Next Level Blog

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Three Common Pitfalls for New Executives and How to Avoid Them

Next Level Blog

Congratulations! Youve just gotten promoted to your first executive level job. What do you do now? One of the big reasons I wrote The Next Level almost 20 years ago was that the expectations of new executives are always very high but hardly ever clearly defined. My goal with the book was to make the implicit behavioral expectations of new executives explicit.

Execution 165
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From Playing Not to Lose to Playing to Win: A Game Plan for Senior Leaders

Next Level Blog

A few weeks ago, I had breakfast with a friend who spent twenty years as a senior engineer at Intel. Ten years ago, Apple lured him away to build a new engineering team. Knowing Intel has lost roughly 67 % of its market cap in the last five yearswhile NVIDIA has sprinted aheadI asked him, What happened? He didnt hesitate. They wouldnt risk killing the x86 cash cow, so the world passed them by.

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How to Tame Your Monkey Mind

Next Level Blog

For ten years Ive been asking audiences of leaders this question: In the last year, has it been easier or harder to control your level of mental chatter? In every year of the last ten, the answer has been harder. It would seem, then, that the leadership curve on mental chatter is up and to the right. For example, a group of sixty-five leaders I spoke to this past week on the connection between effective self-management and positive leadership outcomes posted these overall results in a self-asses

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The Power of a Verbal Yes in Driving Team Alignment

Next Level Blog

Anyone who has ever flown in the exit row knows the drill. Just before takeoff, the flight attendant stands in the aisle, asks everyone to take their ear buds out, and make eye contact as the attendant asks, Are you aware that youre sitting in an exit row and are you willing and able to assist in an emergency, including opening the exit door and assisting other passengers?

Power 227
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How to Navigate a BANI World: A Leadership Playbook for Turbulent Times

Next Level Blog

I first heard of the BANI framework a few weeks ago when I ran an updated post on leading in an age of non-stop VUCA and a reader left a comment on LinkedIn that the world isnt so much VUCA now as it is BANI brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. Yeah, that feels about right. I dont necessarily think that VUCA and BANI are mutually exclusive; rather I think they complement each other and can provide a lot of guidance for executive leaders pondering how to navigate uncharted waters.

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Stop Asking Why: Ten ‘What’ Questions Senior Leaders Can Use to Drive Alignment

Next Level Blog

When youre a senior executive, your success depends on influencing, aligning, and mobilizing others toward strategic goals. Yet, even at the highest levels, misalignment often arises due to differing motivations. How well do you truly understand the priorities driving your peers, board members, or senior team? And are your assumptions accurate? The best way to understand whats motivating someone is to engage them in a conversation that surfaces their goals, their ambitions, and their fears.

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Leading in the Age of Non-Stop VUCA

Next Level Blog

Back in the early days of the COVID pandemic, I wrote a post on how to lead under volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous conditions. You may know those four words by their common acronym VUCA. To be honest, I didnt think that things could get any more VUCA than they were during the pandemic. Im beginning to think I was wrong about that. Practically every week over the past year theres been a new breakthrough or application in the field of artificial intelligence.