If I Had A Hammer: What Can An Old Song Teach Today’s Leaders?

Issue 255 — March 25, 2024

I often share the metaphor of a hammer in leadership development training and speaking. That’s because power is like a hammer — you can build something with it or break something apart.

Power has no attributes of its own. It’s energy to be used at will, and it becomes whatever we do with it.

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To Gloria Steinem With Love On Her 90th Birthday

Dearest Gloria Marie,

Words are inadequate so here are a few photos of meaningful times, places, and causes that brought us together. I’m ever grateful for your vision, courage, and leadership to make the world a more just place, and personally for your friendship, your kindness, your boundless compassion.

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What a Week: Making Women’s History and Future Every Day

Issue 254 — March 18, 2024

I absolutely love Women’s History Month. I love it as an opportunity to write into the generally known history the many women who have been overlooked or under-recognized for their accomplishments.

And increasingly, I focus on tomorrow’s history that we each make by our actions today.

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The #1 Action You Can Take Today To Make Life More #GenderFair

Issue 254 — March 3, 2024

How many clip art flowers and pink figures, celebratory Women’s History Month posts have you seen already this March — and we’re just a few days into it? Somehow it seems that many people have forgotten (if they ever knew) that women needed this special month, just as February was Black History Month for the same reason — because the narratives of history have not been written with our lens, and often our accomplishments have been downright ignored — or stolen.

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How Are We Doing? 10 Years of Take The Lead

Issue 253 — February 26, 2024

The late bombastic New York mayor, Ed Koch, was famous for going around the city asking, “How am I doing?”

So as Take The Lead kicks off its 10th anniversary year, exactly 10 years after its first big public launch event at Arizona State University’s Gammage Auditorium, we’re asking you, “How are we doing?”

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From Lucy to Leadership Part 2: Our Origins’ Central Question

Issue 252 — February 11, 2024

Last weekend, I went to see the movie I think should win Academy Awards in every category: Ava DuVernay’s rendition of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

After writing last week about the discovery of the 3.2 million year old hominid fossil Lucy in Hadar, Ethiopia 50 years ago by paleoanthropologist and founder of the Institute of Human Origins Donald Johanson, I wanted to explore further the question of why we humans are the way we are.

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From Lucy to Leadership, Part 1: We Are All Africans

Issue 251 — February 5, 2024

What is more fascinating to us humans than ourselves?

Don’t we check how we look when we pass a mirror? Didn’t we invent psychology, sociology, and anthropology because we are obsessed with understanding who we are and why we behave as we do? Don’t we love seeing our names mentioned, or being tagged on Instagram? Come on, admit it.

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In This Together: The Power of a Movement

Issue 250 — January 15, 2024

Re-print: Originally Published January 21, 2019

“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

The two movements that have shaped my life converged this long weekend.

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