Author: Jim Lukaszewski

Start Eradicating Your Bad News Today and Every Day

The Bad News Eradicator is designed to help you eliminate using defensive words and negative phrases in your speech and writing. Keep this document on your phone. Collect your own set of habitual negative phrases and words. List them on the sheet, then create their positive equivalent and get a whole new life. The goal is to create a positive phrase that has the same or fewer words than the negative phrase.

Why eradicate bad language? Two powerful reasons.

  1. Positive language improves:
  • Your understandability
  • Your credibility
  • Your integrity
  • Your leadership
  • All your relationships

All of which are up to you. Every day.

2. Positive language ensures that you will be:

  • Understood
  • Obeyed
  • Credible
  • Believable
  • More powerful

This discipline constantly and relentlessly translates negative language into the power of positive speech or writing. Whenever you have a moment, simply work through the list and develop equivalent positive phrases for each negative phrase. There are many ways to accomplish this. Sometimes a negative phrase has a half dozen or more positive equivalent options. The goal is to eradicate the negativity and gain a whole new power over your life, and the lives of others.

Look for more bad news eradication conversions in upcoming blog posts. And, if you’d like the full list of 182 conversions, email me at jel@e911.com, subject line: Bad News.

Get in the habit of jotting down your negative words and phrases, translate them and add them to this collection for future reference and to share with colleagues, coworkers, and bosses.

1. “Are not limited to . . .  ”“Include, among others . . .  ”
2. “Are not associated with . . .  ”“Are separate from . . .  ”
3. “Are not necessarily indicative.”
4. “Do not include . . .  ”“Only include . . .  ”
5. “Does not require . . .  ”“Only requires . . .  ”
6. “Does not exceed . . .  ”“Only exceeds when . . .  ”
7. “Does not occur . . .  ”“What occurs is . . .  ”
8. “Don’t hesitate to call.”“Please call.”
9. “Doesn’t hurt to ask.”“Asking is helpful.”
10. “Don’t worry, he won’t care.”“What he cares about is . . .  ”
If you’d like the full list of 182 conversions, email me at jel@e911.com, subject line: Bad News.
  1. Look for more bad news eradication conversions in upcoming blog posts.
  2. Happy to add your favorites to the list.
  3. Send your indispensable negatives, and I’ll suggest a useful, positive alternative.
  4. This small step will make a major change for the better in your life, and those who know you.

©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

Look, liars always know. You always know when you lie. In more than 50 years of working with organizations, institutions, senior people, businesses, agencies, and the news media through an extraordinarily broad spectrum of problems and serious circumstances, I have yet to meet anyone who accidentally lied. Well, I did meet one person years back. He knowingly enhanced his war record and suffered expulsion when it was revealed. All lies are intentional.

Lies & Liars Are Everywhere

Our culture is full of professional and serial liars. Among the biggest are the entertainment industries, including the news. Anyone who uses stories is lying. All stories are fabrications, often containing elements of truth and, probably, equal elements of fabrication. Always beware of stories that are “balanced.” That means they maybe half truth and half something else. One thing is for sure, even if the story is “balanced,” it’s a whole lie.

