Christopher G Hornick

Christopher G. Hornick

Christopher G. Hornick is the President and CEO of HBSC Strategic Services, an organizational and digital transformation company based in Silicon Valley, California. He has founded three companies and has held multiple executive and board-level positions in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Chris is also a founder of the HBSC Leadership Institute which started in early 2020. 

He holds a BA from Rutgers University, an MS in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Mr. Hornick splits his time between Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe and is an avid skier, sailor, pilot, marathon runner, and triathlete.

The Unified Leadership Training course 

For existing leaders who want to rise-up and become wiser and more powerful.
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HBSC Leadership Institute Podcast Videos

Unified Leadership Model Podcast
Unified Leadership Model Podcast: A conversation with Chris Hornick and David Popler.
Unified Leadership Institute Podcast
Unified Leadership Institute Podcast: A conversation with Chris Hornick and Bill Belanger.

Book Summary

As leaders, we function in increasingly diverse, distributed, and rapidly changing environments. Hence there is a near-constant thirst for evolving leadership practices. The ability to rapidly grow our leadership capabilities and coach others’ development is increasingly essential to thriving in modern organizations.

In this book, you will discover:

1. A Leadership Field Manual for becoming a more effective, influential, and inspirational leader.
2. Key Leadership Principles from some of the most impactful leaders throughout history.
3. A groundbreaking new model that strengthens your capabilities and executive presence.

Because leadership continues to change and evolve, this book offers a fully integrated model that expands your metacognitive awareness of both time-tested and cutting-edge leadership practices. This awareness dramatically expands your leadership toolkit—making you more versatile and persuasive while increasing your leadership presence.

Despite the prevailing wisdom that leaders are made, not born, most people never receive instruction on how to lead. Similarly, most people don’t have Churchill’s natural charisma or Tom Brady’s situational awareness and athletic talent. The good news is that you can become a more powerful leader with the right models, tools, and behaviors. This book delivers the Unified Leadership Model (ULM), highlighting the 24 Elements that can catapult you to greatness or torpedo your leadership goals and aspirations.


The Last Book of Leadership - by Christopher G. Hornick

Leader, lead thyself … First!

The ULM Framework provides a holistic lens from which to view the kaleidoscopic evolution of leadership. Each story contained in this section present realistic, but anonymized, examples of leadership challenges and outcomes. The first story in this section is futuristic, while the subsequent stories have the names and places changed to protect people’s privacy and identity.

Unified Leadership Model

The ULM Framework represents a paradigm shift—an actionable model that is accurate regardless of the environment, and views leadership holistically rather than focusing on one or two individual attributes. Like any social science that tries to explain human behavior, leadership has many layers of complexity. Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” The ability to understand this complexity begins with foundational areas. The resulting model integrates these concepts into a single framework that is applicable regardless of domain or specialty. Once complete, this framework facilitates a holistic understanding of leadership. The ULM Framework has five foundational areas.
Foundational Areas

The first rule of evolution:
We are destined to become more complex.

Unified Leadership Scorecard

Converting the ULM framework into a scorecard provides the answer. The combined 24 ULM elements can be used to holistically capture Homo sapiens’ strengths and weaknesses across context, vision, wisdom, power, and outcome. Having a standardized report card expedites an understanding of a leader’s contextual awareness, capability to create a vision, level of wisdom, ability to use power, and past outcomes as a predictor of future success. Each section of the ULM scorecard focuses on different high-level leadership questions to understand the leader’s intentions, goals, skills, personality, and capabilities.
Scorecard image
Do you understand your context?
What do you want to achieve?
Are you wise enough to achieve your goal?
Are you powerful enough to achieve your goal?
Does your track record predict future success?

Operational Range Summary

Operational range enables a leader to rapidly adapt their behavior to a diversity of environments. It exists at the intersection of power and outcome and reflects a leader’s capacity to adapt their leadership style, process, and use of power to a multitude of situations. A leader’s operational range measures the ability to alter one’s leadership demeanor and identity appropriate to the situation. Showing up with the right level of authority and inspiration for the given circumstances requires significant self-awareness and self-control. A leader’s operational range develops over time by working in diverse and contentious situations, overcoming adversity, and self-reflection. In general, if a leader can balance humility and empathy with high levels of operational range, they can become a benevolent, wise leader who also embodies a warrior’s fearless mindset. 
Operational Range

Quantitative Analysis

“As a seaman, he had competence, but as a leader, he lacked critical people skills that could have maintained his crew’s organizational alignment. Like Julius Caesar with the Roman senators, Captain Bligh psychologically separated himself from his men and communicated that he was more important than the group he led. He also exhibited poor operational range based on his inability to maintain social awareness and emotional control and alter his leadership style and process. While Bligh had great self-confidence, many of his men did not trust or respect him—thus, lowering his personal power.”
ULM Gap Analysis - Captain Bligh

Praise for The Last Book of Leadership

"Groundbreaking and empowering! Building on an impressive breadth of knowledge, Hornick has delivered two precious gems: 1) A novel framework that guides you to integrate the many dimensions of leadership based on your circumstances, and 2) An expansive historical context that illustrates where a couple dozen famous leaders went right and where they went wrong. Whether you're a seasoned or aspiring leader, this book will grip you—and then find a place under your pillow.“
— Eric Siegel
Author of Predictive Analytics and founder of Machine Learning Week
“Our world needs strong, well-balanced leaders more than ever! And this is the first holistic model I have seen for identifying and developing complete (‘unified’) leaders. Whether your domain is business, government, sports, faith or other arenas—this model will define and challenge your own development as a leader, and surely help you guide leaders of the future.”
— David Popler 
Silicon Valley CEO & CRO
“For head hunters and tomorrow’s leaders. A deep dive, quantitative analysis of what it means to be a leader in various real-world contexts. With newly defined metrics, organizations can objectively determine what kind of a leader will best help them succeed. By understanding these same principles, individuals can more aptly choose the kind of leader they want to be.”
— Jonathan Gray
Boeing 777 Captain

Evolutionary Leadership

The first rule of evolution: 
We are destined to become more complex.
The Last Book of Leadership - by Christopher G. Hornick