I’ve mentioned Lee Thayer in each of my last four blogs and I’m keeping the string intact; this blog is all about what Dr. Thayer calls the “Five Drivers of Wimpy Behavior.” I pulled these thoughts from Chapter 7 of the new and revised edition of his book, Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing. You can’t be a leader if you act like a wimp; truth be told, I’ve displayed these behaviors from time to time and I’ve seen them in others …

Mitch Goozé spoke to my Vistage key group last Thursday. Mitch is a veteran speaker who has addressed Vistage groups more than 500 times. The title of his talk was “Effective Marketing: How to get it, or tell if you already have it.” The group gave Mitch very high scores on the take home value of his talk. One thing that resonated with every member was Mitch’s admonition that leaders should spend 25% of their time with three groups of …

One of the cable TV channels ran a James Bond marathon over the July 4 holiday weekend. After watching dribs and drabs of a few of them, I decided they highlight two worthwhile lessons for leaders.

There have been a total of 22 James Bond movies to date; all of them (except the comedy version of “Casino Royale” that starred Woody Allen, David Niven and Peter Sellers) follow similar scripts. In virtually every one, an incredibly wealth madman develops or steals …

Words from a column Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal on June 26 have stayed with me all week. Normally, I’m not a fan of Ms. Noonan’s columns, but she struck a chord with this one. In it, she told the story of a conversation Clare Boothe Luce had with John F. Kennedy in 1962. She told him, “A great man is one sentence.” She meant that the impact of some leaders can be summed up in just …