Nancy Koehn was on track for an administrative leadership role at Harvard Business School, where she taught the history of leadership to the world’s best and brightest. But a series of personal crucibles — the death of her father, a divorce that came without warning and decimated her finances, a cancer diagnosis — caused the floorboards of her personal and professional lives to crumble beneath her.
Life has not always been easy for Warwick Fairfax. That’s a statement many in his native Australia never would have associated with the fifth-generation heir to arguably the country’s most influential media empire. But then he launched a multi-billion-dollar takeover of the company that failed spectacularly — leaving him with regrets, self-doubt and uncertainty about his future. More than 30 years after the takeover fell apart, the founder of Crucible Leadership and host of BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE will speak in detail for the first time about what motivated his bid to assume control of the company and why he thinks it wasn’t successful in a book from Morgan James Publishing due to be released early next year.
A crisis is the ultimate test of your leadership and your character, in particular in your ability to maintain the cohesion of your team. A crisis can be a bit like a centrifuge, which tends to push people away, and dissipate team unity. Whether the team drifts apart or comes together is largely dependent on you, the leader.
Growing up in Communist East Germany, Cathleen Merkel was taught her value came from doing what others expected of her, working hard and not upsetting the established order of things. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and she grew from a girl into a woman with dreams and passions of living a free and successful life. There was just one problem: the goals she pursued professionally and personally dead-ended a couple of times and didn’t really fulfill her even when they were going well. So she took a deep look at herself, asked close friends to help her see where she’d veered off course and finally discovered who she really was and what vision she wanted to cast for her life.
Tommy Breedlove isn’t one to make excuses. Yes, the physical and emotional violence he endured as a boy led him to become violent himself as a teen, landing him in jail for his 19th birthday. But when he was mentored by a fellow inmate and inspired to avoid another trip behind bars, he took responsibility for his recovery.
