My Career

Early in my career, I began to travel around the country opening up new restaurants for a national hospitality company and I later got a job selling Point of Sale (POS) systems for a large, international organization.  A few years later, I took another sales job at a company based in Cleveland that has its world headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark.  Within 10 years I was promoted to the President of their US and Canadian operations and over the past 15 years I have held similar roles for two other international organizations. 

 

Thankfully, everywhere I went I experienced success in one form or another, and I attribute most of it to what my father taught me:  Work hard, be honest and take responsibility for my actions, all helped to carry me a long way.  Interestingly, they are just a few of the leadership lessons I learned from his school of hard knocks.

 

During my career I have been honored to work with some outstanding managers and leaders, but as one might imagine, I have also seen a few that needed some help and guidance.  I began to try and determine why this might be the case and how to fix the situation, so I started to study the elements of great leadership.

 

A quick google search shows that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of articles and books written about what it takes to be successful in business, so clearly a lot of other people have an interest in this topic as well.   Many of them identify very specific business skills like “negotiating”, being “good at numbers” or having “no fear of failure”. 

 

What I couldn’t find was a tool that really spelled out the core attributes and personal characteristics of successful business people; the type of people that others want to be around, that lead by example, and that time and time again demonstrate long term success.   In my opinion, even the most famous and well known books on this subject do not adequately cover the topic.