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As a Miami-based Executive Coach and Consultant, my experience is that all companies have a set of Core Values whether they realize it or not. The question is whether they are clearly articulated and thoughtfully implemented into the company culture. Often, the Core Values are unspoken, underutilized, latent principles. Waking up the Core Values is perhaps the most energizing thing you can do for yourself as a business leader and for your team. Many organizational and leadership issues—including hiring and firing, talent retention, employee motivation and performance, and simple management skills can be vastly improved when the Core Values are alive within an organization. Oddly enough, there is no formal discovery process or “delivery system” for the creation and implementation of Core Values. Below, however, is a four-step Discovery process to help your organization clarify its Core Values. In my next blog entry, I will detail practical ways to implement the Core Values into your…

In the wake of their semi-final World Cup defeat to France, Belgium’s goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois, criticized France, telling Sporza. “I would have preferred to have lost in the quarter-finals to Brazil, at least that was a team that wanted to play football. [France] are just an anti-football team.” France did not win because it was anti-football (and to characterize being anti-football as solely defensive in strategy is of course absurd). We can actually look to France’s championship team for key ingredients about leadership and effective teams:  · Adaptability. France was criticized as having been over-reliant on defense (“anti football”). But a major reason France won was because of their ability to adapt to the changing strategies of their opponent—they happed to play extremely efficiently and defensively against Belgium and more offensively against other opponents. A leader and team’s ability to adapt to changes in the market and environment is critical to success—this “Adaptability Quotient” (AQ)…

In a recent trip to Cartagena Colombia I found myself fascinated with the sun-drenched, hypnotic world of author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although having settled in Mexico City, he would make many trips back to Cartagena to visit his parents and siblings and a city that would inspire many of his stories and characters. After wondering the streets of el Centro for a few days it is not difficult to see how Marquez’s magical realism literary style was inspired and crafted—or perhaps that Cartagena’s dreamlike feel, with its seamless and at times vigorous blend of Caribbean and Latin culture, found Marquez, who would simply become its scribe. As a Miami-based Executive Coach, I really wasn’t actually thinking about leadership at all. I was wondering about Marquez’s ability to intertwine dream and reality, about the centuries of conquests of this canon-lined, walled city, and the astonishing gold animal carvings of the pre-Columbian Zenu tribes that lured the…