Change

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 […]