The ONLY thing leaders have in common is the shared decision to lead.

The only people who get paid what they're worth are people who don't follow the instruction book, who create art, who are innovative, who work without a map.

It takes confidence and guts to intentionally create tension.

I find that it's almost essential to fall in love with an idea to invest the time it takes to make it good and worth sharing. And then, the hard part: deleting that idea when it's just not what it could be. Too often, organizations are good at the first part, but struggle with the second. And so we defend expired business models, support the status quo and have a knee-jerk inclination to preserve what we've got.

The best favors are worth doing for the doing, not because we'll ever get paid back appropriately.

An organization filled with honest, motivated, connected, eager, learning, experimenting, ethical and driven people will always defeat the one that merely has talent. Every time.

The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn't mean, because they might be criticized for it.