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It was one of the most memorable moments of my career. I was standing in the front of the…
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Articles by Russ
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Stop Mourning. Start Adapting.
Stop Mourning. Start Adapting.
The end suddenly seems near. Almost every executive I've had coaching calls with the last few weeks is stressing about…
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LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 02.17.20
LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 02.17.20
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the trends and most notable content related to culture management on LinkedIn. We're…
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LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 02.10.20
LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 02.10.20
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the trends and most notable content related to culture management on LinkedIn. We're…
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Culture Change Can't Happen Quickly - Wrong!
Culture Change Can't Happen Quickly - Wrong!
Often when we begin working with an organization on their culture the CEO or some member of the senior team will ask…
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LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 02.02.20
LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 02.02.20
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the trends and most notable content related to culture management on LinkedIn. We're…
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LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 01.26.20
LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 01.26.20
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the trends and most notable content related to culture management on LinkedIn. We're…
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LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 01.19.20
LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 01.19.20
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the most valuable content related to culture management on LinkedIn. We're scouring…
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The 2019 Corporate Culture Award Goes To...
The 2019 Corporate Culture Award Goes To...
After spending 2019 traveling the world meeting with thousands of leaders across all kinds of industries it's time to…
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How Amazon Hires & Promotes
How Amazon Hires & Promotes
The first time I went to a meeting at Amazon I expected to fly into Seattle and then be dropped off at the company’s…
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Why Aren't We Holding Leaders Accountable?
Why Aren't We Holding Leaders Accountable?
I ran into her at a meeting outside of Philly. She walked up to me anxious to share the news.
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Russ Hill shared thisKonosuke Matsushita left school at nine and later wrote a 250-year business plan. His own executives thought he had lost his mind. What he was really building had almost nothing to do with electronics... Matsushita left home at nine years old to work in an Osaka shop. He had almost no formal schooling and poor health for most of his life. In 1918, at 23, he started a tiny business making electrical parts out of his home, with his wife and her teenage brother. That company became Panasonic. In 1932, he gathered his employees and told them the real purpose of a business was not profit. It was to end poverty by making useful goods as abundant and affordable as water from a tap. Then he announced a plan to carry out that mission. It ran 250 years, divided into ten phases. Many founders cannot see past the next quarter. Matsushita was making decisions for people who would not be born for two centuries. He believed a company chasing only this year's numbers would make small, fearful choices. A mission measured in centuries forced bigger, braver ones. Japan came to call him the god of management. He trained his people to say their first job was to make good people, and their second was to make good products. What most leaders miss: the time horizon you lead on shapes every decision you make. Short horizons breed timid choices. Long ones create the freedom to build something that lasts. Most leadership problems are really decision problems in disguise, and the horizon you are judged on drives all of them. That is exactly the pressure the 2026 Leadership Reality Report was built to expose. Comment REPORT and I'll send you the 2026 Leadership Reality Report.
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Russ Hill shared thisVernon Hill built a bank that welcomed dogs and stayed open on Sundays. Rival bankers called it a gimmick. The strange part was the one thing he had every employee hunting for. In 1973, Hill opened a single bank branch in New Jersey with an odd idea. He would run a bank like a great retailer. While every competitor optimized for cost, Hill optimized for the experience. Commerce Bank stayed open seven days a week, including evenings and weekends, back when most banks still closed at 3pm. Branches gave out free lollipops and pens. Dogs were welcome, with biscuits waiting at the counter. Hill refused to call the people who walked in customers. He called them fans. His obsession was removing friction. He ran a program called Kill a Stupid Rule, paying employees to find and eliminate any policy that made life harder for a fan. Bankers laughed. Fans did not. Commerce grew to more than 440 branches and $50 billion in assets. In 2007, Hill sold it to TD Bank for about $8.5 billion. What most leaders miss: culture is not the poster in the lobby. It is the hundred small rules you choose to keep or kill, because those rules tell your people what you actually value. Hill made his values impossible to miss. Every stupid rule his team killed was one more piece of proof that the fan came first. Want to build a culture your people can actually feel? Lead In 30 transforms how managers and senior executives lead and deliver results in just 30 days. DM me to see how it could work for your team: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF
