Change

Anna Mar, engagement manager and senior writer at simplacable.com posits that open positions in your organization are precursors to contests.  This piece was suggested by Bill Allison, an ITLP alum who is Director, Campus Technology Services at the University of California, Berkeley.  Bill noted that the short piece is valuable even when the leadership contest isn’t bitter […]

In Warren Berger’s Harvard Business Review blogs essay, he writes that his work has led him to conclude that the three words “how might we …” unlock our creative juices.  He notes that too often our language with phrases like “How can we do this?” and “How should we do that?” imply judgment:  Can we really do […]

The Tuesday Reading today is  “Are You Learning as Fast as the World is Changing?” http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2012/01/are_you_learning_as_fast_as_th.html, written by Bill Taylor for the Harvard Business Review blog.  Taylor is William C. Taylor is cofounder of Fast Company magazine and author of Practically Radical:  Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself.  […]

  There’s a rule you really have to make New Year’s Resolutions.  Today’s Tuesday Reading, “10 Resolutions to Make 2013 Your Best Year Ever” http://www.fastcompany.com/3004179/10-resolutions-make-2013-your-best-ye…, will help you get started.  It’s from the pen of Shawn Parr, CIO of Bulldog Drummond, a San Diego based consultancy focused on innovation and design. Parr notes that we […]

The Tuesday Reading today is “Don’t Sabotage Yourself” by Susan David, founder and co-director of the Harvard/McLean Institute of Coaching.  She is also a member of the Harvard faculty.  This essay appeared in the HBR blog. The essay begins with David telling a story about her friend first identifying a dream job and then not applying […]

For today’s Tuesday Reading, I thought we might revisit the topic of email.  The piece, “How to craft an email that gets a reply”, which appeared at the cbs.com business blog, arrived along with a batch of email that seemed to violate its principles and reminded me of the importance of taking the time to write […]

Today’s Reading is a blog entry “6 steps to resolve conflict”by Robert Pagliarini which appeared recently  on the CBS News MoneyWatch website.  Pagliarini works to inspire others to live life to the fullest by challenging the way they invest their time and energy. We all experience conflict and the emotional turmoil that ensues.  So, what can one do […]

Today’s Reading, Christensen on disruptive innovation in higher education, comes to us from the Changing Higher Education blog.  (Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” in 2003, having used “disruptive technology” earlier for the same concept.) This blog post draws from a well-written white paper – Disrupting College – that describes the challenges facing higher education today, […]

Hear from members of the MOR Associates team and past program participants as they give an overview of the Leaders Program and what to expect in the months ahead in this video.     

Peter Bergman, author of today’s reading – “What’s Your One Big Theme?” – takes time each year at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year to identify what he wants to change during the coming year.  Others, write New Year’s resolutions.  And, when you think about it, there’s no magic in any particular day.  So today may be your day […]

A few weeks ago, Erik Lundberg, an ITLP alum from the University of Washington, shared with me a short piece from Inc. – “Don’t Be Afraid to Break Stuff” – which is today’s Tuesday Reading.  Chris Mittelstaedt, Founder and CEO of the FruitGuys, a company delivering farm-fresh fruit and vegetables to the American workplace, homes, and […]

Today’s reading “Five Questions That Should Shape Any Change Program” comes from Scott Keller and Colin Price, directors at McKinsey & Company and coauthors of the book Beyond Performance.  This article appeared early in December in the HBR blog. Keller and Price wrote this book to address a key problem in leading change: “organizations that focus too […]

Today’s reading is a short piece “Nix Ambiguity and Focus for Lasting Change” by Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, as well as Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. In this piece, a true story about eliminating narcotics abuse in a health-care network […]

Today’s reading is a reflection on “Change and the Balcony.”  Drew MacGregor, Coordinator of Educational MDA Technology, College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sent this reflection to his IT Leaders Program cohort in mid-December 2011.   Several points caught my eye in Drew’s essay: •  Real change occurs when we buy into and experience […]

Today’s reading is “3 Paradoxes of a Well-lived Life” and comes from the blog of Box of Crayons, a Toronto, Canada, consulting company that helps organizations, teams, and people do less “good work” and more “great work.”  I learned about this piece from Kika Barr, an IT Leaders Program alum from the University of Wisconsin. In  this blog, […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading “Transforming Your Organization with the Three-Box Approach”reports on a conversation with Vijay Govindarajan and Brian Goldner.  Govindarajan is a professor of internation business and founding director of the Center for Global Leadership at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmath.  Goldner is president and CEO of Hasbro, Inc. Like last week’s reading, […]

This week’s reading is a piece “What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Growth” by Nilofer Merchant.  Merchant is a writer for the Harvard Business Review.  This piece is part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line. The text of this post focuses on corporate growth, and Apple’s in particular, and, more importantly for higher […]

Steve Jobs died last Wednesday. Since then, tens of thousands of words of tribute and remembrance have been written along with other similar expressions for this man who on one hand was very human – “much more … a real person than most people knew” (Dr. Dean Ornish) – with a tremendous love for his […]

You may have run across the term “decision fatigue” in your recent reading. John Tierney in a lengthy NYTimes article “Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?” writes: “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get anyry at colleagues and families, spurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket, …  No matter how rational […]

I found this interesting read “Why Leadership Programs Don’t Work” by Kelly Goldsmith and Marshall Goldsmith in BNET.  It’s really short infomercial aimed squarely at you. A few years ago Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan studied eight different companies with 86,000 participants, including 11,000 recognized as leaders, in executive coaching programs.  Every leader focused on one […]