Into The Fire: The Fastest Way for a Leader to Develop

The date was January 1998. I’d been out of school for a mere 8 months and suddenly found myself the leader to a team of 10 individuals. This was a critical heat experience in my career. Heat experiences are those intense moments in a leader’s life when the heat gets turned on. Criteria for a heat experience include…

Taking Out the Mental Trash

I’m the Co-Founder and President of Rare Bird, an internet marketing firm. I’ve recently had the opportunity, if you will, to experience a pretty significant sea change in my world, and it allowed me the chance to reflect on how we react to changes of all kinds.

A few months ago, one of my business partners left the company after 18 years. He was the very definition of a key man: with me from the beginning, he was an integral part of the way we ran the business, the success we’ve had, and the decisions we made. When the opportunity to run a family business came up, he discussed it with several trusted advisors and decided to make the leap. From my perspective, it was the right choice, even though it would require huge changes for his entire family — not to mention being incredibly disruptive for Rare Bird.

Are You Map Following or Leading?

Seth Godin poses this question in his book, Linchpin. This little book has rocked my world, and has me thinking about leadership, and life in general, in new and exciting ways.

“Leader” is a term I’ve always labeled myself with. In fact my parents love embarrassing me by sharing stories of me playing with the neighborhood kids at age 4. All the kids would come to our house and ask: “Alyssa, what are we going to play today?” I’d develop the agenda and start assigning roles…

Burned Out

We had great intentions when we moved our young and growing family into a tough, inner city neighborhood. We were going to be part of the solution. We invested 10 years of our lives there. And boy do I have some stories.

Here’s the thing. With all the good that we did, something was increasingly missing. It took ten years of living there and three years living other places to figure it out.

Full Speed Ahead

As the New Year begins, many of us are filled with hope and excitement about what this next year will bring. That is definitely the case for all of us at Kairos. Last year included quite a bit of change which helped us prepare for where we are today. Seeing as change is one of the core services we provide, it was quite fascinating to watch how we reacted to the changes we went through. Helping organizations respond, adjust & thrive in change is something we do all the time, so you’d assume it would be easier for us, right?