George Lucas created the Star Wars franchise, one of the highest-grossing entertainment franchises ever. When he sold it to Disney in 2012, they paid over $4 Billion for it. George Lucas also created Jar Jar Binks. Not only did he create the character, but in April 2019, he named Jar Jar Binks his favorite Star…
If you’ve led your agency for any length of time, you’ve experienced some ups and downs. For example, here’s an email I got from an agency owner this week: I thought the deal would catapult us into a new level of stability. I had verbal commitments and contracts out. In the meantime, we were working…
Contented: satisfaction with one’s possessions, status, or situation. Merriam-Webster Part of being grounded is knowing that I have what I need at this moment, and when challenges or opportunities arise, I can meet them with confidence. Another word for that is contentment. When I live from a place of contentment, it’s harder for people to…
I was listening to The Rich Roll podcast with Michael Gervais as a guest, and I was blown away by this brief story that Michael tells about practice. (Click the image below to watch it yourself.) Michael Gervais was talking to a singer he admired and said, “You are an amazing singer, I wish I…
I was recently watching high school wrestling, and I got really curious about how different coaches worked with their wrestlers. One coach was very directive. While the match was in progress, he’d shout instructions to his wrestlers. “Break his grip! Get your belly off the mat! Go for his leg!” Then, after each match, he’d…
If you want to be influential and lead others, there is one thing you can do that will have an outsized impact on your leadership. Get a good night’s sleep. Before you sign up for an expensive leadership development program or read another book about leadership, pay attention to the basics. Things like sleep, nutrition,…
One of my clients is planning to spend time thinking about her plans and creating a forecast for next year, and she asked me if there were any questions she should think through to prepare for that exercise. Here’s what I sent her: But I know you are all a lot of smart business leaders,…
In human affairs, the distance between the leaders and the average is a constant. If leadership performance is high, the average will go up. The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise one leader’s performance than to raise the performance of a whole mass. ~ Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive Leaders I…
The effective executive knows that to get strength, one has to put up with weaknesses. ~ Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive Kicking off an assignment with a new client, I casually ask, “Tell me about your team…” What comes back is a string of complaints. “They rarely come to a meeting prepared; I don’t…
Founders of creative service firms and other agencies have built a platform that’s created leverage for them. They have a team. They’re leading an organization from a positional sense. However, the team doesn’t always do what they expect, and sometimes team members act in puzzling ways that contradict the direction they have set. To gain…