While you may require some time to understand what is going on you can immediately implement a strategic five step first response. This strategy is often referred to as The Golden Hour Strategy.

As I have observed for several decades, why advisors fail to get the attention and ear of the bosses and leaders they are counseling, it is readily apparent that the vast majority of these internal advisors or external consultants know very little about bosses as people, as leaders, nor do they know the pattern of behavior of people at the top.

I suggested to the recently elected CEO that it might be wise to develop a new strategic approach that more closely matched his probable tenure rather than to revise the current plan by establishing an optimistic set of principles and ideas that wouldn’t pass the straight-face test, no matter how sincerely they were developed.  The meeting immediately got down to business.

I keep hearing communication colleagues pining for set of rules for social media like those in legacy journalism i.e. critical thinking skills, validated sources of information and quotes, insertion of editorial judgment steps, off the record conventions and ethical principles.

It would seem logical if you are addressing or advising senior leaders and CEOs to be somewhat familiar with what they do, what they know, what they think, and where they come from.

Leave it to the Wall Street Journal (Business Education, 2-6-13) to come up with the headline “Does an “A” in Ethics Have Any Value?”

In crisis, silence comes in many colors and in two varieties: intentional and cultural. All strategies of silence have the same outcome: toxic shock to the perpetrator. Silence strategies are ethical impediments to finding the truth.

Key takeaways from Paul Johnson’s book, Churchill.

For some time now, I’ve been conducting my own completely unscientific “poll” of senior advisors, asking them, from their experience, to provide up to 10 attributes of executives with integrity. Here’s what they said…

When it comes to errors, goofiness, and the insensitivity of top managers, there must be a part of the business school campus that is intentionally avoided—the school of sensible answers and actions.