For every leadership development seminar I conduct, I ask each participant to gather some objective data on the topic of leadership ahead of time. Specifically, I ask each person to talk with a few of their friends, family, students, coworkers or acquaintances about leadership in the days before the seminar, and find out what they look for in someone whose lead they would willingly follow.… Read more »
Category: Peter’s Perspective
Let’s Leave, They’re Only a Buck Fifty at Safeway
If you are fortunate enough one of these days to drive along the central coast of California between Santa Cruz and Monterey, you will pass by field upon field of tall, thick-stalked, prickly leaved, some say prehistoric-looking spiny plants supporting a fist-sized vegetable that is poetically known as the vegetable of passion, the food of nobility, the thistle of love — the California artichoke.… Read more »
Peter’s Perspective: Legacy
My grandfather came over on the boat from Sicily at the age of 20, landed at Ellis Island in New York Harbor on April 30, 1900, settled among his Italian relatives in Brooklyn and set up shop as a barber. Four years later, he married a Sicilian farm girl, newly arrived in America from his home village of Juliana in the mountains above Palermo.… Read more »
Peter’s Perspective: The Main Thing is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing
Consider this bit of wisdom: The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing!
Now let’s put it to use: If the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, what’s the main thing?
If the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, what are the main principles that will guide your actions?… Read more »
Peter’s Perspective: Cheating Yourself, Cheating Others
All judgment aside, I’ve grown to accept that cheating is probably part of the human condition – good, bad or indifferent. Sometimes we are the ones who are doing the cheating. Sometimes we are the ones being cheated. Either way, cheating eventually (if not immediately) injures both the cheater and the cheated.
While the severity of injury caused by cheating depends on the circumstances — superficial, shallow, profound, grave — no repeated injury is harmless.… Read more »
Peter’s Perspective: What We Choose is Who We Are
I too am shocked and sickened by Rick Perry’s divisive tone and bigoted words in his Christmas campaign commercial for the Presidency. (As of this writing, YouTube “dislikes” are outnumbering “likes” by a count of 40:1).
Perry reveals a character that resorts to maligning and marginalizing minorities as a show of strength. He is really no different than the racists who denigrate African-Americans, the skinheads who slander Jews, and the bullies who mock Americans with disabilities.… Read more »
Peter’s Perspective: Obstacle to Citizen Leadership – “The Ends Justify the Means”
The Ends Justify the Means
While we do not lack for role models who share and demonstrate what it means to consistently live by values, there is also a fair share of public personalities whose demonstrate the opposite – whose primary value seems to be the ends justify the means (whatever it takes, or whatever I can get away with). Too often, these personalities seem to be lauded and rewarded, or at the very least, they seem to encounter few and feeble consequences for behaving and speaking in ways that reflect and reinforce that value.… Read more »