February 22, 2012
Change is hard. Even the most agile of organizations have to slave over it. Above all else, the acceptance, adoption, and embodiment of change collectively involves thoughtful communication…and a boat load of it. The difference between those organiza…
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February 10, 2012
With the advent of countless social media tools to build bridges between people, it’s tempting to count click-throughs and page views to certify that we’ve completed our virtual public square. But building a true online community isn’t quite that…
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February 2, 2012
In our third annual Employee Engagement study, which APCO Worldwide conducts with our friends at Gagen MacDonald, we chose to focus on the influence of social media on employee engagement in the workplace. Maril MacDonald recently wrote about the impor…
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January 25, 2012
In the Let Go and Lead community, we know that, in the last decade, digital and social technologies have reshaped the meaning and expectations of leadership in some fundamental ways. For that reason, we chose to focus our annual Employee Engagement stu…
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January 11, 2012
There’s no “I” in “team.” There’s also no crying in baseball. The latter refers to a scene from the 1992 film, “A League of Their Own,” starring Tom Hanks as a down and out former professional baseball player coaching a team of female…
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January 7, 2012
As an Ohio State football fan, I wanted to relay a recent observation I’ve had about the ability of personal narratives and authentic storytelling to power dynamic, inspired leaders. For those that don’t know, it’s been a very rough year for Ohio…
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December 6, 2011
My job before graduate school was pretty daunting. With a small team of urban believers, I had to convince a skeptical metropolitan population that the city at its center—despite its dismal public image—was worth visiting. It wasn’t easy. During …
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November 18, 2011
When I first got into the business, internal communications was still earning its chops as a function. You didn’t see any of the fervor around employee engagement that you see today. It was widely seen as corporate overhead. Some of that perception w…
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November 11, 2011
Letting go is a challenging task in a world that forever changing. It’s human nature to give ourselves over to fear or anger, and seek ways to find comfort and reassert control when things around us are chaotic. I’ve been in a few situations where …
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November 3, 2011
Last year, my firm APCO partnered with Huffington Post to launch a study of what makes social media campaigns effective. You can read the details about what we did on our Social EQ website, but the short version is that we derived six discrete facto…
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October 27, 2011
Stephanie Pace Marshall describes the type of environment needed to nurture innovation as “messy, non-linear, non-predictive,” which seemingly goes against the grain of traditional top-down corporate and leadership models. So is there a way for org…
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October 20, 2011
Like it or not, we are in the midst of an emerging leadership landscape. Never before has there been a time when so many different generations were brought together in a working environment. The lines of authority are blurring, Baby Boomers are working…
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October 10, 2011
I had a friend who came up in the profession as a speech writer. He had a way with words, but that was not the genius behind his gift. His talent (like many great writers) lied in the fact that he was a big thinker. He loved getting into issues and co…
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October 7, 2011
Steve Jobs had an uncanny, almost prescient ability to see around corners. No matter how you feel about Apple and its CEO, one thing is absolutely clear: this was a man whose imagination brought urgency to products that customers never realized they ne…
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September 30, 2011
Albert Einstein was perhaps a bit modest, but he certainly recognized that curiosity is a powerful force in the universe. One of the best things about participating in a community like this is that we all get to tap into the power of hundreds of curi…
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September 23, 2011
“Enchanting” is a different way to look at business. But Guy Kawasaki, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and former “chief evangelist” of Apple, thrives on difference. The author of nine business, personal and professional guide books (launched…
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September 16, 2011
There has been much said and written about Authentic Leadership. It’s the thesis statement for the movement of reconnecting with customers and communities. The word Authentic has become THE new buzzword. And I have trouble with that. To paraphr…
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September 8, 2011
Do you remember the movie A Beautiful Mind ? It told the story of John Nash, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on Game Theory. Game Theory is the study of situations involving conflicting interests – gains and losses among opposing p…
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September 1, 2011
I once had a boss who was never in the office. He traveled constantly, and all over the country. I only worked there for a summer, but it was several weeks before I even had the opportunity to meet him. In other words, he could have been a candidate fo…
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August 24, 2011
One of my ongoing questions is: “What am I not seeing?” Whenever I enter into a dialogue with a client, or put myself in a seminar series or a course for ongoing growth and development, I forget what I know in a sense, so that I can hear ne…
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August 17, 2011
Howard Schultz has a distinctive view not only on leadership, but on corporations’ relationships with and responsibility to their customers, employees and communities in today’s global landscape. As Joe Nocera’s New York Times editorial column pr…
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August 12, 2011
In my life, the power of the Let Go and Lead presents itself most vividly in the time I dedicate to writing and producing sketch comedy revues around Chicago. For a writer, the production of a sketch comedy show is a process of continuously diminishing…
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August 5, 2011
The more conversations I have, the more I think the answer is “everything.” Howard Schultz talked about it during our interview. So did Mitch Albom. It’s funny how so many people would scoff at the question, as if there’s no place for love in b…
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July 28, 2011
As a business culture we rely on this comforting cacophony. The great white noise. It’s secure; and it reassures us. As leaders, we’re constantly butting heads with the volume. Looking around we’re screaming “Listen to me, IR…
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July 21, 2011
I waited a long time for my 30th birthday. Not because my 20s were especially trying or horrible, but rather I figured age would give me the respect and street cred I felt I needed as a leader. But when I hit the big 3-0, the sky didn’t open; wisdo…
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July 15, 2011
The conversation with Dan Pink made me think about why I got into this line of business in the first place. When we started our firm, I had a dream to change the world one dysfunctional company at a time. (And I believe companies are like families – …
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July 8, 2011
In tilting my ear toward a discussion of generational differences in the work place, I’ve been surprised that it doesn’t take long before the temperature starts to rise. Words like entitled, demanding and pampered start to slowly creep in, coun…
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July 1, 2011
At first glance, it seems like a pretty basic question. But there’s a multi-billion-dollar industry behind it. Just search the word “leadership” on Amazon.com—you’ll get a list of 69,000+ books to choose from. The amount of li…
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June 24, 2011
We tend to think about corporations as these separate entities, when in fact they are simply a community of individuals who have come together to serve a common purpose. If you want to drive change in your organization, you have to start with individua…
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June 14, 2011
Frankly, we all know the world has changed. Much discussion is underway on how to adapt, respond and just deal with it. It reminded me of Peter Drucker’s quote: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” For the last 60 years, Drucker …
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Let Go & Lead Events
June 30th, 2011
Fast Company Featured
Maril MacDonald's video interview with Simon Mainwaring for Fast Company. ...
June 7th, 2011
Fast Company Featured!
Maril MacDonald's video interview with Simon Mainwaring for the Fast Company blog ...
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