How Do Leaders Handle Breakdowns?

In your personal or professional life, breakdowns occur.  When I say breakdowns, it includes problems, disruptions, challenges, chaos, misfortune, disaster, etc.  When it comes to business, in many cases, the larger the goal the larger the breakdown.  If you’re a leader, the way you handle those problems can

What Happens When Leadership Does Not Create a Corporate Culture?

I have worked as an executive and advisor to CEOs in variousindustries.  In either capacity, I have noticed a pattern.  One pattern is that high performing companies have a culture of high accountability.  Low performing organizations tend to have toxic cultures and confusion.  Nevertheless, effective leaders can always

What Is Leadership?

Perhaps the shortest and easiest answer to “what is leadership?” is: there is no leadership.  At least there is no such thing as the archetypal leader who, as the dictionary says, “is the action of leading a group of people or an organization”.  Or it is said to be “a state or position of being the leader”.  What’s odd about the definitions is they are both

What Does Your Intimate Life Have to Do with Your Professional Life?

On the surface, it would seem your professional and intimate lives are worlds apart.  However, when you peel back the layers, you find patterns that are mirrored in both.  For example, whatever upsets you in your personal life will upset you in the workplace, even if you are taught to suppress it at work.  Eventually those upsets will

Here’s Why Leadership Books Will Never Make You a Great Leader

If you want to read about leadership, go into any bookstore.  Or search the Internet.  You’ll find millions of entries online and thousands of copies in bookstores.  And every book has the answer. They tell you to be a situational leader, primal leader, emotionally intelligent leader, servant leader and the list goes on.  Yet, many, many people still struggle with being an effective leader.  And even more people are

Here’s Why Your Words Have No Power

When you learn your first language, it is to ensure you are able to communicate with others.  Before you learn a language, you cry to be fed or to have your diaper changed.  Language allows you to speak instead of cry.  Once language is acquired, most people use it to communicate what they want or don’t want.  Therefore, it is a tool.  However, it is one of the most

Are Leaders Really Needed in Organizations?

Leadership.  Is it really essential to have leaders in an organization?  For the past few decades, there have been companies that have eliminated titles.  There are no CEOs, presidents or managers.  In some cases, there are no individual owners.  The employees own the company.  In today’s business model, some call it a

Great Leaders Don’t Tell You What to Do

In many cases, people become managers because they solve problems better than others.  And problems solvers can be rather proud about telling others about how to implement solutions they have discovered.  While being a problem solver may be a normal path to management, it is a trap.  For those managers who move to senior management, being the best problem solver can become

Here’s Why You Are Inadvertently a Huge Trump Supporter

Perhaps there has never been such disdain for a president of the US as there has been for President Trump.  While the majority of the US population voted for his opponent, Hilary Clinton, the electorate votes made Trump the winner.  Therefore, more than half of the US citizens opposed President Trump from the beginning.  Yet, in their desire to invalidate him, they will ensure he

Here’s Why Knowledge Transfer from One Generation to the Next Is Rarely Effective

Knowledge transfer is critical for the survival of mankind.  However, as each generation eliminates threats, the knowledge that is transferred has to account for that.  In previous articles, I wrote about the unintentional knowledge transfer that sabotages the best efforts of any person or society.  That happens because people still have the mindset that was necessary when the threat existed.  In this article, I will outline one of the most

Can You Unlearn the Addictive Behaviors You Learned?

Everyone with a healthy brain is influenced by their environment.  Everything in your environment that you see, hear and touch is recorded in your brain.  Those recordings become part of your memory and shape what you think, say and do.  Therefore, it’s imperative to expose your brain to that which makes you smarter and more effective.  Except, in the human paradigm, you unknowingly

Interview with Ted Santos: Corporate consultant motivational speaker

Ted Santos: Corporate consultant motivational speaker: Ted Santos advises executive teams to create disruptive strategies. He then works side by side with key personnel to transform corporate culture in a way it supports those disruptive strategies. Through his work with midsize to large corporations, businesses have created quantum leaps in top line growth. He helps them identify and exploit untapped markets …

Are You Passing Your Addictive Behaviors to the Next Generation?