  1. Lying on the face of it: When was the last time – if there ever was a time – when the movie you saw at the theater matched its description in the newspaper and the promotional hype? These are deceptions at best, lies at worst.
  2. Deception: For that matter, live theater never tells the whole truth about the programs you have paid big bucks to see. They lie even as you sit in your seats waiting for the performance, by omission, commission, negligence, i.e., your program fails to tell you that the “romantic comedy” you’re about to see has three murders, two rapes, a suicide, and an abused, gay child. Theater, movies, and many live events often use one word promotions, “fantastic,” “powerful,” “memorable,” “lovable.” Then when you leave the event, you aren’t handed a survey with an appropriate validation comment, “worthless,” “dull,” “boring,” “misleading,” “unbearable,” “I want a refund.”
  3. Dishonesty: “Breaking News” is the biggest lie in all communications . . .  On CNN the sign never goes off despite the fact that they use the same doctored video footage and repeat stories dozens of times a day, often for weeks. We never know when news clips were produced, originally shown, or how many times the clip has been replayed. This is deceptive and unethical. Now CNN even flashes “Breaking News” signs just before their 10-minute commercials. What are these people thinking? We are hapless victims.
  4. Fabricating news when there isn’t any: This is extremely obvious when a news organization tosses on a bunch of reporters and paid consultants (everybody’s paid in television) rather than actual news subjects, victims, or individuals directly connected or affected by the story material being discussed. How many experts does it take in a day to repeatedly say, “They are still searching for the black boxes.” “They are still bombing.” The staged expert shows are collections of political losers. The mouthpiece news shows are like watching wrestling . . .  a shit show.
  5. Exaggeration: Tiny, inconsequential news stories are blown out of proportion or attach false urgency to stories that have actually played out and been resolved hours, sometimes days, before.
  6. Politics: Don’t get me started.
  7. Fires never go out: The day before the murder of George Floyd, there were some fires in downtown Minneapolis, which were put out almost immediately. But then, when Floyd’s murder occurred, the television news started with the fires from the day before only identified as Minneapolis, Minnesota. It looked as though the Floyd murder was connected somehow to the flames, which had already been put out. Thousands of times after those two events had occurred and were over, whenever the Floyd murder was mentioned, the clip of the city burning was used along with the clip of the Minneapolis police murdering George. I started getting notes from people around the country asking when we’re going to put the fires out and why hasn’t this already been taken care of? This is the lie, especially of CNN, but of all television news. They love fires, and they love to use clips of them because it gets attention. It is a lie. Just a lie pure and simple. This has got to stop or be metered so that we can know the original use and the number of the current use.

These are just samples of well-known lying habits we and our culture tolerate every day.

Liars and fakers always know. When they are caught and confronted, they cry. Yes, people can be naive, simpletons, stupid, or victims . . . But there is something in human nature that sets off the lie alarm or the perpetrator alert. Whether you are 9-years-old or 90-years-old, most of us can spot a lie and a liar, detect a fake and a faker.

An old friend of mine who was in the FBI for a dozen years in New York and the Caribbean. He retired as the head of security for a Fortune 250 company. He used to tell me an FBI truism about criminals; what criminals learn quickly was that it is always better to commit a large crime. The burglars, the bullies, the petty thieves, and pickpockets are crushed by the criminal justice system. Commit an important crime, and you get better treatment, cells, lawyers, press coverage, better meals, and you’re protected from the riffraff.

The same rules apply for celebrity misbehavior, criminal or not, especially the media coverage part. The media loves criminals and important people who do really stupid things, then behave badly.

If you are a colorful criminal, you get special media treatment. If you are a terrorist, you can be canonized and admired by the reporting stirring up the radicalized individuals to act out their fears, angers, and to die gloriously. The victims and survivors get occasional coverage, but the media always returns to the killers, rapists, terrorists, and especially how the terror was carried out. CNN has been broadcasting the world terrorism handbook daily for decades.

The person, organization, business, agency, movement, or foundation with integrity speaks up, stands up, and fesses up immediately. In fact, they seek forgiveness immediately.

©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

One of the most important roles of the trusted strategic advisor is to ask constructive questions that help broaden understanding and move processes and decision making to the next level.

Too often, staff tend to use questions as a means of demeaning, maligning, or harming the advice of other advisors. Here are some examples:

“Why am I/we just hearing about this now?”

“Where is the justification for this request?”

“Where did this come from? How many have done it successfully before?”

“Why wasn’t this circulated earlier for more thorough consideration?”

“Shouldn’t this have gone through IT, finance, or strategic planning first?”

“Who authorized this much off the reservation effort?”

I often refer to this as “Death by Question.” If this is your approach, you need to end it immediately. Insults and needlessly combative negative opposition through questioning are always remembered. What goes around will come back around. Negativity creates needless victims and active adversaries. These injured individuals live forever and always resurface at the worst possible times.

Even though you learn that the senior executive environment is fairly combative and confrontational, your goal has to be to preserve loyalty, develop constructive next steps, and convert criticisms into constructive questions.

Ask Managerially Relevant Questions First

Managerially relevant questions are designed to foster discussion and the productive exploration of ideas. They bring more critically essential understanding to the boss. Here’s a list of those kinds of questions, which are almost always relevant:

  • How does the current situation affect strategy?
  • Which management mistakes could change the strategy?
  • What steps can we take to gain employee commitment to the changing circumstances that are causing some of the problems we must now face?
  • What strategies are available to us to keep shareholder interest aligned with our goals?
  • Can management make the tough decisions and act quickly enough to turn a problem situation into an opportunity or at least into a mitigative circumstance?
  • What resources can management allocate now to deal with the issues at hand or to resolve matters in ways that align with our strategy?
  • What have peer companies done in similar circumstances? Do we care?
  • How will the present circumstances affect our ability to research and develop new products, services, and ideas?
  • Is this a situation that requires adaptation or dramatic shifts and changes?
  • What nonfinancial factors are of greatest concern? What about the direct financial factors?
  • Will customer satisfaction be adversely affected?
  • What are the compliance and ethical implications of the current situation, and what remedial steps will be necessary?
  • Have any rules, regulations, or laws been bent, broken, or compromised?
  • Are there other experts we need to recruit?

