Archives
April 22, 2024
Being the Epicenter of Problem Solving is the Problem
When you start a company, problems pop up and you fix them. As entrepreneurs, it’s in our nature. As your company grows and you hire staff, they see how good you are at solving problems and they become excellent at handing problems over to you to fix. This works well, until it doesn’t. Being the… Read More
February 24, 2023
Leadership and Coaching
I wish I had understood what coaching was when I ran my company. I would have been a better leader. I even had an incredibly valuable CEO coach during that time. When I left the company, he suggested I become a CEO coach, which I have done for 20 years. Yet after all these years,… Read More
January 4, 2023
How You Learn. You Must Learn.
Only a third of CEOs will find this a valuable essay. The other two-thirds will agree with my assessment, but will find less value. CEOs learn both before and after bad things happen. I’ve become an expert on both ways, though I prefer proactive instead of reactive learning. When I started my company, most learning… Read More
September 13, 2022
Controlling the Monkey Brain
I crafted the Fackler Five back in 2010 after 20 years of learning about leadership, especially as a CEO. Number Five is “Do not forget to work on yourself. Though fixing yourself is hard work, it makes fixing the business easier.” A week ago, I completed a 10-day silent retreat at the California Vipassana Center… Read More
November 17, 2021
Is Ego the Enemy of Leadership or Essential?
I have a different take on ego. Though I understand the HBR article titled “Ego is the Enemy of Good Leadership”, I’d like HBR to write the corollary titled, “Ego is Essential for Good Leadership.“ Without a doubt, unchecked ego is a problem as the article explains. As a founder and CEO of a 500… Read More
September 22, 2021
Overcoming Fear of Failure
Until I was about 35 years old, my way of avoiding the fear of failure was to not try my hardest. That way if I failed, I would tell myself the failure was not because I was incapable of succeeding, but because I did not try my hardest. I can remember the moment when I… Read More