What Frogger Can Teach You About Leadership 🐸

I'm a sucker for retro video game arcades, and I frequent them with my son. In our most recent arcade escapade, I decided to try my hand at Frogger.

🐸 In Frogger, you are an 8-bit frog trying to cross obstacles to get to the “other side”. You must dodge cars on a busy highway and cross a fast-moving river by jumping on logs and turtles before they move off the screen. Each time you succeed, the obstacles change and get harder.

After sacrificing many frog lives ❌ to reach my goal, I started to note what I needed to do to succeed. It was then I realized there were leadership nuggets on my list.

🕹️Timing is important – if I jumped too soon or too late, my frog died.

🕹️Anticipate obstacles – thinking ahead several moves and anticipating what came my way was critical.

🕹️Have a plan – I had to begin with the end in mind to reach my goal.

🕹️Unexpected problems pop up – just when I had the perfect path to reach my goal, something appeared on my log and pushed me in the water.

🕹️Know when to hit the reset button – sometimes it was better to just start over (with a modified plan).

❓Have you played a classic arcade game that taught you a leadership lesson?