1: “Germans are extremely proud of their engineers—particularly those in the car industry, which is home to stellar high-export brands like Daimler, BMW, and Porsche,” Fred Kofman writes in The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.

Martin Winterkorn, the future and now former CEO of Volkswagen, is an “intelligent, ambitious overachiever,” Fred notes, earning a PhD in physics from Germany’s acclaimed Max Planck Institute.

Martin got … continue reading

1: Author Fred Kofman was leading a leadership seminar at a chemical company.

“I love molecules!” Boris (not his real name) exclaimed with humorous exasperation.   “Molecules are so well behaved. You apply a certain amount of heat and a certain amount of pressure to them, and you know exactly what they are going to do.” 

Everyone laughed.  

“The problem,” he went on, “is that I did so well managing molecules … continue reading

1: “In 2011, Netflix was on a roll,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in CEO Excellence.

The company was a media darling.  Its rapidly growing, highly popular subscription business delivered DVD rental movies to customers’ homes.  

Still, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings knew that streaming was the future.

“It was a classic innovator’s dilemma—for Netflix to keep growing it would have to cannibalize its DVD … continue reading

1: Fear.

“We often don’t even recognize that the emotion we’re feeling is fear,” says Kristen Ulmer, one of the world’s leading experts on fear, in Steven Kotler‘s book The Art of Impossible. 

“Instead, it gets misinterpreted and redirected, showing up as blame, anger, sadness, or in irrational thoughts and behavior.”

To combat this tendency, we can develop an awareness of our fear by noticing it in … continue reading