The title of "Chief Learning Officer" reportedly entered the mainstream in the mid-1990s when Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric, created the role at GE. Since then, the CLO role has become widespread, particularly in the professional services, health care, government, and financial services sectors, according to a 2015 survey. The challe...

Here are seven websites/apps that I started using in 2017 that have proven quite useful and are not yet universally-known. These sites helped me (1) find non-standard airfares, (2) learn a new language, (3) find someone to film an event, (4) reduce my email inbox clutter, (5) create an animated video for my website, (6) see all my travel options between...

The “hacker-hustler” team is a common recipe for co-founders of successful new businesses. The “hacker” is the partner who has the technical skills to build innovative products or services. The “hustler” is the partner who has the marketing and other business skills to grow a valuable enterprise around those technical inno...

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) accomplishments in his first 100 days set a bar against which every subsequent US president has been measured. It is an unfair bar in many ways, as the situation FDR inherited 84 years ago is much different than modern times. It’s also not clear FDR even intended 100 days to be a bar agains...

On January 20, 2017, the city of Washington DC will host the most sacred ceremony in the US democracy - the peaceful transition of power from onepresident to another. The last transition in 2009 attracted an estimated 1.8 million spectators from around the country. At about 3x the population of the city of Washington DC, it was the largest crowd in DC histor...

People often have a hard time understanding what I mean when I say I am a strategy consultant. The best way to describe the job can be by telling the story of one of my consulting projects.

We hear the phrase “think outside the box” a lot. If “the box” is something that is stifling creativity, it sounds like something to avoid. But when “the box” is a framework that smart leaders use to get better results from their teams, it is something to embrace.

In our new book

Twenty-one years ago, student government at the University of Pennsylvania gave me my first formal leadership opportunity as head of the grad student government executive board. For our one-year term, we set three goals that represented one urgent need (the ‘Today Goal’;), one juicy opportunity (the ‘Tomorrow Goal’;), and one imp...

CIOs are typically faced with demands from internal clients that far outstrip their information technology (IT) team's capacity to deliver. Successful CIOs manage their clients as effectively as they manage their own teams. What would IT look like if CIOs implemented these 10 client management practices successful restaurants use to manage their custom...

If you lead a team for long enough, you will likely face a crisis at some point. Internal things that you rely on every day will break some day. External forces that you plan for can go haywire. Whatever form a crisis takes, leading your team successfully out of the crisis gives you a chance to demonstrate your leadership and quick thinking skills. If y...