Personal development. Professional development. Leadership development. Regardless of which words you use, chances are as the New Year begins, you are thinking about some sort of development; some sort of approach to creating change, growth and advancement in your life. As you think about our world today, the good news is that you have lots

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Want to read the smartest leadership thinkers all in one place? That is the goal of the Leadership Development Carnival.  The current issue is dubbed “the best of 2009.”  Each author, including me, pick their own posts. The Carnival is avaiable now, and I would urge you to take a look right now!

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A couple of days I wrote a post about project leadership lessons from a jigsaw puzzle.  Last night I finished it  (aren’t those tractors beautiful?) The lessons from the earlier post are valuable.  Here are a couple of other additional thoughts. Energy of the “team”  (Kelsey, especially) grew as I got closer to the end. 

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One of my winter memories as a kid was doing jigsaw puzzles – especially at the holidays or on “snow days” those wonderful times in western Michigan when there was more snow than the plows could handle and there was no school because of it. While I haven’t really worked on a jigsaw puzzle for

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Can you and do you inspire others? This is an important question for all of us to ask as leaders.  Our answer helps us see past our positional “power” and look at our true effectiveness.  Alaina Love, wrote a a blog post  for Business Week that outlines ten attributes that help you inspire others.  Here

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It is Christmas morning, and my family is still in bed.  Before we get into an amazingly wonderful day, I wanted to write a post that has been swirling in my head for a couple days (visions of a blog post rather than sugar plums?  I’m not sure what that says about me, but here we

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Alonzo Fields, served as a butler in the White House from 21 years – from 1932-53.  For many of those years he served as the Chief Butler.  According to the Truman Library website, “The job of Chief Butler meant that Fields was responsible for keeping track of all White House tablecloths, napkins, silverware, glassware, and china.

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