Leadership Step by Step

How the Course Works

You learn from doing, away from the computer, with people and projects you care about.

Leadership Step by Step has four units:

• Understanding Yourself
• Leading Yourself
• Understanding Others
• Leading Others

Each has a series of exercises that build on each other. Most exercises take under an hour, though you can keep practicing them and follow up for a lifetime.

To progress from one exercise to the next you write a reflection, which many students describe as the best part of the course. Reflecting leads you to retain and generalize what you learned by doing. You also learn from reading everyone else’s reflections on their unique experiences.

You will finish with what makes today’s top leaders successful and what companies ahead of the curve like Google look for: Experiences, skills, and beliefs that show in everything you say and do. You will be able to lead independent of authority, able to lead your managers, people outside your company, outside a hierarchy.

Every relationship in your life will improve—in business, with family, with significant others, and with yourself.

If you do the exercises you will learn. If you don't you won't, simple as that. Don't register if you don't plan on doing them, but don't kid yourself that listening to lectures or MOOCs will create success. I can give you direction and you will develop discipline by doing them, but I can't do them for you. What leader became great through inaction?

It’s a symptom of our time. Society’s path to success: work for others and follow.

My client, a successful CFO and Ivy League MBA, captured where it leads: “If I continue on this path, in ten years I’m going to retire rich, successful, and with no idea what my life was about.”

You get one life. Don’t waste it.

Traditional academics can’t teach integrity, self-awareness, empathy, compassion, and how to create meaning, value, purpose, and passion. Nor can MOOCs. They’re passive. Leadership Step by Step teaches you to develop self-awareness, empathy, compassion, integrity and how to create meaning, value, purpose, and passion in yourself and others. Great leadership become great through experience.

Schools teach you to follow, not lead. Lectures, case studies, and papers teach passive following, even at Ivy League business schools. So do MOOCs. They teach you to adopt their values, not find yours. They’re expensive, take years, and surround you with finance information relevant only to bankers. Many top bankers don’t have MBAs anyway. Google no longer requires a college diploma because they found it doesn’t predict success. Many of today’s top leaders left school: Branson, Zuckerberg, Oprah, Musk, Schwarzenegger, Combs, Jobs, Dell, Gates, … the list goes on.

Ronald Reagan graduated from the modest Eureka College with a C average and is ranked a top ten President. George W. Bush, with a Harvard MBA and Yale BA, ranks in the bottom ten.

Leadership Step by Step gives you that experience. Through an integrated, comprehensive progression of exercises that develop the skills, experience, and beliefs of successful, effective leaders safely, without the wrong turns and costs of mistakes of going it alone. You’ll work hard but enjoy it. You’ll make mistakes—that’s how we learn—but in a supportive community.