What is it that defines a truly great leader? Why is it that names like Joan of Arc, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Teresa resonate throughout history, while countless others are forgotten—or footnotes at best? How do you know when someone is a truly great leader?

How do you know if you are a truly great leader?

Here’s the test, and it may be a harsh one if you’re being honest with yourself:

Would your followers (your employees, your team ...

Last night I attended a performance by the Seattle Symphony of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto. If you’ve ever seen the movie Shine, you know how daunting this piece is to a concert pianist. It’s a 40-plus minute workout, consisting of 30,000 individual notes, all of which have to be performed—often at lightning speed—in a particular order; with nuance, dynamics, and passion; live; from memory; in front of a discerning audience of several thousand people, and an even more discerning orchestra ...

As I’m writing this, the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend is just ending, and we’re all well into the throes of the holiday season.

There’s nothing quite like the pressure of preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for roughly 30 people. It’s an exercise in cooking, kitchen resource allocation, family dynamics, political diplomacy, alcohol distribution, and traffic flow, just to name a few.

And there’s only one chance to get it right.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not, this probably sounds familiar. If you’re a leader, you’ve ...

In a few hours, I’m going to be delivering a keynote for about 800 college and university professors. These professors come from a wide variety of disciplines. I arrived at the conference just yesterday, and already I’ve had fascinating conversations about the effect of driverless vehicles on supply chain delivery, big data’s impact on healthcare, and Chinese political history.

As I said, it’s been fascinating.

Now here’s the thing. I’m not an expert on any of these topics. But the people I ...