Be a Constructive Skeptic

If many of these questions seem confrontational, it’s because they are. This is part of your role as a constructive skeptic, as a productive, constructive questioner. It is a part of the rough-and-tumble world of a top strategic advisor. Get comfortable asking questions that have a constructively confrontational (rather than negative) tone. Every idea can be subject to a clash of thinking and alternative comparisons.

As Always, Have an Answer in Mind for Every Question You Question

In terms of operations, asking questions is an excellent method for triggering incremental improvement. However, the job of the trusted strategic advisor is to simultaneously develop answers and answer strategies.

*©2006-2026, James E. Lukaszewski, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, pages 92-94,” Josey Bass. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

 Nominate a JAM in your life for the South End Award, for behaving like the south end of a northbound horse! Spotting them is easy . . .  you hate them.
  1. Their words, deeds, or actions often vilify, defame, slander, abuse, or malign.
  2. They use sarcasm to ridicule, damage, demean, disparage, dismiss, diminish, or humiliate.
  3. Their words are arrogant, causing needless but intentional pain and suffering.
  4. Their words clearly express frustration, anger, and irritation.
  5. Their words, deeds, or actions are demanding and bullying.
  6. Their words are mostly just plain mean.
  7. Their words intentionally cut and insult.
  8. Their words are corrosive and disrespectful.
  9. Their words are tone deaf and disparaging.
  10. They speak and behave without empathy.
  11. Their words mindlessly and intentionally shame and injure.
  12. Their words, deeds, or actions intentionally injure and hurt.
  13. Their words spread phony accusations and suspicion.
  14. Their words exhibit overbearing and overzealousness.
  15. Their purpose is negative, punitive, defensive, harmful, and restricts others.
  16. Their words exceed the boundaries of decency, civility, and integrity.
  17. All Jackasses lie about everything, even when they say they are being truthful.
  18. All Jackass pathways lead to trouble, prolong problems, corrupt mitigation, defeat reconciliation, and confound resolution, it’s what they want.

If your boss has even one of these attributes, get out of there now!!

JAMs never change; they always promise that they will. It’s a lie. Just wait and see. (see #17). JAMs have been lying so frequently and for so long that they can’t remember what the truth is or was, but all victims do.

The true test of civility and decency is daily visible commitments to verbal and written communications that are predominantly positive, declarative, behaviors that are simple, sensitive, sensible, constructive, positive, helpful, empathetic, and benefit the recipient more than the sender.

True empathy means positive deeds that speak louder and more constructively than words.

Artificial intelligence has generated incredible amounts of optimistic speculation, anticipation and ever-expanding forecasts about the world’s magical future since its debut almost four years ago. The impact of this imperfect, invasive, unfinished technology has changed a lot of thinking. Problems and serious issues are finally coming to light.

I’ve been studying this subject since Generative AI’s introduction. My approach to new innovations and developments is from the perspective of the victims that can and will be created. Reducing the production of victims is at the heart of readiness for crisis response.

Fundamentally, this situation is a mass-casualty problem moving toward becoming a crisis. If it gets to the crisis phase, it will be the victims who control the outcome.

My definition of crisis is short and clear: A crisis is a people-stopping, show-stopping, product-stopping, reputation-redefining, trust-busting event that creates victims—people, animals, living systems—and often, but not always, explosive negative visibility. With AI, we didn’t have long to wait.

There are at least four categories of problems that need to be addressed immediately:

  1. Revealing the hidden software that is activated for the benefit of the tech industry without the knowledge of the owner and user.
  2. Software modifications that put users at risk, especially those that cause addiction.
  3. The urgent need for rules, guidelines, laws, and approved procedures to require and provide permanent oversight and crisis readiness.
  4. Victimization prevention introduction response requirements, including public oversight and participation in the governance of these industries.

