Is leadership something we are born with and possess innately or is it a capacity we learn and develop later on in life? To address this age-old question, we need to agree on what we mean by leadersh…
Of course I am not better than you—nor are you better than me. Comparing people’s qualities is like questioning whether Einstein is better than Mozart or whether Bill Gates is better than the Dalai La…
So many people, Ray Dalio says, often make bad decisions because they’re absolutely sure they’re right. Successful people, Dalio says—and Dalio is a super successful billionaire, hedge fund manager, t…
We’re all facing the hard reality that COVID-19 and its domino effect of hardships will be with us for a while. When the pandemic first began, despite our worries and fears, there was some novelty in…
I asked the only woman to have made it to the senior ranks of a leading bank (that today scores high on diversity and inclusion) to what she attributed her success. “I was fortunate,” she said. “The bank hired a coach to teach me how to act and react like…
Of the approximately 35,000 choices we make every day, many of them impact other people. Of course, it’s inevitable that over the course of a few days or weeks, we are going to mess up with these choi…
Recently I mentioned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in 1995 in South Africa. It was an exercise in restorative rather than retributive justice. Its purpose wasn’t to punish anyone…
“Things only get better when we get better,” said Tony Robbins on Instagram recently. Tony Robbins is correct. We tend to depersonalize the need for change and put the focus on things that have to get…
When people act up, whether it’s a child throwing a tantrum or an entire generation of people protesting, the cause is almost always a deeply felt pain that has been triggered. In acting up, however,…
My sadness about what is happening in America at the moment is deep and complex, as I’m sure yours is. I’m sad about the looting, the chaos, and the suffering it has caused. I’m sad—very sad—about the…
To navigate the COVID-19 crisis and global lockdown and to help our people through it, we have had to draw on new and deeper resources within us and practice leadership skills we were never taught. No…
In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell shares the story of the Getty museum’s kouros statue, a sixth century BC sculpture purchased in the early 1980s for $10 million (which would be just shy of $26 mil…
Among the hardest decisions business leaders must make is how to balance the conflicting interests of their companies’ stakeholders. For example, it may be in shareholders’ interests to radically redu…
