Tag: Barry Cohen
Care, Connect, Contribute
In 1938, Sir Nicholas Winton started rescuing children from certain death in the Nazi concentration camps. He singlehandedly brought 669 children from Czechoslovakia to Britain and connected them with families there. Most of their families perished in Auschwitz. He never told a soul about his efforts and kept it a secret for 50 years until his wife found a notebook with the names and pictures of all the children he had saved. Sir Winton cared Read More
2020 World Culture Vision
The TV show “Downton Abbey” demonstrates as well as anything I have ever read or seen how an all-pervasive cultural code can produce strange and incomprehensible behaviors in people. People will do abnormal things to look “normal” by complying with the unwritten rules of the game.
Just as financial reports need to be audited, so also do the norms and values of the culture.
Three Types of Trust
I’ve been married to the same woman for 46 years, and I can say unequivocally that I totally trust her. I trust her to do the right thing, I trust her to not throw me the under the bus (even though I have given her many opportunities), and I trust her to stand up for people in need of special help. When she makes a statement, I know it is based on sound research; she Read More
Community and Connection
Walking onto the campus of Interlochen Arts Academy is like walking into a different world. For one, there is as much artistic genius per square foot as there is mathematical genius at MIT. There is also a richness of diversity. In a typical summer, 2,500 kids from all over the world and practically every state attend the camp for four to eight weeks of intense study in music, drama, creative writing, dance, and/or visual arts. Read More
Ethical Leadership
One more time. In 1987, Barry Cohen and I wrote the book Ethical Leadership. We published the first version of the book when greed was still in its relative infancy and millionaires (much less billionaires) were still relatively rare. It thus preceded the economic boom of the 1990s, a decade in which market values escalated to what was then outrageous levels. In finance, Black Monday refers to Monday, October 19, 1987, when stock markets around the Read More
Leadership Myths and Realities
Over 25 years ago, Barry Cohen and I published a book titled Leadership Myths and Realities. Since that time we have held a variety of senior leadership positions and have continued to study the Art and Science of Leadership. This post will review the 10 myths and realities we wrote about in the late 80s, discuss their current relevance, and suggest any new myths and realities that have emerged. To be clear, myths usually contain some degree Read More