Near the end of 2025, two wrongful-death lawsuits involving the suicides of two teenagers allegedly caused by AI addiction were settled out of court. These cases, and more that are in process or on the way, are the tip of an iceberg that will reveal risks, hidden consequences and secret modifications within AI software. Also exposed will be the fuzzy, limited understanding of what AI is. Earlier this year, Anthropic PBC introduced a revised 76-page constitution for its AI model, Claude, to learn and be governed by. In the process, Claude is tutoring Anthropic about itself. AI has created a dozen gigabuck companies and dozens—maybe hundreds—of smaller ventures. Anthropic alone raised $30 billion in 2025. AI is here to stay, with some enormous problems that must be dealt with.

This quote appears in the introduction of Claude’s constitution: “We believe that AI might be one of the most world-altering and potentially dangerous technologies in human history, yet we are developing this very technology ourselves.” What they admitted in the small print was how little they understand about this powerful and highly intelligent software.

When stories of this miracle technology began grabbing the headlines the tech industry, not wanting visibility, reacted by saying, “leave it alone.” That response ignited an explosion of enthusiasm and over-the-top speculation and experimentation. The industry response was like a mother telling her children not to stick their fingers in the little black holes in the wall. And like children, the world decided to do it anyway.

After several years of extraordinary euphoria, litigation against AI tech companies is now growing. Lawsuits for negligence, design defects and failure to warn parents about the dangers, especially to young children, posed by AI chatbots. This includes the alleged behavior leading to teen suicides, self-harm and exposure to sexualized content, plus inappropriate data collection and deepfakes. In one case, a mother alleged that a chatbot relentlessly generated sexually explicit questions for her 11-year-old daughter, who is likely to be in assisted care for the rest of her life.

Businesses are already salivating at the prospect of replacing tens of thousands of humans, especially in jobs where human judgment is required. Quality Control was identified as a candidate. Bots can learn the rules, regulations and standards so the humans who enforce compliance with their pesky human factors like ethics, conscience, rightness, wrongness can be gone.

An entirely new communication sub-industry the tech companies didn’t ask for has appeared to assist these companies in covering their tracks when bad news appears and can develop ethical excuses and overlook suspect software behavior. I follow Will Durant’s definition of ethics, “seeking and finding ideal behavior.” With AI we witness autonomous intentional inappropriate digital behaviors, label them, with little intention, effort, energy or resources committed to resolve them. “Hallucination” comes to mind. Cute but annoying, intentional and inappropriate. It’s a euphemism for bots fabricating and lying.

There are organizations studying ways to police and assert control over AI. The Rand Corporation recently published an important report, “Four Governance Approaches to Securing Advanced AI,” recommending:

  1. Government-enforced AI security standards for high-risk model developers.
  2. Government-led AI developer authorization programs conditioning federal use on security compliance.
  3. Industry-led AI security certification to promote adoption of common standards.
  4. Self-regulation combined with increased government and industry collaboration on security practices.

2026 will see significantly more AI-related civil litigation. Little will be learned from the civil cases that will be settled out of court, the outcomes sealed, protected by NDAs. Published reports indicate that multiple families in different states have filed or will file lawsuits against generative artificial intelligence developers for contributing to teens’ mental health problems. Government regulation is needed so violations can be litigated and punished.

This industry can’t be lawless until laws, rules, regulations and enforceable guardrails are in place. The tech industry prefers to be untouchable for as long as possible.

In August 2025, the Attorney Generals of 44 jurisdictions wrote to the CEOs of the 10 largest AI companies. The letter began, “We, the undersigned Attorneys General of 44 jurisdictions, write to inform you of our resolve to use every facet of our authority to protect children from exploitation, predatory, and artificial intelligence products.” This organization of AGs can be remarkably collaborative. Remember, these are prosecutors.

My perspective comes as an observer, witness and victim of the current situation, looking for ways to reduce the victimization this technology causes.

A few ways to reduce victimization come from Thom Hartmann’s book, “The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink,” Copyright © 2025 by Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

What can we do now?

