Onward to 2010!

Friends,

Happy New Year! A new year gives us all a chance to reflect on the opportunities that lie in front of us. The future is ripe with possibility – if we are bold enough to go for it! I don’t know about you, but I am ready to think big, to be aggressive, and to seize the day! I have goals for my personal and professional life and am ready to get after them. “Targets Up!”

Can I take a minute and update you on Leader Business? While not exactly burning up the internet, we did just have our 15,000th visitor to this site. (I need to weave in some juicy stories about Brittney or Tiger and I will probably get that kind of volume every day! I am in Los Angeles, after all!) I hope that the messages that we talk about on these pages are resonating with some of you and that you are sharing them with your friends. Please continue to do so and encourage your friends to subscribe (as a couple hundred of you already have) so they don’t miss any of our discussion topics. And thanks to those of you who comment! You all know the power of the blog as a 2-way conversation!

You may have noticed (okay…you probably didn’t) that I haven’t been posting as often as I once was. I have started working on Leader Business – the book! It will be a compilation of the sorts of topics we talk about here on this site and will be sort of poor man’s leadership development course. The leadership lessons I have accumulated over my career at places like West Point, Army Ranger School, and the Army’s National Training Center will be the foundation for this project. Stay tuned.

I hope to have this project completed before…I deploy to Afghanistan in July. I will be leaving Los Angeles and taking command of an Army Corps of Engineers unit in Kabul. I am looking forward to the challenges that leadership in a combat zone, focused on construction and water resource issues, might present. I am confident that my future teammates will bring me up to speed and I hope to be able to contribute to the success of our mission there.

In the interim, I have a lot to do. My New Year’s commitments include some of the same things you likely have on your respective resolution lists:

-- Listen more and talk less.
-- Have shorter meetings. My teammates will be thrilled with this one.
-- Be less of a cynic and more of an encourager. Be positive.
-- Reward people more. A praise or two per day over the next six months will help people understand how truly proud and grateful I am to serve with them.
-- Follow up / follow through on the many tasks that I am working with my team. An action passed is NOT an action completed!
-- Accomplish the mission and put a good transition plan in place. I need to set up my replacement for success.
-- Stop wasting time! I have too much to do. Read more, write more, and spend more time with family and friends.

So, enough about me…what about you? (See resolution #1 above!) How can I help hold you accountable on your commitments? What can I do to further our friendship or enable your success? Please let me know!

Happy New Year everyone. Let’s get to work! That’s Leader Business. Hooah!

P.S. Thanks to Dan McCarthy for including my posts on leadership lessons at the Army Ranger School in his “Best of 2009” Leadership Development Carnival! Please check it out!