Category: Business analyst

Here’s a leadership question, courtesy of Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. When you’re leading a team in difficult times, is it better to exude optimism, or lean toward realism? 

This is the sort of thing I cover in my free ebook, Flying Business Class: 10 Rules for Leaders From the U.S. Airlines, about what business leaders can learn from watching the airlines. (You’re invited to download it here.)

Over the past 10 days or so, we’ve had the chance to watchas Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta Air Lines, and Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines, each took a significantly different rhetorical approach as they predicted the way forward during 2021.

First, Bastian at Delta. During his airline’s most recent earnings call, I was struck by how often Bastian and his team used variations of words like “hope,” “optimism,” and “confidence” despite the

Tom Brady is the oldest active player on an NFL roster, and somehow he’s just two wins away from yet another Super Bowl trophy. 

Business leaders can learn a lot from studying Brady. In fact, I’ve compiled an entire ebook about this idea: Tom Brady Always Wins, which you can download here for free. 

Whether you’re a Brady fan or not (and whether you care about sports or not) here are 12 key secrets to Brady’s success, each explained in under 100 words, and ranked more or less by how replicable they are:  

Losing control of your feelings is the fastest way to lose control of a critical situation. Brady is very emotional — but when it matters, it’s all about controlled emotion.

And when the game is over, he’s effusive. (Here’s what I caught him doing after winning the Super Bowl in

If you’ve had good news to share lately, it’s been a frustrating time. 

It’s been hard to get anyone to pay attention to much besides the election–and the attempts to overturn it, and the insurrection, and the second impeachment, and the inauguration… It sucked all the oxygen out of the media ecosystem.

I suppose this was actually good news for people with bad news–scandal, disappointing numbers, for example–since they could release things with the reasonable hope that nobody would notice.

But, it also meant it was hard to get attention for things that deserve attention. And that brings us to Mark Cuban.

There’s no scandal involved; this is about a brilliant new venture he’s involved with. Last week, Cuban tweeted about one of his new companies: Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, which is being billed as a generic drug company in which the prime value proposition is

As he promised, President Joe Biden is taking steps to have the United States reenter the Paris Climate Agreement on Day 1 of his presidency.

Due to the legal time frame for withdrawal from the agreement, in which 196 countries pledged to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the U.S. had actually not withdrawn until this past November. But the act of reentry is the first step in an expected aggressive set of policies to begin recovering lost time for the U.S., which is responsible for about 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

The makeup of Biden’s cabinet and close advisors shows how much recovering global environmental leadership means to the new president. The nominees to head the Environmental Protection Agency and the Departments of Energy, Interior and Transportation are all focused on leading a decarbonization transition in the United States. And