“To start, we must treat the regulation of AI and the people who own/use/deploy it as a democratic survival issue. That means:

  • Banning the use of deepfakes in political ads
  • Enforcing transparency on algorithmic decision-making
  • Creating public, open-source alternatives to corporate-controlled models
  • Creating disinformation-catching infrastructure as we would biological or nuclear weapons (that are also not just dangerous, but potentially civilization-ending)
  • Demanding that social media outlets publish their algorithms so we can see how we’re being manipulated”

Tech companies are quietly influencing and controlling every aspect of their lives. You can see their influence everywhere. The bad news for this industry will grow as increasing numbers of victims are created and reported. Now is the time for the principal tech companies to organize and step forward to publicly help guide the massive disclosures and exposures needed to build an atmosphere of trust based on a collaborative approach: Vigorous problem solving now combined with rigorous public oversight and participation now. When trust is gone, the vacuum fills with fear.

I believe in the “Do it Now” theory of problem management. Fix it now. Challenge it now. Change it now. Reveal it now. Repair it now. The sooner you do the things that need to be done, the sooner trust can emerge. Trust is the absence of fear. Managing problems has only three options: doing nothing, doing something and doing something more. The tech industry will be in the third category, not counting the ethical expectations they have allowed to awaken. Failure to act on today’s problems today is how crisis is born.

Crisis is the sudden but predictable and almost always preventable presence of victim creating chaos. It will be the victims and their survivors who determine the outcome and choose the replacement magicians.

©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden. Originally published in O’Dwyer’s, February 23, 2026.

The toughest part of trust survival is ensuring the positive relationships that preserve trust. The three crucial needs are inoculation (the intentional discussion of trust), cultivation (ongoing conversations and examples of trust), and motivation (reminders of trust maintenance using our own examples of how we build and maintain trust strategies).

Trust is a fragile magical substance like the lignin in trees – it’s the glue that holds the fiber of relationships together. Trust is the most fragile and vulnerable agent in any relationship. Trust begins with a lexicon, a vocabulary of trust concepts.

The Trust Lexicon

Apology: The atomic energy of empathy. Admission and taking on the responsibility pain and suffering caused.

Candor: Truth with an attitude delivered right now. Truth plus the facts, truth plus some perspective, truth that reflects the value of other observations on the same set of circumstances and facts.

Credibility: Always conferred by others on those whose past behavior, track record, and accomplishments warrant it.

Empathy: Actions that speak louder than words ever can.

Fear: The absence of trust.

Integrity: Uncompromising adherence to a code of values by people, products, and companies, with the attributes of credibility, candor, and sincerity.

Sympathy: The ongoing verbalization of regret, embarrassment, or personal humiliation, promptly conveyed, i.e., feeling truly sorry for someone in pain, stopping short of taking the blame.

Trust: The absence of fear; a feeling of reliability in adverse situations that reduces the pain and impact of mistakes because trust cushions the impact.

©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

How does bad news start? Often, as the result of defensive, negative answers to questions. Defensive responses guarantee tough, embarrassing, irritating, even insulting, follow-up questions from the media, colleagues, and stakeholders; and shuts down employee progress and productivity.

How do you avoid being defensive? First, try to eliminate the use of negative words – can’t, shouldn’t, won’t, don’t, mustn’t, not, no. Second, try to use positive power words – interesting, unusual, different, unique, powerful, essential, urgent. Negative responses always invite debates in negative terms.

The discipline of using positive language is the most powerful tool of leadership. Positive language leads to understandability, credibility, contention-reduction, and truthfulness. One of the most telling indicators of impending or existing leadership failure is the use of confusing, conflicting, erroneous, or damaging negative language. Leadership and achievement are about the future. Positive language is leadership language to the future.

To reduce conflict, eradicate these defensive answers and others like them. Instead consider a positive alternative.

Negative Statements Positive Alternatives
I don’t like that idea. What I’d like to see is . . . .
I don’t see the connection. Here’s what I think.
I wouldn’t say that. I would say . . . .
It can’t be done. There must be another way.
It didn’t happen that way. Here’s what happened.
It won’t work. What will work is . . . .
It’s against company policy. The company policy is . . . .
It’s never been done before. This is the first time I’ve heard of this.
It’s not my responsibility. This area is (blank’s) responsibility.
It’s too much trouble. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Our boss would never buy it. Here’s what the boss would do.
Our customers wouldn’t like it. Our customers prefer . . . .
Our people would never do that. Let’s ask people what they would like to do.
No comment. When there’s something to say, I will say it.
Not my job, unfortunately. My job is . . . .
Not that again. We’ve heard this before; it’s been rejected.
That isn’t our problem. It’s really (blank’s) problem.
That’s impossible. Here’s what is possible.
That’s not a good question. A better question is . . . .
That’s not our fault. Let’s find out whose fault it is.
We aren’t a bad company. We are a (blank) company.
We can’t change that fast. It will take longer to fix.
We can’t talk about it. When we can talk about it, we will.
We couldn’t have known. If we’d known, we would have . . . .
We did all right without it. Other options, such as (blank) worked better.
We didn’t know. We found out afterward.
We don’t care. Here’s what we care about.
We don’t have enough studies. We need better studies.
We don’t have the resources. All the resources are allocated elsewhere.
We don’t have the time. We are out of time.
We won’t have the money. Our resources are already committed.
We’re just too busy, we can’t. Let’s discuss priorities and make changes.
We’re not ready for that. It’s too early for that approach.
What you’re not saying is . . . What you’re really saying is . . . .
Why won’t you use everything I say? You need to do and say what I tell you.

