On November 19, 1863, United States' President Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd gathered to dedicate the cemetery for the soldiers killed at the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg four months earlier. At just 271 words, Lincoln's speech was much shorter than the two-hour, 13,000 word speech that the event's main speaker, former Governor and Senator Edward Everett, delivered before Lincoln. Lincoln's wo...

Before he was elected as South Africa’s president, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela spent 27 years in prison, from his mid-forties to his early seventies. Eighteen of those years were spent on Robben Island, a former island leper colony turned into a brutal prison. Instead of breaking him, that ordeal shaped Mandela into the extraordinary man that emerged whe...

I recently walked the ancient Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail across Spain. Every pilgrim (peregrino) has a passbook to get stamps along the way to prove they are doing the trail. My pilgrim passport hangs proudly on my wall and gives me something more than just memories: it lists 7 values each pilgrim should live by while on the trail. I've found t...

A values statement can be a very useful thing to keep an organization centered on its purpose as it grows and expands. The value statement identifies the few core values and beliefs that the organization has embedded in its core t...