Simplify Strategy in Order to Implement Strategy
“No organization, team, or individual mission has ever failed for lack of a good strategy. They fail for lack of execution.” Moving people from knowing to doing is a critical and tough task. As facilitators, it is our role to not only bring a group to consensus about their desired future, but to to do it […]
Simple Leadership: To Lead, You Must Tell Stories
Leadership is a simple activity – but “simple” does not mean “easy.” As Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, says, “effective leaders are masters of simplicity.” What he means is that leaders are good at identifying the most critical core elements of strategies and highlighting them consistently. The leader is the […]
How Silicon Valley Can Foster Diversity
Silicon Valley has a diversity problem. Everyone has heard the numbers: 83 percent of Google employees are male, and 91 percent are white or Asian. Similarly, about 69 percent of Facebook employees are male, and 91 percent are once again Asian or white. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yahoo all report similar makeups. These companies are missing […]
Blind Spots: We All Have Them, But We Don’t All Manage Them
Everybody has blind spots. They arise from the fact that, as human beings, we are situated in a world that elicits responses from us at all times – often without providing an opportunity to stop and think about how we go about responding. In other words, we all have a default way of acting in the world. […]
If Your Inner Circle Backs You Up 100% of the Time, Here’s What You’re Doing Wrong
Hank Paulson, the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, has said that every leader that he’s worked with has had significant blind spots – and he’s worked with a lot of important leaders in the financial world. These leaders know they have strengths and weaknesses. What they do is surround themselves with people who complement their […]
Stop Managing Millennials: Manage The Individual
By 2015, Millennials will represent the largest generational cohort in the workforce. If you believe some of the leading news sources, this will be the apocalypse. According to them, Millennials are strange creatures that do not play by the old rules of the workplace. If you ask me, this sensationalism hardly qualifies as journalism. Millennials […]
What is Leadership? Gaps In The Research
What is leadership? There is no current communal definition of leadership, which has led to widespread confusion. We blur the lines between leadership and management, and our discussions of leadership often become fanciful and unfocused. We need to fix this by clarifying the definitions of the two. We should view leadership, management, teamwork, and strategy as […]
Putting Employees First: People-Centered Approaches To Management
If we want to see how current management thinking has evolved, we should first review history. The formal study of management is a relatively new concept: it began in the late nineteenth century, when Henri Fayol introduced his 14 principles of management. Frederick Taylor further formalized the study of management when he introduced the principles […]
The Rise of Leadership: Leadership in the 20th/21st Century
I’ve never seen leaders and managers as separate people – rather, I believe that leadership and management are different roles. Leaders must often be managers, and managers must often be leaders. Even though the business world is currently obsessed with leaders at the expense of managers, this was not always the case. In the early 20th century businesses emphasized […]
The Dangers Of Over-Emphasizing Leadership
Once the idea of “leadership” entered the corporate lexicon, a major effort to elevate the role of the leader ensued. But as organizations elevated leaders, they undervalued the roles of managers. What businesses need is a balance between leadership and management. Unfortunately, too many focus all of their attention on leadership and fail to cultivate managers. The “Holy […]