Remember: There are three ways to answer questions. You can be positive, negative, or blah. Whichever style you use, it takes about the same amount of energy to answer. So, be positive! The benefit? It’s nearly impossible to be positive and defensive at the same time.

©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

7 Strategies to Wage Peace and Reduce Contention

Wherever there is conflict, confrontation, and crisis, there is contention. In today’s social media-dominated world, working to resolve important issues, the questions and decisions often become very contentious and ends only after one side is beaten and leaves the field; there is a mutual withdrawal; or most commonly, one side wins and the other side stays angry.

Winning, it turns out, is rarely about getting 51 percent of individuals or groups to concur or comply; it’s about getting 51 percent of those who matter. This thinking leads to an Axiom and a Law.

Lukaszewski’s 1st Axiom of Winning in Contentious Situations:

Almost every decision of any consequence is made despite serious, often powerful collateral contentiousness. The media can be mad or support someone else, some of your neighbors can be irritated, even your employees can be against you, but stay the course, be optimistic, be constructive in your approach, and you can win.

Lukaszewski’s Law of Success and Survival: 

Neither the media, your severest critic, angry neighbors, irritated legislators, nor regulators can truly stop what you have set out to accomplish. The most significant damage is almost always caused by the intervention, timidity, or hesitation of an overoptimistic boss or Board; well-meaning friends, “supporters,” or relatives; and failure to address the true issues raised by those who feel victimized.

These seven principles and components of a strategic approach for winning:

  1. Wage peace every day: Reduce the production of critics, enemies, and victims at every opportunity. Talk tough, act tough, or threaten and you will have war for sure. War produces casualties, victims, and new critics, all of whom will live long enough to destroy, delay, or deny your best efforts.
  2. Reduce contention: Contention is the absence of agreement. Work for agreement, incrementally, every day. Stop causing contention. Offer constructive options.
  3. Seek permission rather than entitlement: Getting permission depends upon gaining public agreement and consent. Avoid and resist anything, anyone, or any decision that delays, denies, disables, or damages the permission process. Act like you’re entitled to a public decision and you’ll really be stopped cold.
  4. Control testosterosis: Anger, irritation, frustration, and confrontation cloud judgment, damage relationships, cause misunderstandings, create critics and naysayers, and rarely accomplish anything good. Stop taking contrary views and negative messages personally. The only one who is suffering from this is you. No one else cares. Remain calm and carry on, constructively.
  5. Be democratic: Recognize and leverage from the patterns of democracy, and avoid political games and game players. All those people have their own egos and agendas. They will dump you in a minute.
  6. Work as directly as you can: Like most everything that matters in life, agreement is generally achieved when the principals commit to sit down face-to-face, bring in other affected parties, and directly work out their differences. Engagement builds stakeholder support and reduces the production of critics.
  7. Communicate intentionally: Success depends on simple, sensible, positive, declarative, and constructive communication, common sense, direct, prompt action, empathy, transparency, and engagement. Explain and constantly remind everyone of your communication and behavior intentions so they will know what to expect and how to behave in return.

Over the 40 years I’ve been helping clients get public permission, communities, critics, individuals, and organized opposition have consistently grown more intense and powerful in their ability to stop or significantly alter the plans of even the worthiest projects and powerful companies. With social media and the ability to marshal the power of AI, the number of dedicated human opposers will continue to grow.

The big lesson is that you can often achieve your objectives with people being upset, the media angry, your employees split, and in communities that may be more divided than unified. This document is the recipe for success.

Winning depends on altitude (keeping calm), attitude (focusing on the goal), and avoiding distractions.

