I attended the Art of Leadership Conference awhile back, but much of what was discussed by Tom Rath, author of the best seller Strengths Finder 2.0 and head of Gallup, has grown on me over time. He championed the importance of focusing on your and team members’ strengths (or developing strengths), not weaknesses.
Admittedly Strengths Finder [...]

My friend in Lagos, Nigeria, broke the news of Whitney Houston’s death to me at 8:16 p.m. EST. I received her message one hour after the Beverly Hills police pronounced Houston dead on February 11, 2012, and only 15 minutes after the Associated Press sent out its first tweet.
What came next was a flood of [...]

As public relations professionals, we like to consider ourselves masters of language. Communication is our bread and butter and the written word is often our choice method of connecting with an audience. From news releases, to speeches, to blog posts, storytelling is among our greatest strengths. But what about story-showing?
I recently watched an interesting TED [...]

I have recently watched with more than casual interest the public relations controversies swirling around News Corporation and, most recently, the Susan G. Komen Foundation. I have former colleagues, now friends, in the top communications jobs at both organizations and have been astonished to hear how similarly the situations evolved. Both scenarios were not dissimilar [...]

In all the noise and commotion of the recent Susan G. Komen debacle, it was not difficult to point out what Komen did wrong.
Within the scandal, something was done so very, very right, that it went almost unnoticed. What Planned Parenthood did, and did not do, in communicating with media and followers of the [...]

I recently read a great book on Abraham Lincoln and it was an excellent illustration of the skills required by leaders in building senior teams for multi-faceted organizations. President Lincoln has been studied in great depth and in this book, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin tells how Lincoln built his first Cabinet in 1861 [...]