leadership

07 Dec 09

12 Nov 09

leadership - Ben Zander | Fast Company

art of possibility leadership

www.fastcompany.com/...zander.html - Preview

BenjaminZander leadership positivity

12 Oct 09

Become a More Creative Leader — Think Small - Stew Friedman - HarvardBusiness.org

good quotes

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leadership creativity generative thinking

What kind of leadership do we need now?
Adaptive, flexible, and innovative.
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- the leadership attribute that comes to mind most often is the means for dealing with chaos. It boils down to this: playful creativity.
- Global Leadership 2.0 universe, then, is the capacity to be creative as leaders.
- Leadership is the capacity to mobilize people toward valued goals; that is, to produce sustainable change — sustainable because it's good for you and for the people who matter most to you.
- To be innovative, to act with creativity, is to experiment with how things get done. The innovations people pursue in my Total Leadership workshops are designed to improve performance not only at work but also at home, in the community, and in your private life (mind, body and spirit) by better integrating these different parts of your life — I call the results four-way wins.
- If you're not continually getting better at overcoming the three great inhibitors to creativity — fear of failure, guilt about appearing to be selfish, and ignorance of what's possible — then you're missing opportunities to strengthen your capacity to gain control in an increasingly uncertain world.

05 Oct 09

Hire People Who Disagree with You - John Baldoni - HarvardBusiness.org

hire opposing voices, people who disagree with you

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leadership hbr.org

Sky represented a civilian sensibility and voiced oppositional views that she felt senior officers needed to hear. Ordierno once referred to Sky has "my insurgent."
someone who could be "his opposite" (Sky's words)
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- "brain trust,"
- Leaders who solicit opinions from people who disagree with them are smart enough to realize that they do not have all the answers
- Look for character
- Look for strength of ideas.
- Look for ambition
- Look at their track record.
- Hiring someone who is opposed to your ideas is not the same as hiring someone who is opposed to you. The former is a good thing; the latter is a threat.
- Having a strong oppositional voice is the mark of good leadership. Rather than a sign of weakness, it demonstrates force of character and the ability to think and act strategically.

Three Tips for Becoming an Energizer - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org

manage your energy, positivity, reponse time

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...ps-for-being-an-energizer.html - Preview

leadership hbr.org

30 Sep 09

Sum Up Your Leadership in Six Words - John Baldoni - HarvardBusiness.org

Once upon a time Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story using only six words. Impossible, some thought. Not for Papa, as Neal Conan explained on NPR's Talk of the Nation. The next day Hemingway produced this: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."

Clare Booth Luce, according to Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, once told President John Kennedy that "a great man is one sentence." Noonan writes that Lincoln's life could be summed up as "He preserved the Union and freed the slaves." My colleague, Scott Eblin, adapted the concept to summing up one's leadership legacy. "It takes time and effort to boil down the essence of what you're trying to do to a short and memorable idea."

Reducing one's life to a handful of words is a mighty challenge. Creating a six-word memoir, a concept inspired by a project conducted by Smith magazine, can be a useful exercise in self-analysis, particularly if you apply the process to reflecting upon your goals and your results. Did we achieve what we set out to achieve? Did I help them and the team to succeed? Did our results stand the test of time?

The million dollar question for any leader is this: did you leave the organization in a better place than when you found it? Sadly we have discovered that the great recession we are enduring was in part due to senior executives who did not leave their companies better off, even though they themselves exited with pockets full of cash.

For leaders, this six-word exercise works well as a form of aspiration, that is, how do I want to be remembered? So if you are early or mid career, you have time to make changes so that you can become the leader you are capable of becoming. Consider the following three questions to help you consider how you would sum up your work life in six words or less.

What gets me up in the morning? A very basic question! What do you do and why do you do it? For some, the answer is the opportunity to work with others on a project that has real meaning, that is, improves the quality of life for others. If t

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story leadership hbr.org

27 Sep 09

Principled Innovation LLC » Curiosity is not a luxury

curiosity is a necessity

www.principledinnovation.com/...curiosity-is-not-a-luxury - Preview

leadership boards 21stcenturyskills

The role of curiosity in making 21st century associations thrive is a subject that deserves more of our attention than it currently receives.
Ideas matter. And when ideas are amplified by recognition that alternative models of governance exist, whether they be in far-away or adjacent places, people-centric approaches become more easily imagined and demanded.
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- Leach concludes that “…the future is now the province of the curious.”

