During its heyday in the 1980s, the Van Halen band required host arenas to provide a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed. David Lee Roth, former front man for the band, confirmed the story in his autobiography, Dan and Chip Heath report in their new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. Here’s how Van Halen used M&Ms as an early warning system of potential technical failure.

Take time to assess your tax situation. By making a few moves midway through the year, you can cut your 2010 tax bill by hundreds or thousands of dollars. On the other hand, if you wait until the end of the year to seize these tax-saving opportunities, it’s often too late. Here are 10 timely techniques to contemplate.

On April 4, 1968, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy stepped to the microphone in a poor neighborhood in Indianapolis and stunned the crowd with the news that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed. The sheriff had tried to persuade Kennedy to cancel his appearance, saying it was too dangerous to address an African-American crowd. Kennedy refused.

Strategic planning has always accounted for changing circumstances. But leaders have now shifted their planning habits to allow for on-the-fly adjustments. For example, Office Depot began updating its annual budget monthly at the start of 2009. “This downturn has changed the way we will think about our business,” says Steve Odland, Office Depot’s chairman and chief executive.

Richard Nixon suffered the stigma of being the only U.S. president forced to resign, and his leadership suffered greatly under the weight of Watergate. But the disgraced president did fire off one flare of good leadership as his administration crashed. Ironically, it ensured the end of his presidency.

Before you act, think through how your leadership in one sphere will translate into leadership in another. Consider the case of British diplomat Roger Casement, who documented the rubber industry’s cruelty to indigenous people in the Congo and Amazon and was knighted in 1911. But five years later, the British hanged him for conspiring with the Germans on behalf of Irish independence.

Overtime pay. Discrimination. Family leave. Harassment ... Federal employment laws govern all of these issues – and many more – that you deal with at some point in your career.  It's important for supervisors and managers to know the basics of how to comply with those laws. Here's a list of the top 10 most important federal employment laws:

One day at about 2 p.m., David Silverman had an “Aha!” moment. He and his two-person staff hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Silverman didn’t care about lunch. He was focused on their project, which for the first time felt like his project. For the first time, Silverman felt like an executive. In truth, however, he had taken only the first step toward leadership: ownership.

They called him Mr. Hockey for good reason. He was one of the sport’s icons. “If people someday compare me to Gordie Howe, it will be the biggest compliment they could pay me,” says Wayne Gretzky, who broke several of Howe’s records. “If you ask me about my idol, there’s just one: Gordie.”

Western CEOs could learn a thing or two from their Indian counterparts, say the authors of new research on the difference between Indian and Western bosses. Among the most salient lessons: Lead with a sense of social purpose; invest in employees; act as a role model.

Everybody knows that leaders are optimists. Here are nine quotations and a little story for when your glass drops to the halfway mark. For starters: “The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious of the rose.” — Kahlil Gibran

The oil spill that has threatened both the sea life and the economy in the Gulf Coast illustrates two major flaws in the leadership of British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward: He allowed the company to run ahead of the technology available, and he blindly trusted outsourcing.

If your employee handbook hasn’t been updated in the past six months, it’s out of date. Because employment laws and your business are in a constant state of flux, it’s critical to keep your personnel policies up-to-date. In light of recent legal changes, be sure your policies include these updates:

If you want your organization’s employees to work more productively, pay more attention to them. During the economic crisis of 2009, the most effective business strategy turned out to be increased supervision and management of employees.

If you believe Nike president Charlie Denson, sticking with Tiger Woods as a Nike product endorser has more to do with Woods’ reputation as a golfer than as a philanderer. “A lot of people seem to overlook that very, very important component of the relationship with the athlete,” says Denson. “If we’re going to create the greatest product in the world, it’s the greatest athletes in the world [who] are going to confirm that.”

Manage your company’s reputation by starting a two-way dialogue with consumers ... Follow the recipe of Jordan Zimmerman, founder of Zimmerman Advertising, to increase productivity ... Be more innovative by spending at least 15 to 30 minutes per day jotting down questions that “challenge the status quo” in your company or industry, recommends Brigham Young University Professor Jeff Dyer.

John Chambers, Cisco's CEO, survived both the Internet bubble burst in 2000 and the financial bubble burst in 2008, when so many of his colleagues did not. He refused to let the huge computer company stagnate. Chambers pushed Cisco to innovate in videoconferencing, idea generation and sharing, and acquisitions.

Whether or not the marketplace has you feeling backed into a corner, ask yourself several strategic questions. For starters: What’s the most important thing? There’s no right or wrong answer, but your market may have changed. Spot it and hit the reset button.

How can you increase employee health and decrease health costs? Many of America’s best companies have found that a few best practices do a remarkably good job of improving employee health and controlling health care expenses.

A statewide leadership program in Kansas is training people how to get things done. Bob Sage is a case in point. Promoted to police chief of Rose Hill in 2002, he wanted to learn new ways to teach and lead. “Cops are alpha males, and everyone is trying to be leader of the pack,” he says. “You tend to have a real dominant personality.” The Kansas Community Leadership Initiative taught him different ways people learn and various approaches to lead them.

When actor Ed Asner was swept into office as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) on the promise of helping merge with two sister unions, he made a rookie leader’s mistake that opponents of the merger used to scuttle the alliance. He failed to realize that when he spoke in public, he was presumed to be speaking as president of the guild, not for himself.

Plenty of managers feel like they’re between a rock and a hard place because they have someone on their team who produces great results but alienates almost everyone around them. They're prima donnas! If you have a prima donna on your team who keeps playing games, bite the bullet and fire the person. Here's why.

By definition, a leader has to be out front. That’s why in hindsight it’s so easy to see how Peter Drucker, the foremost management guru of the 20th century, got off to an early lead: He was ahead of his time.

When Bill Ford joined Ford Motor Co.’s board of directors in 1988, he was told to leave his concerns over the environment behind. But Ford felt that sustainability—the responsible use of natural resources—would be key to the survival of the company his great-grandfather founded. By the mid-2000s, when gasoline topped $4 a gallon, Ford pulled ahead of its U.S. competitors in developing fuel-efficient vehicles.

Remembering his own life as a tough guy, Robert Nylen offers some thoughts on the meaning of courage. The Vietnam veteran tells how he once traded stories with an RAF pilot about their most gutless moments. For the World War II pilot, it was popping his parachute by mistake three times in a row during takeoff ...