Helping leaders build the character worth following.
I’m Steve Sammons. I’ve spent more than two decades leading marketing for well-known brands and mission-driven organizations, and most of what I’ve learned about leadership came from watching character win or lose under pressure. This site is where I write about it.
What you’ll find here
Every week I publish a short leadership reflection drawn from one person in the Bible: a king, a prophet, a shepherd, a mother, a tax collector. Their stories are honest about ambition, fear, failure and courage, which makes them some of the best leadership case studies ever written.
Each story comes with a profile page that sticks to what the text actually says, and an interactive map that shows where it happened, what can be located with confidence, and what can’t. The portraits are imagined, not historical likenesses. I explain how I make them in How These Portraits Come to Life.
- Bible Characters: every character, grouped by Old and New Testament, with their posts, profiles and maps
- Bible Maps: interactive maps with real terrain, routes and places from each story
- Leadership: decisions, teams, influence and succession
- Faith & Spiritual Living: conviction, grace and spiritual practices
- Marketing & Branding and Publishing: lessons from the work I’ve done for a living
Where I’ve worked
My career has run through the automotive, retail, publishing, higher education and nonprofit worlds:
- Nissan and Infiniti: work on Infiniti brand campaigns such as “Where are the cars we were promised?”
- Calumet Photographic: uniting retailers in four countries under one brand, website and e-commerce engine
- Zondervan: executive vice president of consumer engagement, where I helped bring the updated NIV to market and was part of Bible Across America, a 22,000-mile tour in which people across the country handwrote the NIV verse by verse for its 30th anniversary
- Corban University: shaping a brand distilled to three words: Character, Competence and Christ
- BiblicalTraining.org and the Children’s Literacy Project: making good teaching, and the ability to read, available to more people
My doctoral research asked what Christian universities that still attract students with real, lived faith have in common. I interviewed the leaders of five of them, and the answer came down to integrity and faculty. Read the findings in Keeping Faith on Campus.
Family
Family comes first for me. My wife, Suzy, and I have kids and grandkids spread all over the United States.
Beyond the work
I’m also an author, artist, pianist and enthusiastic photographer, and I enjoy building new online ventures, most recently hawkeye.pro. When I was thirty-five, a doctor told me I had months to live. That story, and why I still pray the way I do, is in The Prayer That Worked.
Stay in touch
New reflections arrive every week. The easiest way to keep up is the newsletter, and I’m glad to connect on LinkedIn.