Entrepreneurs: Don't Just 'Challenge the Status Quo' | The Corner Office | BNET

the goal, the customer, followers

blogs.bnet.com/ceo - Preview

leadership

The goal. Never lose site of the goals of your company, group, business, whatever it is you’re evaluating and “challenging.” That should be your guiding light.
The customer. Whoever your customer is - those who buy your products or services or another organization within your company - stay focused on meeting their needs.
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- The organization. Every so often, stop and take a look around to make sure folks are actually following your lead. If not, you may have some internal selling to do.

Simplicity: The Next Big Thing - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org

Simplicity as competitive edge

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simplicity leadership management

An emphasis on focus, speed, streamlining processes, and finding common platforms has characterized the best companies for years.
Companies sow the seeds of their own decline in adding too many things
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- When everyone else suffers from over-complexity, there is a market for products and services that simplify life.

Great Communicators Are Great Explainers - John Baldoni - HarvardBusiness.org

importance and explaining and leadership

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writing story leadership communications

He has toned down the rhetoric and geared up the details.
"the Great Explainer."
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- Explanation is a key attribute of leadership communications.
- What does it mean and why are we doing it are critical questions that every leader must answer with straightforward explanations.
- Good explainers need to be careful, however, not to overdo the details.
- FDR, like all good leaders, knew how to close a good explanation with an equally good challenge; it puts people on notice and gives them a reason for action.

Decoding Steve Jobs: Trust the Art, Not the Artist - Bill Taylor - HarvardBusiness.org

great term - humbition. Ambition and humility

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leadership Googley collaboration transparency

How many corporate executives can make a legitimate claim to have reshaped not just one industry but four: computing (the Mac), music (the iPod), mobile communications (the iPhone), and movies (Pixar). And how many CEOs can make the legitimate claim that they achieved their wealth and power by making tens of millions of people so unbelievably happy that they worship the company and its products with near-religious devotion?
Jobs, for all of his virtues, clings to the Great Man Theory of Leadership — a CEO-centric model of executive power that is outmoded, unsustainable, and, for most of us mere mortals, ineffective in a world of non-stop change.
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- The best leaders I know don't want the job of thinking for everybody else. They understand that if they can tap the hidden genius inside the organization, and the collective genius outside the organization, they will create ideas that will be much more powerful than what even the smartest individual leader could ever come up with on his or her own. Nobody alone is as smart as everybody together.
- Leaders who want to both change the game and stay in the game for the long haul have come to appreciate the power of "humbition" over blind ambition. What's humbition? It's a term I first heard from Jane Harper, a nearly 30-year veteran of IBM. It is, she explains, the subtle blend of humility and ambition that drives the most successful leaders — an antidote to the know-it-all hubris that affects so many executives and entrepreneurs.

Organized Information is the Next Moonshot - John Sviokla - HarvardBusiness.org

making sense of information, metrics will be critical going forward

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leadership Organizationdevelopment

work on our ability to make sense of the data they collect faster and better.
he central theme of the information revolution is that more and more intelligence has simultaneously moved both toward the edge and toward the center.
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- Companies (and armies) win by coordinated action. So with these new capabilities, the question becomes: how well does your firm gather all the relevant information available and make sense of it in real time? How well is information shared to those who can actually take action? Who knows more about your relationship with your customer — you, or your customer? These questions are relevant to every firm, yet few are on top of these simple questions.
- Those leaders who build an organizational system that can gather more information, make sense of it quicker, and take action more decisively have crafted an organization with a higher collective IQ than their competition. Consequently, I believe the next "moonshot" is figuring out how we can raise the collective IQ of the people who are gathering and making sense of information that can be collected remotely. The good news is that there are new not only new technologies to easily gather information, from sensors to video feeds, but there new bundled capabilities that can help.
- Today's challenge is not having more information; it's devising a less-resource intensive way to collect it and an efficient way to filter and disseminate it.

