leader

Dear [insert business name], what’s your promise?

You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words.

You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people.

Your employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors.

You question the adoption of disruptive technology by your internal champions yet you’ve not tried to find the value for yourself.

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Four Must Have Skills For Tomorrow’s Leaders

Every now and then it is important to take a personal inventory of your skills and abilities. I don’t mean an end of the year surface-level, quick, “hey, I’m great” type of thing. I’m talking about an honest, candid evaluation of yourself as a leader. A deep look inside.

Every time I have done this over the years, I also ask myself, “What skills do I need to develop to be more successful in the future?” There are four must have leadership skills on my list this year. They are:

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Ford CEO: 14 Lessons in Leadership & Marketing

Alan Mulally

“We are fighting for the soul of manufacturing. There is no reason we can’t compete with the best in the world.” Ford Motor Company CEO, Alan Mulally

With these words, Alan Mulally, dubbed “Ford’s Comeback Kid” by Fortune magazine, summed up his passion for success and his confidence in the resiliency of American ingenuity even in the worst of economic times.

Alan spoke these words during a charitable dinner, on February 5, 2010, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The dinner was sponsored by a local Ford dealership, L.B. Smith, to benefit “The Second Mile,” a charity that offers a variety of services for at-risk children. About five-hundred people attended the event.

I had the privilege of attending the evening as a guest of the event organizer, fireball Anne D. Gallaher, a dear friend and business colleague, in the company of the great connector, Amy Howell, another dear friend and business colleague – a story of Twitter friends networking in real life, a story deserving of its own blog post at a later time!

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