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Russ Hill shared thisMary Kay Ash trained the man who was then promoted over her at twice her salary. So at 45, she quit and started her own company with her life savings. The single rule she built it on turned nine friends into an army of sellers. By 1963, Mary Kay Ash had spent 25 years in direct sales and was very good at it. Then she watched a man she had personally trained get promoted above her, at double her pay. She walked away. At 45, an age when many people are told their best years are behind them, she took $5,000 and her son's help and opened a small cosmetics company with nine friends as her first beauty consultants. She had studied enough bad managers to know exactly what she would do differently. Her core belief was simple. Imagine every person you meet wearing an invisible sign around their neck that reads, "Make me feel important." So she built the whole company around recognition. Top performers were celebrated on stage, handed diamond pins, and famously awarded pink Cadillacs. She praised progress loudly, in public, and she did it relentlessly. She called it praising people to success. The company she started at a kitchen table grew into a global business with a sales force in the hundreds of thousands. What most leaders miss: recognition is not a nicety you get to when there is time. For your team, feeling seen is often the line between doing the job and giving everything they have. Want to build a team that brings its best without being pushed? Lead In 30 transforms how managers and senior executives lead and deliver results in just 30 days. DM me to see how it could work for your team: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF
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Russ Hill shared thisGE went from the most valuable company in America to the brink of collapse. So the board did something it had never done in 126 years. It handed the company to a total outsider, and the first thing he fixed was not the balance sheet. By 2018, General Electric was in freefall. The company that once defined American industry had shed tens of billions in value, slashed its storied dividend to a single penny, and churned through CEOs. For the first time in its 126-year history, GE looked outside its own ranks. It hired Larry Culp. Culp had spent 13 years running Danaher, where he became known for one thing: a relentless operating system built on lean management, the same continuous-improvement ideas Toyota made famous. At GE, he did what Wall Street rarely sees from a turnaround CEO. He went to the factory floor. He walked the lines, watched how the work actually moved, and fixed problems where they happened instead of from a boardroom deck. The system worked. In 2021 he announced GE would break into three focused companies. By April 2024 it was done: GE Aerospace, GE HealthCare, and GE Vernova. What most leaders miss: motivation fades by Monday. A system compounds every single day. GE did not turn on one inspiring speech. It turned on a discipline that showed up on the floor every day, whether anyone felt motivated or not. Most teams try to fix performance with pressure and pep talks. The ones that compound build systems that make the right behavior automatic. Telling those two apart is most of the job. Comment REPORT and I'll send you the 2026 Leadership Reality Report.
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Russ Hill shared thisMax De Pree ran a Fortune 500 company on one idea about a leader's real job. It had almost nothing to do with being in charge. It began with defining reality and ended with two words. De Pree led Herman Miller, the furniture company behind some of the most recognizable designs of the last century. Under him, the company nearly tripled its sales and was named one of Fortune's most admired companies again and again. He put his philosophy into a short book, "Leadership Is an Art." One line from it still gets quoted in boardrooms: "The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant." Read plainly, that is an entire model of management. Define reality: tell your team the truth about where things stand, the good and the hard, so they act on facts instead of hope. Become a servant: spend your authority clearing obstacles for them, not collecting status. Say thank you: treat recognition as a core part of the job, not something you get to when there is time. What most leaders miss about managing people: your team does not need you to be the smartest person in the room. They need you to define what is real, remove what is in the way, and notice what they did. De Pree called leaders stewards of their people, not owners of them. Most managers are never taught which of those three jobs they keep dropping, and it is usually the one that ends up costing them their best people. That gap is exactly what the 2026 Leadership Reality Report was built to expose. Comment REPORT and I'll send you the 2026 Leadership Reality Report.