  1. Candor: Public trust depends on receiving information well ahead of their actual need for it. The most toxic strategy is to fail to answer every question, provide key information after it is truly needed, or work to disparage, demean, or discredit those who oppose or have concerns about the project, and go to the trouble of making them public. Or, refuse to communicate. Silence will be toxic to you.
  2. Patience: Accomplishing your goals is going to take longer than you ever imagined, even to achieve interim milestones.
  3. Resources: Success will defy financial management. More money will be spent, requested, or required for things one never imagined would happen.
  4. Stomach Power: Set your stomach for all the lies, misunderstandings, deceptions, bad behaviors, and misrepresentations created by angry, frightened, unqualified people and victims with real power, combined with a willing media, and the outrageous motives they will ascribe to you, with all of your explanations, good work, and intentions just bouncing off.
  5. Staying Power: Community decision making is slow, sometimes silly, even stupid, sloppy, expensive, confusing, and emotionally driven. Settle back and go with the flow. Kick up, kick out, and you’ll go nowhere pretty quickly.
  6. Pragmatism: Winning means constantly waging peace and re-acquiring community consent daily. It means relentlessly doing the doable, knowing the knowable, getting the getable, and achieving the achievable. 
  7. Recognize Victory: Contention often masks victory. Be alert, be helpful, to ready to capture victory when it first appears.

If democracy is one thing, it is a process. Those who propose, if they can stay the course, can expect to achieve less than they had hoped (sometimes far less), but usually wind up with more than they need to successfully achieve their objectives, which are likely to change as the community has its say. If you believe that you are entitled to get what you are asking for, you are entitled only to disappointment.

Your goal is to help work preemptively, constructively, and productively to shorten the timelines and lower the barriers that are inevitable byproducts of public decision making. Wage peace and win earlier, if winning is possible at all.

©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

  1. Inconsistency
  2. Real Expertise
  3. Focus
  4. Laggership and Entropy
  5. Pragmatism

How to begin assessing your strategic capacity? The concept of the Five Virtues of a Strategist is all about how this is done, and you want to keep doing it as your career progresses.

You’ll need to ask yourself critical questions about how you approach ideas, questions, opportunities, dangers, and challenges.

Use these questions as tools to develop your personal behaviors. Systematically questioning yourself leads to a better understanding of why you choose to be strategic—in other words, what your intentions are for thinking and acting strategically.

The result, if you organize it, tends to fall into five specific behavior or intention categories I refer to as the Virtues of the Strategist. Virtues or principles and guidelines for your thinking, behavior, and recommendations. Sometimes they are also expressions of your intentions:

  1. Inconsistency
  2. Real Expertise
  3. Focus
  4. Laggership and Entropy
  5. Pragmatism

Another benefit of this personal questioning process is that it will help you determine just how strategic you really are or can be. To help accomplish this task, assess yourself against each of the following strategic thinking guidelines or virtues outlined in this series.

Virtue #1: Inconsistency

The strategist is intentionally inconsistent. In strategy, inconsistency is a virtue. Strategists relentlessly question all assumptions. The goal, always, is to identify a different approach, to discover new options, to try new and unconventional combinations of ideas and concepts.

Inconsistency leads to constructive surprise.

Are you predictable? Do you approach most problems in the very same way? Is what you recommend and think about virtually the same in every situation? Are you bound up every time, looking at everything through the lens of your staff function?

Be intentionally different. Grab the wrong end of the telescope. Think about things from a different perspective, intentionally, relentlessly. This is a state of mind.

Advisors of the highest value to leaders and managers are often those who can see things from an entirely different perspective. When you study classic military strategist—Sun Tzu, Von Clausewitz, B. H. Liddell Hart, and others—all stress that one key to victory is acting differently than the opposition expects.

Here’s the story of where three unexpected actions led to a faster, better, and more humane result. A client of mine operating an educational facility for children with special needs was in a situation where a teacher mistakenly loaned a student a videotape of sexually explicit material, which was subsequently shown to the student’s family. The child’s father was so irate that he rushed to the school, beat up the teacher, hired a lawyer, and threatened to sue, all in the first three hours of the incident. The facility’s standard procedure for responding to allegations was to sit tight, let a little time pass, and see if cooler heads could prevail or if a simple solution might emerge.