The Age of the Both/And CEO - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org

times certainly call for both/and leadership. Both/and thinking is great generative

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leadership

we have been encouraging the wrong personality traits in our business leaders, admiring and calling for more warm and fuzzy communication skills, empathy, and charisma when what "the market seems to want" is sober and resolute fulfillment of "an organizational role."
false dichotomy. In his view, CEOs are either empathic, good listeners, good team builders and communicators or they are organized, analytic, dogged, anal-retentive and boring. That is hooey. And it is dangerous hooey. As I suspect any self-respecting, experienced, and successful CEO would tell him, these lists of traits point toward complementary sides of effective leadership. This is clearly a case where, rather than either/or thinking, what is needed is a both/and approach.
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- n the fast-moving, complex, transparent, and fully globalized world we live and work in now — and in which, as business leaders rise, they become more similar to public leaders in their media profile and potential impact and influence
- Business leaders must become more sensitive, not less, to how their messages will be interpreted and acted upon by employees, customers, and stakeholders. In our increasingly diverse world, business leaders must pay more attention, not less, to identifying with and understanding the situations, feelings, and motives of those their strategies and operations impact
- we do indeed want and need a new model of business leadership that turns away from the great man CEO and reinforces stewardship, humility, analytical rigor and hard work, but also requires effective communication and empathy, and an integrated view of how business is involved in, not separate from, the rest of the world.

21 Sep 09

Decoding Leadership - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org

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leadership

What are qualities of effective leaders?" Here's a partial list of their responses:

• Authentic

• Transparent

• Emotional intelligence

• Interpersonal effectiveness

• Servant-leader

• Humility

• Leaders not managers

• Know contingency theory by mapping response to situation

• Live the 7 Habits

• Build a vision

• Ensure customer centricity
By synthesizing their work we identified five rules to decode leadership:
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- Rule 1: Shape the future.
- Rule 2: Make things happen
- Rule 3: Engage today's talent.
- Rule 4: Build the next generation
- Personal Proficiency
- Rule 5: Invest in yourself.
- Effective leaders cannot be reduced to what they know and do. Who they are as human beings has everything to do with how much they can accomplish with and through other people.

16 Sep 09

Education Week: Moving Beyond the Conventional Wisdom of Whole-District Reform

excellent article that gets underneath what some things mean like hire great people

www.edweek.org/...03childress.h29.html - Preview

strategicplanning leadership change management education

Hire great principals and teachers, make data-driven decisions, hold everyone accountable, build a strong school culture, and engage stakeholders.
They have hired great people, made data-driven decisions, and all the rest, and they spend about the same amount per student as other East Coast cities such as Washington and New York (and less than Newark, N.J., and Boston). So what is distinctive about their approach? Six strategies from their work go deeper than conventional advice and help make sense of the Montgomery County story:
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- Implement common, rigorous standards with differentiated resources and instruction.
- giving teachers the knowledge and tools to better diagnose individual student needs, develop and put into practice potential solutions, and reflect on their effectiveness. The district recognized that teachers are the most important factor in helping all students meet or exceed rigorous academic standards.
- Apply “value chain” thinking to the K-12 continuum. A value chain is simply a series of activities, each of which adds some value to an eventual outcome. Because the activities along the chain are interdependent, mapping backward from the desired outcome to the beginning of the chain can increase quality throughout.
- Blur the lines between the traditional roles and responsibilities of the school board, leadership team, principals, teachers, and parents. Superintendent Jerry D. Weast instilled shared accountability by blurring the lines between traditional stakeholder roles. As a result, multiple groups felt responsible for the district’s success. Its capacity to analyze problems and put in place solutions also increased because highly skilled people from those groups populated the committees, task forces, and advisory groups that planned the implementation of the differentiation strategy.
- Create systems and structures that reinforce the behaviors necessary for success, and changes in beliefs will follow. A simple definition of “culture” is the beliefs and behaviors of people in an organization. The district’s senior leaders knew the culture needed to shift, but where to start? Beliefs or behaviors? They built systems and structures that required educators to behave as if every student could master rigorous content, whether they believed it or not. These included accountability mechanisms, technology tools, and forums for sharing best practices.
- we started to build the systems anyway, and it seemed that the culture started to shift as people saw that the changes worked for kids.”
- Lead for equity. Superintendent Weast sees his leadership task as mobilizing the entire community to create excellence and equity for all students. He built the capacity of staff members to effectively deliver a high-quality education to every single child, and has consistently made the case that giving everyone access to rigorous content is the right thing to do morally and the smart thing to do economically.

