How To Stand Up To The Strong And Wrong
Male leaders are very often both strong and wrong. And they get away with it. Research from the University of Pennsylvania confirms that men love making decisions. Male brains are wired for action. Male thinking is linear and simplistic. Men are motivated to act with confidence. It establishes dominance and that’s a big drive because […]
How to Turn Anger into an Opportunity
All of us are emotional… thank heaven. Emotional energy motivates us to do great things. Emotion is the horsepower of sacrifice, dedication, innovation and love. Your emotions are nothing to be afraid of… not as long as they are harnessed and directed towards your deeper values that form the guardrails of your actions. But what […]
Can You Hold Yourself to a Higher Standard Than Self-Interest?
Business is bad. I am not referring to financial performance but rather moral performance. Capitalism is amoral. It has no intrinsic moral agenda. You can start an enterprise that makes boatloads of money selling cigarettes or selling treatments for the lung cancer it causes. Actually both these business models are currently thriving. And as far […]
How To Make Positive Emotions Last
What if you put your sincere thanks into this Thanksgiving? It’s not as easy as it sounds. By now we should all know that gratitude is a major driver of personal happiness and feelings of well-being. But the way our brains are designed tends to minimize the benefits of thankfulness. That’s because we constantly turn […]
The One Thing We All Need to be Happy and Successful
Last Friday we concluded the very first Leadership SPA (Smart Power Academy). We had 33 women leaders that range from VP’s of multibillion-dollar companies to founders of growing businesses. We had senior managers and directors and engineers and lawyers. We had women who are at the top of their careers as well as those who […]
7 Things I Learned in Tibet
Debbie and I just returned from almost 3 weeks in Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. Yes, we saw Mount Everest (from a small plane… no more mountain climbing for me). But the most enriching part of the trip was spending every day with a guide who happened to be either a devout Buddhist or Hindu. This allowed […]
Are You Shrinking from Change?
I am traveling and trekking this week in the Kingdom of Happiness, Bhutan. It’s the Switzerland of Asia without the watches or the banks. Bhutan is a tiny mountain kingdom fairyland at the edge of the Himalayas jammed up against Nepal and Tibet. It’s a country of only 700,000 people with a 34-year old king […]
Are You Driven by Goals at the Expense of Compassion?
Increasingly I find it easy to swing on an emotional pendulum from ‘angry-frustration’ to ‘inspiring-hope’ and back again. Something I get angry about are the corporate working conditions that inflame our stress and dampen our performance are much worse now than they were when I started my work 30 years ago (1984). I am angry […]
Women – How to Increase Your Leadership Power
Right now I’m working with a remarkable woman leader. She is the head of Human Resources of North America for a major global company. To sum it up, she is smart, fearless and savvy. But it’s not just what she is but what she does that makes her powerful. If I were to identify the […]
The Six Practices That Drive Bold Moves
The term “bold moves” has become synonymous with radical strategic surgery to create new ways of making money, new innovative products, attracting masses of new customers, and boosting brand energy. Bold moves are exciting and seemingly risky. When they work, we deeply admire them. Zappos’ crazy commitment to delivering happiness was a bold move. So is TOMS […]
