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Stories of Idaho leadership.

Leader profiles, participant spotlights, leadership lessons, and updates from across the Idaho Leaders network.

Leadership Lessons

What Organizational Culture Actually Is

Culture is the set of behaviours an organization rewards, tolerates, and repeats until they require no thought. Everybody inside knows exactly how far it sits from…

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Leadership Lessons

Knowing When to Close Something

Closing well is an act of stewardship, and it is available only while there are still resources to do it with. An organization that continues until…

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Leadership Lessons

The Honest Assessment

Telling a board that the organization may not be viable is the hardest thing a leader does, and delaying it removes the options that would have…

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Leadership Lessons

Cutting Well

One round, deep enough, with the reasoning stated. The slow bleed feels humane and destroys the organization, because a second round teaches everybody capable of leaving…

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Leadership Lessons

The Turnaround Sequence

Stabilise, diagnose, cut, rebuild. The order is not a preference. Each stage depends on something the previous one produces, and reversing any two is how recoverable…

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Leadership Lessons

Recognising Decline

The financial indicators arrive last. Everything that would have told you earlier is qualitative, available for years beforehand, and reported to nobody.

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Leadership Lessons

The Change Sequence Plan

One page: order, owners, checkpoints, and the conditions under which you stop. Written before the announcement, because the reversal criteria have to be set by somebody…

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Leadership Lessons

Making It Stick

A change survives only once it is encoded into hiring, promotion, budget, and calendar. Until then it depends on the leader's continued attention, and that attention…

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