitting on an airplane headed to a conference to Ft. Lauderdale, I learned […]
Boone Pickens + Al Gore: Strange Bedfellows
I sometimes feel I shouldn’t be surprised by anything any more. Yet, sometimes, I am. When I heard conservative billionaire T. Boone Pickens describe his new-found friendship with former vice-president Al Gore, I laughed in disbelief along with the rest of the people at my table. Boone was serious. “If Al Gore ever invites you […]
Alex Ramsey’s Thoughts for Finding Solutions with Conflicting Information
How do you find an answer when expert opinion smashes into one another? I was at an NSANT meeting this weekend where two “technology” gurus both spoke. They gave conflicting information about different ways to solve similar problems. Especially where technology is concerned, this happens all the time. It’s not always a bad thing. Nor is […]