Can You “Teach” How to Grow A Company?

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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 […]

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What Can You Do to Build a Fully Sighted Organization?

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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