Monthly Archives: December 2012

Focus, Discipline, And Grit: Hallmarks of Great Leaders

That successful entrepreneurs have to be gritty is not news. Tenacity and perseverance enable founders to accomplish goals that may take years to achieve. People who start businesses that endure surmount a host of challenges (like wondering how to generate enough cash to keep the doors open and also feed themselves) along the way. Focus, discipline, and tenacity are also hallmarks of great leaders. Little demonstrates a leader’s grittiness more than the ability to effectively navigate a disaster. The movie, Apollo 13, demonstrates crisis management and gritty leadership at their best. Leadership Lessons from Apollo 13 Remember the scenes where disaster after disaster happen? The life-threatening drama begins when Jack Swigert replaces Ken Mattingly as pilot a few days before Apollo 13’s scheduled lift off. Bringing Swigert on disrupts the team’s chemistry, cohesion, and levels of trust. Then, the oxygen…

Self-aware Companies Win… BIG

The Gallup Organization has identified some interesting flaws in modern economic theory. Research indicates that false assumptions about human behavior have generated serious discrepancies between accepted theory and why people buy. The delta between the two makes a difference between companies who win and those who fail, or at best, accept mediocrity. Irrational Decisions… Us? Specifically, classical economic theory says that people look at a set of data (large or small) and make rational decisions. And yet, the Gallup research shows that approximately 70% of economic decision making boils down to emotions. That means only about 30% of the decisions we make line up with the classic economic model. Neruoscientific evidence supports Gallup’s findings. According to How We Decide,the rational brain maxes out at about 7 pieces of data. As a result, using the rational brain when making complex decisions…