Teams

Let me give you a hypothetical high-pressure situation.

You’re the pilot of a small, single-engine airplane. You take off, alone, in this single-engine airplane, and head out over a large body of open water. At about 800 feet above this water, your single engine starts to sound funny (and not in a “ha-ha” way), and you notice you’re not gaining altitude at the rate you should be. At around 1200 feet above the water, your single engine quits.

This is a high-pressure ...

We all love the “oh-so-cool” person who can just “wing it” in any situation, don’t we? That’s why we admire (and secretly want to be) James Bond — the guy who can go through a brutal, life-or-death fight with armed assassins, and then thirty minutes later stroll into a high-stakes poker game (in a perfectly-tailored, freshly-pressed tuxedo, of course) looking like he just had a facial and manicure.

We all want to be the person who, off-the-cuff, always says the perfect ...

You are surrounded by ingenuity that you’re not taking advantage of.

Probably.

Most leaders are. And the reason most leaders are is actually pretty simple.

It’s because most leaders spend too much time focusing on How.

A leader should be focused on the What, and the Where. A leader should provide the destination, but not the route. Why? Two reasons.

First, as a leader, planning the route is a waste of your time and energy. Your greatest value is in creating ...

I still remember the first time it happened.

The first time I went home on a Friday night thinking, “We don’t have a show.”

You see, for roughly 15 years, Saturday was show day for me and my team. Together, we created Seattle’s legendary comedy TV show Almost Live! I was the Executive Producer. Every Saturday, we’d fill the studio with 175 audience members and tape an all-new show that would be broadcast, just an hour or so later, to about a ...

They are the heroes, the icons, the legends. They are the leaders in sports, science, and business who “rise to the occasion.” The ones who “do their best work under pressure.” People write books and make movies about these singular luminaries.

The only problem is that it’s not true.

Despite what we’d like to believe (because it makes for a great story), people do not “rise to the occasion.” “Rising to the occasion” implies that some people do their best work under ...