In the past, I wrote an article about second chances.  In the article, I talked about the need to coach, guide or train people before you give them a second chance.  Otherwise, they will most likely repeat the same mistake.  They may repeat the same mistake because they may have retained the same mindset they had for the first chance.  This first chance mindset is not only possessed by the individual it is

In the Words of Yoda: The Counterintuitive Path Take, If You Wish, From Breakdown to Breakthrough Go You Will

The way is the problem you want.  The problem is the way.  To avoid the problem is to avoid the way.  In other words, problems are not theproblem.  Believing problems are problems is the beginning of your problems.  It is not chaos or problems that are problems.  It is how you think about them.  And it is how you think about

Nope, It’s Definitely Not Persistence That Will Get You to the Championship

Last week I talked about how inherited conversations cancreate mental barriers.  Those mental barriers create a mindset that can derail personal or professional aspirations.  Today I would like to use myself as an example of what happens when the mental barriers are

Do You Believe Persistence Creates Success?

For centuries, people have chanted that the most persistent person wins the prize.  In this article, I am going to challenge that belief.  I assert that it is not persistence that makes the difference.  It is the stripping away of beliefs that allows an individual to keep going.  While I understand that people in the stands watching a sporting event have opinions about successful athletes.  On the field, there is something happening that the fans

Would You Choose Eudaimonia Over Happiness?

Eudaimonia is a word from ancient Greece.  People like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others taught it in Greece.  (Where they learned it is another article.)  In English, it is often misinterpreted as happiness.  However, the Greeks had no obsession with happiness.  They were focused on fulfillment.  Furthermore, they sought fulfillment through

Why Most People Rarely Learn Anything New

The human brain has an enormous capacity to learn.  The paradox is it is filled with blindspots that limit learning capacity.  For the most part, you only think the way you were taught to think.  In effect, the way you do things is the way you do everything.  The way you do things is shaped by the way you see things.  The way you see things is shaped by the way you think or your thought process.  Your thought process is an amalgamation of your brain’s syntax.  Your environment shapes your syntax.  And your environment gives you the facts of life.  Unlearning the learned facts is

Should You Give People a Second Chance?

People talk about second chances in various ways.  They say: “if I knew then what I know now.”  “If I had an opportunity to do things over.”  “Please give me a second chance.”  “Can we start over?”  The list goes on.  Most people actually believe they learn from their mistakes.  However, when you look closely, you see

What Happens When We Disagree?

Disagreement is part of the human paradigm.  The human paradigm is like nature.  In nature, there are plants that sustain life and there are plants that destroy life for humans.  If you have not been trained to eat healthy plants in nature, you can easily eat a plant that will poison you.  And there are plants that can help and hurt your body, depending on the amount administered.  Principally speaking, the same happens with relationships from elements in the human paradigm.

For example, disagreement is thought to be

Does the Board of Directors Affect Corporate Culture?

What is the role of the board of directors?  Some say it is to protect the shareholders’ value.  In other words, they are there to ensure the money of investors continues to grow.  Others say the board is there to oversee the CEO and make sure he or she constantly and profitably grows the business.  Perhaps the board is there to ensure all

Is Coaching Worth the Investment?

In a world where time is money, managers need people who can take action immediately.  They search for employees who already have the skills, competency and capability to work with little supervision.  Combined with ever changing businesses and technology, companies claim there is no time to train and coach people effectively.  Instead they chant do it now!   

However, the idea of do it faster, smarter, and better is in

How Prepared Is Your Board for Cyberspace?

In the wake of the recent Equifax debacle, boards of directors are rethinking their cyber security readiness.  Equifax was warned about the weaknesses in their cyber security and did nothing.  When they did discover it was breached, they waited months to inform the public.  As time went on, it appeared they were focused on covering their butts.  The result is 143 million people have had

What Will You Leave Behind?

As part of my entrepreneurial growth, I created meaningful relationships with CEOs. Some became clients.  Others were sounding boards for my clients and myself.  Through those relationships, I have been able to explore and transform leadership at its highest level.  In that mix of CEOs, some were running companies, while others were retired. One of the amazing conversations with retired CEOs of Fortune 500s is their desire to contribute.  Like all people who contribute, they seek some level of self-interest.  That self-interest can be summed up in one word

You Can’t Go Back

Yesterday is gone.  No matter what you do January 1st, 2001 will not come back.  It doesn’t exist and neither does tomorrow.  To lament over actions you took or didn’t take will not change what actually happened in the past.  Yet, so many people live with regrets that create emotional paralysis.  They live with the philosophy of ‘if I could have, should have, wish I had, etc.’.  To my knowledge, no one has been given the