Category: Leadership

Leadership Moment: Know Your Environment I recently attended a leadership breakfast with a few notable New England Patriots personalities, and a few comments really stuck out, emphasizing the difference that environments have. Head coach Jerod Mayo noted a difference between the business world, where there might be a wall of text highlighting a companies “core…

Leadership Moment: Veterans/Remembrance Day Today is the eleventh day of the eleventh month. One hundred and six years ago, World War I ended at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, and Armistice Day was born. Observed until World War II, it then became Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth of Nations, while the United States,…

Leadership Moment: Elections Have Consequences With the US election around the corner (tomorrow!), it can be a useful opportunity to practice a skill leaders need: the ability to predict the future, and then evaluate later to see what they can learn from. Organizations are often faced with a choice—sometimes one path, sometimes more—and they have…

Leadership Moment: First Welcome A new restaurant just opened up in our town (Karma Asian Fusion, if you must know, and I’ll unabashedly say that their food is amazing). We decided to drop in, and, after we were seating, our server dropped by. “Hi, I’m Shannon, I’ll be taking care of you this evening. Are…

Leadership Moment: Holiday Time The holiday season has begun in full force, with Tishri, the month of Jewish observances (Rosh Hashanah, October 7th, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah), drawing to a close (wedged in there was Thanksgiving in Canada). On the heels of Tishri we’ll come into a month of mostly US…

A Moment for Memory Before I get into today’s newsletter, I want to take a moment to reflect on the past year. It’s been 366 days since the most horrific day for Jews since the Holocaust: when Hamas terrorists raped and butchered Israelis, killing 1,195 and abducting 251, including a baby. Many of those remain…

Leadership Moment: Tipping Over The Edge A summer camp that hires mostly young adults (high school/college) as its camp counselors has what is probably a standard policy: its counselors do not accept tips (while an understandable choice, not one supported by an argument that the counselors are well-compensated, but that’s a conversation for a different…

Leadership Moment: Lessons from Underdogs The NFL season has resumed, in case you’d managed to miss that. This weekend, from both college and professional leagues, two underdogs lead the way. On Saturday, fifth-ranked Notre Dame took on Northern Illinois University. If you’re not familiar with college football, this is what’s often known as a “cupcake…

Leadership Moment: A Bedroom, or a Dorm Room? A weekend ago, I had the sad joy of dropping our eldest off at college. As we helped put together all of the furnishings and accessories to make it feel like home, the residence advisor (among many others!) kept checking in on us, making sure we were…

Leadership Moment: Throwing Shade at Representation At the recent Blackhat conference, Palo Alto Networks threw shade at women in the cybersecurity industry, as attendees at their party were greeted with this sight: It’s 2024, so you could be excused for wondering if that was an AI hallucination. Nope. Palo Alto was quick to apologize, and…