Posted on 26 June 2009
“While many of today’s leaders have lost their way due to moral and ethical missteps, just as many are facing a dead end due to their inability to see the big picture,” writes Peter Vajda. “These leaders are intelligent, but, unfortunately, not wise.”
Tags: Leadership, Leadership development, Perspective
Posted on 23 June 2009
We have lived through the age of ‘nice’: the phony smile, the smarmy front hiding the crook within, the welcome into the crocodile‘s lair of cheap credit and ‘can’t fail’ investments. Now, says Jonathan Littman, we’re about to enter an age of Serious Mean.
Tags: Attitudes, Corporate culture, Hamburger Management, Leadership
Posted on 15 May 2009
“The challenge for organizations today,” writes Peter Vajda, “is to carry out a redesign of their business models that sees it less as a mechanistic mix of processes, procedures and outcomes, and more like an ecosystem: part engineering, part quantum physics, part psychology, part biology, and part neuroscience.”
Tags: Change, Corporate culture, Seeing clearly
Posted on 30 March 2009
Which types of work demand possession of set credentials and which kinds demand being educated? Leaders cannot be produced merely by showing an understanding of certain knowledge and theories. The need for leadership begins at the point where established ways of doing things—the only ways you can teach—are found to be inadequate.
Tags: Better Management, Leadership development, Management
Posted on 25 March 2009
Top heavy organizations are often described as being ‘all chiefs and no indians’. Such a pattern has now become the norm throughout much of the Western world and it is probably why we have stumbled into our current mess. The only way out is to start again and find an approach that includes valuing the ‘indians’ as well.
Tags: Better Management, Leadership development
Posted on 18 March 2009
Forget the pointless, academic arguments about the difference between leadership and management. What makes a situation need a true leader is probably rather simple. It also goes a long way towards explaining why so many ‘leaders’ have failed to cop with the current circumstances.
Tags: Better Management, Leadership, Leadership development, Seeing clearly
Posted on 11 March 2009
What can we learn from the mistakes so many of today’s high profile leaders made—the charismatic CEOs and ‘Masters of the Universe’ whose arrogance, greed and stupidity brought their whole edifice of folly and hubris crashing down on us, as well as them. What should we vow never, never to accept in any leader, ever again?
Tags: Better Management, Leadership development, Management, Seeing clearly
Posted on 10 March 2009
Kate Sweetman argues that leading an organization, especially in a downturn, means interacting with the people who are looking for guidance, and providing those folks with the truest picture the leader can draw about their collective future.
Tags: Better Management, Change, Leadership, Success
Posted on 09 March 2009
Competition clearly can be both a positive and a negative force. What makes the difference? Are there ways to recognize what produces the positive kind of competition and what gives the negative type?
Tags: Civilized work, Corporate culture, Enjoying work
Posted on 03 March 2009
Nina Simosko argues that reigniting growth when all today’s mess finally ends requires rethinking growth, not sinking back into what we fondly hope may be business as usual. By focusing on on value creation and identifying opportunities where you can impact the sustainability and resilience of your business, you will give yourself—and everyone else— the best chance.
Tags: Better Management, Change