The Battle of Trafalgar was really the zenith of the fascinating age of fighting sail.  Admiral Viscount Lord Horatio Nelson completed one of his most astonishing annihilations of his French and Spanish adversaries, and was killed in the process. What Orrin Woodward and I wrote in Launching a Leadership Revolution about Nelson’s victory at…

            Everyone should be interested in leadership, because everyone will be called upon to lead sooner or later.  What surprises most people, is just how often they are thrust into a situation of leadership.  This may occur in small ways or big ways, or a thousand variations in between.  But rest…

           Leaders assault the status quo, and somehow just can’t stand to leave things the way they find them.  For true leaders, this comes from a deep sense of hunger that burns inside.  Often this yearning is extremely costly to the individual pushing for the change.    What might have been a…

There are a preponderance of leadership examples to be taken from the annals of military conflict.  These are both interesting and instructional.  Perhaps the reason so many demonstrations of the principles of leadership are available from battles and wars is true leadership becomes most visible at times of extreme circumstances.  War is as extreme as…

                 Walt Disney the school boy was not a good student.  He would just as soon doodle and draw cartoons in class as learn something.  But, like most leaders, he was a big reader and a hard worker; holding down several odd jobs at once while still young.  His earliest…

One of the key premises in the art of leadership is that one person can make a difference. In a complicated world, with forces for change coming at us from seemingly all directions, it is easy to feel small and incapable.  It is easy to shrug off our highest aspirations and think, “What’s the use?” …

  The name Benjamin Franklin is so familiar it is almost a cliché.  School children are introduced to him as the gray haired man flying a kite in a thunderstorm, or as the contemplative elder statesman sitting in the Pennsylvania State House and advising upon the drafting of the Declaration of Independence or the United…