Change

In today’s readings “Why Brainstorming Doesn’t Work”and “Better Brainstorming:  4 Ways to Generate Great Ideas“, Margaret Heffernan reminds us of several shortcomings in our brainstorming practices and suggests improvements.  Heffernan is visiting professor of entrepreneurship at Simmons College in Boston, CEO, author, and speaker. Referencing work by Nicholas Kahn and Steven Smith <http://bit.ly/cpRstq>, she notes […]

This Tuesday’s reading is “Communicating Vision”, by John Maxwell, prolific writer and speaker on leadership. In this short article, Maxwell outlines an approach for communicating a clear and compelling organizational vision.  (You will notice many similarities to the SUCCES tool that we have presented in many of the MOR leadership program workshops.) He makes six recommendations: […]

A few weeks ago Angela Bell from the University of Iowa shared Dan Bobinski’s article “Is your leadership developing or diminishing?” with her cohort and now I’d like to share it with everyone. As Bobinski, a training specialist, author, and president of Associates at Leadership Development, indicates, too many leaders easily get caught up in the […]

Recently Linkage published a short piece by Marshall Goldsmith – “When I Get Better at …” A Simple Exercise for Changing a Behavior to Achieve Results <http://bit.ly/aUrU3M> – which is this week’s reading. In this piece, Goldsmith describes a very simple exercise – select a behavior you want to change, for example listening, and then complete the sentence […]

Terry Gray, IT Leaders Program alumnus from the University of Washington, suggested today’s reading, “How To Rise Fast At Work:  A True Story”.  Terry thought that the piece might be of interest to the leaders community.  And, I agree. In this Forbes.com piece, its author Avril David talks about two acquaintances – whom he calls Mike and Ted […]

If you are leading a change initiative, then you must be an influencer for that initiative to be successful.  Yet studies have shown that only one in five leaders are able to influence positive change in a way that it lasts.  What’s going on? Today’s reading is “The Influencers:  The Top Five Reasons Leaders Lack Influence”.  In this […]

Every time you begin a change endeavor, it’s quite natural to ask “am I prepared and ready?”  Is my team/organization prepared and ready?  Are the stakeholders ready? Answering these questions on an ad hoc basis is not easy.  Several weeks ago in my reading, I came across an instrument to assess transition readiness <http://www.wmbridges.com/articles/assessment_tools.html> on William Bridges’ website.  He […]

Today’s Reading is Preston Cline’s ”Leadership Lessons from Mt. Kilimanjaro“ which appeared in the November-December issue of the Wharton Leadership Digest <http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu/digest/index.shtml> and is reproduced below by permission. The lesson here is simple and clear:  In life there will always be error, failure.  It is better to fix the error when it is first noticed and small, than […]

For over two decades William Bridges has helped organizations and individuals deal more effectively with change.  Today’s Tuesday Reading is a short piece by Bridges – “Reorientation + Renewal = Revitalization” <http://tinyurl.com/yet24s4> (download) – which focuses on how to revitalize a team after it goes through a difficult time of change. Bridges focuses on teams which […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading takes a look at Higher Ed 2.0.  Our reading is “Who Needs Harvard?” from the September 2009 issue of Fast Company.  The article’s subheading says it all:  “Free online courses, wiki universities, Facebook-style tutoring networks – American higher education is being transformed by a cadre of web-savvy edupunks.”   This piece makes the point that the […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading is an entry –  “Humility as a Leadership Trait”– from John Baldoni’s Harvard Business Publishing blog. Baldoni asserts, and I agree, that leaders who want to inspire followers need to demonstrate both their accomplishments and their character.  Key to demonstrating character is being humble.  And, humility is essential to leadership because […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “The Success Trap”, from Jeffrey Pfeffer’s August 25th,  BNET Column, The Corner Officer on August 25, 2009. Pfeffer’s thesis is simple:  When we become successful, it is very easy to drop our guard, to not maintain our standards (much less build on them), and to rest on our laurals. He argues that to […]

The Tuesday Reading for today is Jeffrey Pfeffer’s piece, Stop Working for Technology – Make it Work for You which appeared in BNET’s The Corner Office on July 22, 2009.  Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Pfeffer’s point in this piece is simple and straight-forward:  For some, maybe most, of us […]

It seems like every week I hear of universities planning for, going through, or having recently experienced layoffs, terminations, or position eliminations as a result of the economic crisis we are experiencing.  Today’s reading – “Ask the Expert:  How Do Effective Leaders Handle Change?” — is by Mark Hannum, Principle Consultant at Linkage and looks at practices that […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is from the April 28, 2009 Ask Annie column of Fortune Magazine:  “How to work better with Gen Y”.  The April 28th question has to do with working with a new class of interns – Generation Y individuals;  birth years 1978-1990 – who are very much like our younger employees. Anne Fisher, who writes the […]

Today, we turn to a short paper by William Bridges, “The Three Questions” (the paper will download).  Bridges is a name familiar to many as the author of “Managing Transitions” (2003) and “Transitions” (2004).   In this short piece, he introduces us to three important questions which he often asks his clients:. 1.  What is changing? […]

Today, we continue our theme of leading in challenging times with Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis.  The piece’s author is Bill George, author of “True North,” and a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School.  He is also the former CEO of Medtronic. Virtually every American institution is facing some kind of major crisis […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “Keeping Pace with Technology” comes from ITLP IX’s Vision Team – Beth-Anne Sullivan (Northeastern University), Terry Tatum (University of Texas), Elease Welch (New York University), Randy Standridge (University of Texas), Todd Rheinfrank (Carnegie Mellon University), and Tom Lewis (University of Washington).  Their graduation was last summer and since then they have continued to […]

Recently, in reading through the goals of participants in the Leaders Program, I noticed a number of goals of the form “reduce my stress,” “learn to control the stress I encounter day after day,“ ”reduce the hours I work to help control my stress,“ etc.  And, then I came across a piece, ”Grownups Need Recess, […]

In the current issue of Fortune Magazine, Jim Collins is interviewed by Fortune Senior Writer Jennifer Reingold for the article “How Great Companies Turn Crisis Into Opportunity”. Collins has spent much of his career in understanding how companies succeed.  For the past several years, he has been focusing on how successful companies navigate through turbulent times.  Much […]