By the time you become CEO, you will be awesome at running meetings. As a humble bystander, and CEO myself for a couple of decades, I have grown to appreciate the fine art of how to run a meeting well. I have seen billionaire tech CEOs run meetings where people cried their eyes out they were so inspired, and I’ve seen front-line supervisors at an aluminum can manufacturing company run meetings so poorly that people were falling asleep–heads clunking down on the table. [Continue »]

You will reach the top of your field. And others won’t. “How do you know? My field is quite crowded with lots of smart people,” you say. I’m going to share with you a secret to success that will change your mindset and how you spend your time, and will alter your career trajectory to the tippy top of your field. There is a tactic that I learned the hard way when I founded ghSMART at the age of 23 (over 20 years ago). [Continue »]

At ghSMART, we advise board members and CEOs of large companies on their most important leadership issues. One of the skills we train our consultants on is making sure we are consulting on the right questions.

I think of a “right” question as one that matters, by cutting to the heart of an issue, one that will produce an answer that is within the power of the leader to act on, and one that–when answered–is likely to deliver the highest value to the leader in achieving results. [Continue »]