Lance Armstrong’s colossal house of cards recently came crashing down during two well-orchestrated interviews with Oprah Winfrey on national television.  For the media, it was a ratings extravaganza fueled by the public flogging of a once-revered sports legend.  For cycling insiders, it was the lancing of a boil that had been festering for years.  And for many Americans and others around the world it was the humiliating discovery that the hero they had worshipped and cheered through one victory after another was a fraud, a little like learning that your favorite uncle is a crook and a pedophile.

What makes Lance Armstrong’s downfall so bitter for us is that we had elevated him to such stellar heights.  He was the celebrity cancer survivor, the solemn spokesman for defeating death. A fierce competitor, driven and strong, he exemplified what you could make of yourself if you were as focused and determined and disciplined as he was.  He created Livestrong Foundation, the cancer nonprofit that raised the hopes of hundreds of thousands of cancer sufferers.  He won the Tour de France, the granddaddy of cycling’s grueling races, seven consecutive times.  He was everything we hoped we could be if only we were more like him.

Dylan Redwine is a 13-year-old boy who vanished from his father’s home in Vallecito, Colorado, on November 19, the morning after he had arrived for a court-ordered holiday visit with his father. He hasn’t been seen since.

I have wanted to write about Dylan since this situation developed, but I wasn’t sure what to say. As a person naturally inclined toward problem solving, my tendency is to speculate about what happened to him and try to solve the mystery. But I am not privy to what the investigators know, so my speculations would be uninformed and potentially damaging. I can say that our community has been stunned by his disappearance, and he remains in our hearts and on our minds.

His Missing Person notice has been posted on many store windows. You can’t walk around town without seeing it. And our local newspaper, The Durango Herald, publishes periodic updates on the case. The latest has nothing new to report on Dylan’s disappearance but notes that the reward for information leading to an arrest or information about his whereabouts has grown to $20,000.

Debra and I recently traveled to Thailand as a point of departure for three weeks of hiking and sightseeing in Bhutan and Nepal. Bangkok and its environs are home to 14 million people. Thailand has a population of 67 million, 20 million of whom are ethnic Chinese. The vast majority of people are Buddhist, and that is reflected in the traditional Thai manner of greeting and departing--the namaste. The tourist-facing people are invariably polite, as you would expect, but we experienced that gentleness in everyday people on the street, too.  Here, boys are swimmng in one of Bangkok's many canals.
 

I am pleased to announce that the Second edition of Adaptive Coaching has just been published. The first edition of the book has been a great success, thanks to the many readers who have found it to be a useful and practical guide for improving their coaching effectiveness. But a decade has passed since the first edition was published, and the world of coaching has advanced considerably during that period. Coaching has become one of the most popular means of developing people in organizations, and the number of people who call themselves coaches has multiplied exponentially. This edition of the book retains everything that made the first edition so useful and adds chapters that will help readers enhance their coaching skills even further.

Like most people, I was horrified to learn of the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, on Friday, July 20, 2012. It’s become evident in the days since that the killer carefully plotted his attack, prepared for months—stockpiling weapons, ammunition, and body armor for himself—and then methodically carried out his plan with ruthlessness and brutality. He murdered twelve innocent people and wounded fifty-eight more. And he rigged his apartment with explosions and sophisticated triggering mechanisms designed to inflict harm on the police officers who would go there to investigate. In the days following this random act of violence, people have been struggling to make sense of what happened and why he did it.

Louis Freeh’s just-released report on the Penn State sexual abuse scandal leaves little doubt that the senior leaders at Penn State, including revered football coach Joe Paterno, were culpable by enabling Jerry Sandusky to continue his abuse of boys for over a decade. Assuming that Freeh’s findings are true—and we have no reason to question his integrity, or the thoroughness of his team’s investigations, or Sandusky’s guilt—then what we have witnessed is a colossal and egregious failure of leadership.

On one of his trips to Durango, Mick had crossed the back roads of Nevada and come into southern Utah on one of those dry summer days when the air is as hot as the pavement and the dust, fine as talcum powder, seeps into your pores. He rode into the only gas station in a place that would be a ghost town if the few people there had had the sense to leave. While he was gassing up, a pickup came to a stop on the other side of the gas pump. When the driver’s door opened, a dog jumped out and ran about a dozen steps and peed. Then the driver emerged. He wore old jeans and a pair of shit-kicker boots, a red cotton shirt, faded from too many washings, and a red bandanna wound tightly around his head. His face looked like it had been etched with a putty knife, and he had long braided gray pigtails. Damn if it wasn’t Willie Nelson. Here in this spit-in-the-road-of-a-town in southern Utah. Damn.

CEO Scott Thompson’s recent resignation from Yahoo—after only four months on the job—is a stark reminder that leadership legitimacy can be lost in a heartbeat if the leader’s integrity is called into question. Moreover, that breach of integrity does not have to be substantial. In Thompson’s case, it was the claim, in his biography, that he had dual degrees from Stonehill College in accounting and computer science (at the time he graduated, Stonehill did not offer a computer science degree).

Thompson, who was named Yahoo’s CEO in January 2012, came to the company with solid technology credentials and a long track record as a successful executive. Before joining Yahoo, he had been the chief technology officer and then president of PayPal and, before that, the executive vice president of technology solutions for Inovant, a subsidiary of Visa. Earlier in his career, he worked for Coopers and Lybrand, where he specialized in information technology solutions for financial services clients. In each of these roles, Thompson had demonstrated not only a grasp of technology but the ability to lead people and organizations successfully. He would appear to have been an ideal executive to turn around a struggling technology giant like Yahoo.