The Harvard Business Review article, “Look to Military History for Lessons in Crisis Leadership” offers Covid-era leaders advice drawn from throughout military history. Much of the advice, though, needs more nuance and context to be fully applicable to modern leaders.

Slogans capture and channel our dreams. Iteration, adaptation, and the hard work of implementation make them real. Pausing to ask “And then what?” isn’t an admission of defeat. It’s a sign of wisdom and maturity, a willingness to at least start trying to think more deeply about complex and troubling problems.

Change is in the air. As we enter mid-2020, organizations and populations everywhere are grappling with a series of powerful social, economic and political shocks. There has never been safety in clinging to the status quo, but it is even less of an option now.

It’s said that quitters never win and winners never quit, but is this true? For highly motivated people, the drive to achieve can be a direct line to accomplishment or into a dead end. The key is the ability to discern when our goals no longer suit us. Ironically, this can be hardest for the best-motivated.

The Covid-19 crisis continues to throw up fascinating contrasts in leadership and communication styles. This post looks at two examples of how senior leaders chose to handle the question of how and if to display their inner thoughts during a crisis--specifically, while laying off employees--and the pros and cons of each.

You’ve probably been told to “lead from where you are” and that followership is its own form of leadership. Even senior leaders, though, are routinely caught between what they want to do and what their bosses and people want. This post looks at how good leading and good following are largely the same thing.

In the two previous posts in this series, we’ve looked at examples of communicating under pressure drawn from the news. This time has been a good laboratory for communications beause the Covid-19 pandemic has created a universal sense of urgency.

To close, we’ll look too at a framework focusing on the power of purpose-driven communication during crisis and close with some general guidelines learned from the examples in Part 1 and Part 2.

Communicating under pressure is more an art than a science, and it’s easy to do it in a way which undermines confidence in the message and the messenger. This post focuses on lessons from Carnival Cruise Lines’ harsh collision with Businessweek.

n a crisis, others’ perceptions of our actions is often based on emotional or intuitive factors which are dramatically different than our reading of the situation. How we handle this tension can make the difference between an incident being minor or becoming a major stain on our reputations. Effective response starts with owning your message.