Leadership Development

Leadership Development

6 Tips for Working with Keynote Speakers

Keynote speakers draw people to events and have a massive impact on the overall energy and experience of attendees. Keynote speakers are also an investment, and there are ways to maximize the impact of your speakers at an event. Through managing Zingerman’s keynotes at hundreds of events over the last decade, I have seen my […]

Leadership Development

More Life Lessons from Line Cooking

Many people, wanting to live their lives in more interesting ways, will decide to take the occasional cooking lesson here and there, all the while continuing to do whatever it is they do for a “living.” I went in the other direction. I started cooking for a living, and in the process, ended up with […]

Leadership Development

Life Lessons I Learned from Food and Cooking

There is nothing I can think of in the early years of my existence back in suburban Chicago that would have led me, or anyone else for that matter, to believe that the story of my life would later be transformed by a deep connection to food and cooking. We ate supper together more often […]

Leadership Development

Leadership Lessons From 2020

Remember March 2020?  What were you doing a year ago–in the “before” time? Personally, I was spending a lot of time on the phone.  We were interviewing prospects for a newly available position as a ZingTrain Trainer. Someone who could help pick up the load at the end of July when I would be stepping […]

Leadership Development

“Working Through Hard Times: Life and Leadership Learnings from 2020”

At the end of this week, I have a new pamphlet coming out. Like the pandemic, it wasn’t something I’d planned for. While the idea for the previous pamphlet—“Humility: A Humble, Anarchistic, Inquiry”—had been in the works for over a year, the idea for this one only came into my head a couple months ago. […]

Leadership Development

Why We Want to Teach Everyone Here to Lead

There’s a musician whose work I like who records under the moniker “honey the witch.” In her piece “when the world ends,” she sings the line, “what a strange time it is to be alive.” That’s an understatement if I ever heard one. But if strengths lead to weaknesses—and weaknesses, in turn, can later courteously […]

Leadership Development

Another Look at Servant Leadership

One of the most common themes of the last six months is how different things are going to be after the pandemic. I keep hearing how we need new thinking to get out of the current situation. But the interesting thing to me is that there’s more than enough insightful old thinking already out there to help […]

Leadership Development

Why The Way We Talk to Ourselves Matters So Much

Breathe.That’s most certainly a suggestion, not an order. If you’re game, go for it again. Breathe. Many mornings, I write that word when I’m journaling. Sometimes I might write it every few lines as I’m getting going. Each time I write it, I take a deep, slow breath (as I did just now). Mindful breathing won’t fix […]

Leadership Development

Leading Every Day with Dignity

There have been a lot of mentions in the news of late about badly behaved anarchists, sinisterly dressed in black, throwing rocks and causing riots. I usually just ignore stuff like this in the news—it’s just old biases continuing to be bandied about as they have since Emma Goldman started public speaking. The other day […]

Leadership Development

Leaders Are Weeders, Part II

In Part I of this post, I wrote a bunch about how I got going on the idea of Leaders as Weeders. This morning, just to get myself in the mood, I did ten minutes of weeding while I was on the phone with my friend Aisling from Fumbally Café in Dublin, just before I started my morning […]

Leadership Development

Leaders Are Weeders, Part I

World class business coach, writer, speaker, and all around good guy Verne Harnish regularly reminds anyone who will listen that, “Leaders are Readers.” I agree. My life, as you likely know, revolves around books. Today, though, I want to expand on Verne’s wise statement with a bit of wordplay and some real life lessons that have […]

Leadership Development

3 Tools to Shift from a Fixed Mindset to a Growth Mindset

When I was 22, I was engaged to be married.  My fiancé called the wedding off two months before ‘the big day’… invitations were printed and more.  When lamenting to my therapist, I’ve never failed at anything in my life!, he astutely pointed out, If you get what you need out of this relationship, how […]