Recent events have returned the notion of accountability to our attention. While we’d like to think that leaders of character never stray very far from always remembering the need to be accountable, the reality seems to be that there is a wax/wane cycle like the moon. But the combination of the economic crisis of the [...]
It was late in the spring of 1981 when the owner of a small construction company that worked on highway construction jobs walked into a federal courthouse to face a federal grand jury that was looking into whether bid rigging had occurred on recent highway contracts in the area. The man was understandably nervous. He [...]
A staff writer at the Washington Post, Karen DeYoung, wrote a story in late November about an initial meeting between President-elect Obama and Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We write here not to make a political comment about either of these individuals, but to praise the meeting methodology reported [...]
What Can We Do To Wake Them Up? One of our colleagues has a Friday morning ritual that he keeps as many Fridays as he can, meeting a group of friends at a Starbucks location for an hour of conversation that usually has a point. The friends all work in product development for a large [...]
I found myself recalling a morning a few years ago when one of my employees, a woman, walked into my office and asked me a rather direct question about a new vice-president in our company’s marketing organization. “Is she just fluffy?” I waited to take in all that the woman might mean by that word [...]
