This post was first published in Harvard Business Review. In the movie Remember the Titans, Coach Herman Boone takes his high school football team to the battleground of Gettysburg. Having inherited a fractured and divided squad, Coach Boone implores the players to “take a lesson from the dead. If we don’t come together, right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed, just like they were.” Coach Boone then establishes the primacy ... Continue Reading »
Archives for May 2015
The value you create: Your raison d’être
This post was first published by SmartBrief. Value creation is the raison d’être of any business entity. How do you accurately assess the value of a company? What dimensions are the most important for determining company value? How do you calculate a company’s long-term prospects for success? Many analysts use a broad definition of value creation, and they include in it the calculation financial factors (e.g. financial statement analysis, ... Continue Reading »
How to Use Optimism to Defeat Adversity
This post was first published in Forbes. I asked executives, in a series of interviews, about the most difficult professional situations they had faced as leaders. One chief executive discussed the effect of 9/11 on the operation of his airline company. Another told of taking his company into bankruptcy. A former CEO reviewed how his company’s stock price had plunged from a high of $48 dollars to mere pennies in less than a year. Other ... Continue Reading »