Leadership in the Moment

An executive at Safeway, Inc. one of the largest supermarket retailers, spoke to investors last week giving his positive “spin” on economic trends.  They have noticed that shoppers are trading up to more expensive items such as better wines and going from plain coffee to upscale drinks such as fancy frappichinos with whipped cream.  The executive said that these examples “suggests to me that we’re at or near the bottom of this whole thing and that would be good for all of us if that’s true.”  Is this a reliable harbinger of economic recovery?  Perhaps the coffee upgrades could simply be the effect of caffeine which makes us appear more industrious. If so, that would in itself make consumers more upbeat and positive about spending.  Is this suggestion simplistic or a plausible recovery indicator?        

What if you were asked to write about your Personal Best Leadership Moment (as we do in The Leadership Challenge® workshops) but it had to be in 140 characters or less?  That would indeed be a challenge.  In the San Francisco area paper today, the question was posed, “Imagine if Twitter was around 100’s of years ago?” They then proceeded to quote famous writers and proposed how their messages would read today in Twitter.  One was by Martin Luther King in his “I have a Dream” speech.  If it were “tweeted” today it might look like this:  “U R equal. I am equal.  We R all equal.  My dream is that we have no more h8.,”   Twitter certainly has its place as a quick exchange of thought in social networking but it’s not a place to find value in communicating with the full depth of the English language.  Wht do U Thnk?