My approach was to move much more aggressively. The allegations from this incident were potentially very explosive. Having worked through similar situations in the past, I had learned one big lesson: bad situations like this one ripen badly. Highly emotional situations such as this one, unless dealt with positively and fast, trigger anger, irritation, suspicion, and emotion, which then grow and feed on each other.

Because the head of the school was a man about the same age as the father and both had boys the same age, I suggested that the president immediately write a letter of sympathy, explanation, and apology to this father and offer to meet promptly to work out whatever problems might have been caused by the event. After a brief conversation with the school’s attorneys, it was agreed that the letter should be sent directly to the victim’s father.

As I expected, the father’s attorney called, boiling mad, and demanded to know whose idea it was to send this letter. He threatened to file an ethics violation with the local bar association against legal counsel. However, I knew that because the president of the school was not a lawyer, the father of the boy was not an attorney, and I was not an attorney, we were not subject to the rules of legal procedure. Had we followed legal procedure, it might have taken days, weeks, or even longer to schedule a meeting to talk about the situation. As it turned out, this very prompt action on the day of the event triggered series of meetings that began within seventy-two hours, and a settlement occurred within five working days. Because of its speed and effectiveness, this rapid approach became standard operating procedure should similar events occur. The cost savings for legal and consulting fees can be enormous. Settlements are achieved quickly and fairly, and, generally, those affected remain clients and customers. The settlements are generous, empathetic, and, in many cases like this, long-term medical and psychological assistance is provided. The victims are relieved.

Think differently, move faster, make prompt, simple, sensible, doable, and appropriate suggestions or recommendations. Strategists generally ignore the conventional wisdoms and conforming customary solutions. I often refer to this technique as constructive surprise.

©2006-2026, James E. Lukaszewski, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor,” Josey Bass. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

For more than 40 years I have been teaching and pleading about ways to handle crises effectively. Given that the number of crises has remained the same during that time frame, I’m going to take a different approach.

But first, let me share my philosophy about crisis management and mismanagement.

How Problems Become Crises

Almost all crises begin as smaller, manageable organizational or leadership problems. Problems migrate into crises for three crucial reasons:

  1. Management ignores problematic issues in their formative stages before actual crises begin happening.
  2. All crises create victims, and they are intentionally ignored, and often defensively attacked. It is a behavior that is learned both in management school and as a practice by upper-level managers and leaders.  I refer to this often as “cohort domination.” It’s like calling your cohort member or mom before you call the fire department.
  3. Knowing intuitively what the correct steps are likely to be, but refusing to go in that direction, because it’s irritating, it’s an admission of failure, or you want to try something different just for the hell of it. That’s called, “Risk addiction.”

The Seven Intentional Bungles

  1. Offensive Defensiveness: It feels good to stick it to the media, it’s okay to look like a perpetrator, and smart people will admire this approach. Even though there will be criticism, I’ll take that risk. The risk is taken because the odds are only 50/50 that the situation will even be seen as a crisis.
  2. Stalling: Look, doing nothing is equal in potential outcomes to doing something. Even though there will be difficulty in explaining why it took so long to talk, to explain, to respond, to care for victims, you’re tired of having people you don’t know (particularly the media) fail to commiserate with your problems about which they know absolutely nothing.
  3. Denial, Denial, Denial: Taking action is too often a demonstration of weakness and lack of confidence. You can’t let a bunch of questionable victims, people you don’t believe, and money grabbers dictate your response activities and those of your organization.
  4. Ignore the Complainers: Reporters and activists are bellyachers and make things up. People fail to take into consideration all the things we contribute to the economy–jobs and opportunity. The victims just want money and attention, which they haven’t earned and do not deserve. We are real Victims, too. Why don’t the media and our critics see that?
  5. Testosterosis: “My attorney is right to suggest that we need to punch back rather than cop out.” Refusing to give in to specious demands, especially to people who simply have uninformed views, is a legitimate management response. Landing the first punch will keep them off-balance and make them go away faster.
  6. Being Decisively Indecisive: If we appear to take responsibility, bad things are going to happen to us. We will look like weaklings to our industry, colleagues, and cohort. We don’t want to be the one to set a precedent that burdens the industry or triggers copycat behaviors.
  7. Empty Empathy: There are worse perpetrators. The real culprits must be defined as people who can and should take the blame for what’s happening. It can’t be us. No one is going to be allowed to stick this on me, or on my company. Who is looking for them?

    There are many more eligible bungles; but do even one or two of these listed above, and your crisis status will only accelerate and become more complex.

    ©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.