13 Sep 09

Leading Resources Inc. :: Leadership

team and leader growth and development

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leadership Development

meaningful growth in their skills and capabilities.
leverage your strengths, address your areas of growth, and make you a more effective manager and leader.
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- leaders gain clarity about specific practices they may have overlooked to create a high performing organization.
- Successful teams are characterized by clarity of purpose, clear operating rules, strong communication, and high levels of trust.
  Using the "Five Habits of High Performing Teams," we help teams improve communication, develop sound operating principles, and create clear measures of success.
  The result is significantly higher levels of trust, productivity, and team accountability.

12 Sep 09

PC Makers Abandoning a Sales Pitch Built on Complex Specs - NYTimes.com

customer is king, emotional decision, all about what use of computer not the hardware - analogy to schools, not about the outsides, about what they can do, what they can offer

www.nytimes.com/...12pc.html - Preview

strategicplanning stevejobs leadership

Over the last couple of years, the industry has made a slow lurch away from its engineering roots toward a more shopper-friendly strategy that recognizes that if you make your product simpler to understand, more people will buy it.
Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.
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- Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.
- Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.
- Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.
- Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.
- Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.

11 Sep 09

Purpose Bigger Than Product - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org

excellent article. sense of purpose/mission enable focus. Alignment is crucial

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mission leadership

At its core, it is about being real and idea-driven. Trust is perhaps the most important currency in business, and big ideas may be the only true source of competitive advantage.
Customers simply don't trust institutions as much today.
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- we now live in an "information everywhere" and more transparent world
- Facebook in their pocket and Twitter at their fingertips. This means we hear and see evidence of businesses not walking their talk.
- In order to regain this trust you must simply make sure that all your products, your merchandising, your advertising, your people and the totality of your touch points with consumers sing from the same hymn. And that hymn is what I call purpose
- When you meet people that have a big idea it is almost impossible to be unaffected.
- "altitude creates attitude".
- I firmly believe that the source of human energy and creativity can be found in the distance between where we are and where we'd like to be. It is that creative dissonance that is the entrepreneurial rocket fuel. If human beings could have walked everywhere on the planet I don't believe we would have invented trains, planes and automobiles. So, if you really want to build great companies you need big ideas.
- You need miniature versions of your grand idea so you can validate its parts, and then iterate and tweak constantly.
- I look at purpose as the guiding star. The compass. The soul.
- I think strong conviction and a sense of purpose enables focus, and the biggest culprit of bad performance in a company is lack of focus.
- a business with a clear purpose that is trying to do something remarkably better than the industry norm.

4 Tips for Efficient Succession Planning - Marshall Goldsmith - HarvardBusiness.org

succession planning turns to succession development and leadership development

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management succession hbr.org leadership

Plans do not develop anyone — only development experiences develop people. We see many companies put more effort and attention into the planning process than they do into the development process.
false sense that the planning process is an end in itself rather than a precursor to real development.
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- executives pay attention to what gets measured

04 Sep 09

untitled

surprizing how easy to change one you realize it helps your success

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leadership hbr.org

"an excessive need to be me." What do we mean by "an excessive need to be me?"
almost any annoying action by saying, "That's just the way I am!"
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- Keep this in mind the next time you find yourself resisting change because you are clinging to a false — and probably pointless — notion of "me."

Jamie Baker's Library tagged leadership → View Popular

Are You an In or an Out Leader? - Gill Corkindale - HarvardBusiness.org

leadership - Ben Zander | Fast Company

Become a More Creative Leader — Think Small - Stew Friedman - HarvardBusiness.org

Hire People Who Disagree with You - John Baldoni - HarvardBusiness.org

Three Tips for Becoming an Energizer - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org

Sum Up Your Leadership in Six Words - John Baldoni - HarvardBusiness.org

Principled Innovation LLC » Curiosity is not a luxury

Entrepreneurs: Don't Just 'Challenge the Status Quo' | The Corner Office | BNET

Simplicity: The Next Big Thing - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org

Great Communicators Are Great Explainers - John Baldoni - HarvardBusiness.org

Decoding Steve Jobs: Trust the Art, Not the Artist - Bill Taylor - HarvardBusiness.org

Organized Information is the Next Moonshot - John Sviokla - HarvardBusiness.org

The Age of the Both/And CEO - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org

Decoding Leadership - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org

Education Week: Moving Beyond the Conventional Wisdom of Whole-District Reform

Leading Resources Inc. :: Leadership

PC Makers Abandoning a Sales Pitch Built on Complex Specs - NYTimes.com

Purpose Bigger Than Product - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org

4 Tips for Efficient Succession Planning - Marshall Goldsmith - HarvardBusiness.org

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