The Future of Leadership
Sorry to break this to you, but the future of leadership is not about you. That's the title of a guest post I did this week over on the blog of Shawn Murphy and Ted Coine, two outstanding thought leaders in the leadersh ...
Category: Leadership
Tell Your People
When I first started in consulting, I was on a big project with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was an extensive assessment of "organizational issues" broadly speaking. I did a LOT of interviews and focus groups. ...
Start by Looking Inside
Edelman's Annual "Trust Barometer" report is out. Maddie broke the news on SocialFishing, pointing out that trust in CEOs dropped precipitously (50% last year; 38% this year), where trust in the "regular employee" was up ...
Shaking Up Patterns
This weekend I taught a three-hour session on Systems to students in Georgetown's Organization Development and Change Leadership Certificate program. I went through this program 11 years ago myself (though it didn't have ...
Conflict and Decision Making
There is an article in the Volunteer Leadership issue of Associations Now titled, "Balanced Conflict, Better Decisions." The conclusions in the article concern me. I'm paraphrasing here, but the article says: "Cog ...
Leaders Are Keepers of the Story
Duncan Watts has a great blog post on HBR that talks about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Specifically, he has noticed how perplexed many of us are by the fact that the movement itself has no single, identifiable leade ...
The Future Will Look and Feel Different
I suppose that sounds obvious, but when I talk to people about changing the way they lead and manage organizations, I'm not so sure it's that obvious. Instead, there seems to be a default assumption that in the future, m ...
We Have No Idea What We're Doing
Whenever I get some time to think deeply about things related to the workplace, like how do we make work better, or what is leadership, or what is management, then I end up inescapably coming to the conclusion that is th ...
Steve Jobs and the Focus of the CEO
Steve Drake pointed me to an interesting blog post based on some of the material from the most recent Steve Jobs biography. Apparently Jobs thought it was a problem when CEOs become too focused on sales: I have my own th ...
Word of the Day: Amplify
I give credit to Shelly Alcorn and her Association Subculture blog for triggering this post. She wrote a post about "volume," referring to a very cool video of George Carlin. Carlin talked about how, later in his career, ...