Change

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 […]

Today’s reading “IT Careers:  5 Tips for Charting Your 100 Day Plan“ by Mary Pratt, a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, MA, focuses on developing a plan for the next 100 days.  The point being that the more you have a vision of where you want to be in 100 days and a well thought out plan for […]

Today’s reading is “The Success Delusion — Why It Can Be So Hard for Successful Leaders to Change” from the Marshall Goldsmith Library.  Goldsmith’s thesis is straightforward:  The more successful we become, the more positive reinforcement we get, the more difficult it will be for us to make the changes we need to make to continue […]

In my reading not long ago I found a pointer to a short piece by Sean Silverthorne – “The Power of the Humble Checklist“.  As the author points out, and as I will confirm, having a standard checklist for complex, but nevertheless, routine tasks – e.g., the pilot’s pre-flight checklist or the hospital’s safe-surgery checklist – […]

We all remember Ron Heifetz from the first day of the IT Leaders Program.  There we learned about “adaptive leadership,” “giving work back to the workers,” and about “getting up on the balcony.” Today’s reading “The Leader of the Future” reports on a series of 2007 conversations that William Taylor, a founding editor of Fast Company, had […]

Dan and Chip Heath, who wrote “Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” are two of my favorite authors.  Recently, they wrote a column titled “Make Goals not Resolutions” which appeared in the February 2008 issue of Fast Company. The Heaths note that we often make resolutions;  like New Year’s resolutions, like the […]

Have you ever had a manager who was abrasive on your staff?  You know, the person who causes you headaches, who have aggressive management styles that create interpersonal friction, reduce motivation and trust to rubble, and disrupt work well beyond the group they lead.  In “Taming the Abrasive Manager:  Words from the Boss Whisperer”, Laura Crawshaw, president of […]

As it nears the end of the year, it seems appropriate for the Tuesday Reading to turn to the future.  In “A Roadmap for IT Leadership and the Next Ten Years” <http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM0626.pdf> Tim Chester, CIO at Texas A&M at Qatar, argues that the future requires that CIOs and other IT leaders become technology advocates and […]

In “Making Strategy That Sticks“, Susan Cramm points out that all too often when we develop a strategy, we focus on getting the right content rather than getting the right commitment.  She writes:  ”The acid test of strategy is whether it informs and constrains decision making by compelling leaders to align their functional goals and day-to-day […]

 John Baldoni, in “Questions to Make You a Better Leader” argues that asking good questions is a practice that all leaders need to have.  He suggests five: 1.  What about your work motivates you?  If it’s not motivating, what can you do about it?  What changes can you make to increase satisfaction? 2.  What challenges are […]

We all like to be treated with appropriate respect and consideration as we go through the several roles we have each day.  And, we bemoan the fact that in the fast-paced world we find ourselves in even the most basic decencies such as saying “hello” and “goodbye,” or remembering and using the names of people […]

In this piece, Becoming a Change Leader, May 8, 2007 CIO  <http://www.cio.com/article/108351/Becoming_a_Change_Leader>,  Maya Townsend, founder and principal consultant of Partnering Resources, introduces four key factors which she argues are crucial to successful change initiatives: 1.  Active, committed leadership — if you are not committed why should your staff commit? 2.  A clear, compelling business (not technical) […]

Today’s reading the “The ‘Pull Leadership’ Manifesto” by Stever Robbins, founder and president of LeadershipDecisionworks.  This piece from the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Archives caught my eye because of its thesis:  “We need leaders who inspire others to follow, who engender loyalty.”  Robbins calls this “pull” leadership and then goes on to identify twelve key […]