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Russ Hill shared thisBill Gore built a $4 billion company with no bosses and no job titles. Everyone, including him, was simply called an associate. One rule kept the whole thing from sliding into chaos. In 1958, Gore left a secure job at DuPont and started a company in his basement. It became W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex. Today it does about $4.5 billion in annual revenue with roughly 12,000 people. From day one, Gore refused to build a hierarchy. No org chart, no chain of command, no manager titles. From the newest hire to Gore himself, everyone was an associate. Leaders were never appointed. They emerged, because people chose to follow them. If no one followed you, you were not a leader, whatever your résumé claimed. That structure sounds like a recipe for anarchy. Gore got the opposite. The company made Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For every year from 1984 to 2017 and shipped one breakthrough product after another. What made all that freedom safe was a single idea he called the waterline. You could make almost any decision on your own, as long as it stayed above the waterline. Anything that could sink the ship, a call big enough to hole the company below the water, you had to talk through with others first. Freedom above the line. Consultation below it. What most leaders get wrong about control: it is not the only thing that creates order. A clear, shared understanding of what actually threatens the business does the same job, without the drag of endless approvals. People do not need permission for everything. They need to know exactly where the waterline sits. Want to build that kind of clarity in your team? Lead In 30 transforms how managers and senior executives lead and deliver results in just 30 days. Message me to see how it could work for your team: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF
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Russ Hill shared thisToyota rejected 47 of the 50 piston rings Soichiro Honda first sent them. Then bombers and an earthquake destroyed his factories. He later called all of it the foundation of everything he built. In 1937, Honda ran a small shop making piston rings and had landed a contract with Toyota. When he submitted his first batch of 50, only 3 passed inspection. Instead of quitting, at nearly 30 he enrolled in a technical school to study metallurgy. He sat with students half his age for two years, until he could finally make a ring that met the standard. Then the war came. A B-29 raid destroyed his Yamashita plant in 1944. The next year, the 1945 Mikawa earthquake collapsed what was left of the business. He sold the salvage to Toyota for 450,000 yen. By then, walking away for good would have been the reasonable choice. He used that money to start over. With no fuel and no cars in postwar Japan, he bolted small engines onto bicycles. That workaround became Honda Motor Company. Honda put his whole philosophy into six words: "Success is 99% failure." That was never a motivational line to him. To Honda, the 1% you keep is built entirely out of the 99 you survive. The lesson most leaders skip: resilience is not staying calm through one crisis. It is being willing to keep paying tuition to failure long after it stops feeling heroic. Your best people are watching how you treat the losses, not just the wins. If failure ends careers on your team, they will stop taking the risks that growth depends on. Want to build this kind of resilience in the people you lead? Lead In 30 transforms how managers and senior executives lead and deliver results in just 30 days. Message me to see how it could work for your team: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF
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Russ Hill shared thisTadashi Yanai named his own business memoir "One Win, Nine Losses." He is now the richest person in Japan. That title was deliberate. It described exactly how he ran the company. Yanai built Uniqlo from a single roadside menswear shop in Hiroshima into a retailer with nearly 2,500 stores across 25 countries. Its parent, Fast Retailing, now sells about $22 billion of clothing a year. But most of the road there was losses. He opened a wave of Uniqlo stores in London and had to close most of them within two years. He launched a produce business on the side. It was gone in under two years. For every idea that scaled, several never made it. His argument in the book is blunt. A leader who has only ever won has learned almost nothing. The nine losses show you where the real edges are. The one win pays for all of them. So he kept setting targets people called unreasonable, then treated the failures on the way as tuition instead of shame. What most leaders miss: a culture that punishes every failure also kills every experiment that might have taught you something. Yanai made losing survivable, so his people never stopped trying things. The trap is that many teams cannot tell a loss that is tuition from a loss that is a warning sign. They either fear all of them or ignore all of them. That instinct, knowing which failures to fund again and which to stop, is one of the clearest markers of a team that compounds instead of stalls. Comment REPORT and I'll send you the 2026 Leadership Reality Report.
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Russ Hill shared thisPat Summitt won 1,098 games, the most in college basketball history when she retired. In 38 seasons she never had a losing record, and every player who finished her program graduated. She ran it all on 12 rules she called the Definite Dozen, and the first had nothing to do with basketball. Summitt coached the Tennessee Lady Vols from 1974 to 2012 and won 8 national championships. By any measure, one of the most dominant runs in the history of American sport. The Definite Dozen was the standard underneath all of it. A fixed set of rules every player lived by, on the court and off it. The first was simple. Respect yourself and others. Others on the list read like a leadership manual. Take full responsibility. Discipline yourself so no one else has to. Put the team before yourself. She held that standard for everyone, regardless of talent. Her most gifted player answered to the exact same bar as the last walk-on on the bench. Stars earned no exemption. That is also why the graduation rate was 100 percent. Not most of her players. All of them. Summitt was not chasing only the most talented recruits. She developed people up to a standard she refused to lower, and the talent followed the standard rather than the other way around. Most managers do the reverse. They bend the rules for their best performer, then wonder why accountability erodes everywhere else on the team. The standard you tolerate from your most talented person becomes the real standard for everyone. Your team learns what you actually require by watching who gets a pass. When the bar bends for talent, your best people are often the first to lose respect for the whole thing. That is one of the gaps that costs teams their strongest players, and most leaders never see it happening. Comment REPORT and I'll send you the 2026 Leadership Reality Report.
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Mike T.
Surprised? Agree? Small-business pessimism is easing, and CEO confidence is holding steady as leaders become more optimistic about revenue and profits. What does that signal for the months ahead? How should you respond? Read the latest WSJ/Vistage CEO Confidence Index report to spot the trends that can help you plan smarter and stay ahead. #SmallBusiness #CEO #EconomicTrends #Vistage #WSJ
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