Culture

John Gohsman, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, Washington University in St. Louis keynote video for the 2016 MOR Leaders Conference. Video of John Gohsman, WashU, MOR Leaders Conference To learn more about the program the team at Wash U is working on, please visit: http://itservicesprogram.wustl.edu/

Last week, many of us participated in the 2016 MOR Leaders Conference, Reimagining IT as University Needs and Technology Evolve.  There we were encouraged to think about our university’s IT and what it could become.  And, we were asked to identify one idea that we each could take action on?  I want to take this […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Who I think about as “My Leader,” is an essay by Paula Torres, Senior Educational Design Technologist, Global Learning and Innovation, NYU Information Technology.  Her essay first appeared as a program reflection last year. The one person I think of when I think of leadership was not my manager, supervisor, or even […]

The important thing is not to stop questioning…  Never lose a holy curiosity.         – Albert Einstein During World War II when I was a young boy, we lived with my mother’s parents while my father worked about 100 miles away in an oil refinery and commuted back to our small town […]

Not the grit you think of in “gritty from hard work in a grimy, greasy environment.”  But rather, it’s the grit that Angela Duckworth defines, in her 2013 TED Talk, “as the passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.”  In this view, grit is having stamina, it is sticking with your future, day in, day […]

You can find many lists of leadership competencies.  Some result from a careful examination of the work in a particular job family or from role descriptions.  Some come from discussions about what it takes to be a really good leader in a mid-level position at, say, an education institution.  Other lists are developed based on […]

Professor Bernard Roth is academic director and cofounder of Stanford’s d.school, the campus hub for innovators.  Students and faculty from engineering, medicine, business, law, humanities, sciences, and education come there to work together on some of the world’s most messy problems.  A part of that work encourages students to examine and take control of their lives.  In […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Giving Credit, is an essay by Anna Lynch, Manager, Online Instructional Design, eLearning Design & Services, and Julie Parmenter, Manager, Enterprise Decision Support Services, at Indiana University’s University Information Technology Services. Many of us at Indiana University attended the Information Technology Statewide Conference last fall where we heard CIO Brad Wheeler and IU […]

Got your attention, didn’t I?  In a recent HBR blog post, Bain & Company’s Michael Mankins answers with a strong very likely. Twenty years ago, new technologies like email and teleconferencing were key drivers in dramatically increasing productivity.  Information flowed faster, collaboration was easier.  However, by 2007 year-to-year growth in productivity was on the decline.  Yet, today, […]

Among the essential skills we expect leaders to have is giving and receiving feedback.  Everyone needs to know how they are doing, what they might improve, what they are particularly good at, etc.  Feedback focuses on the past, and in particular on what you did recently.  And, that’s important in providing guidance on how you […]

The first in a series of case studies supporting our clients as they think about the process of engaging others to move ideas forward in their environment. Enjoy!  And thanks to Evan Silberman from NYU for partnering with us on this write up. NYU-Case-Study-Building-Leadership-Community.pdf  

Last Sunday morning most of us experienced a disruptive event in our sleeping as we shifted our physical and mental clocks forward one hour to Daylight Saving Time.  This wasn’t all that unusual since most of us regularly disrupt our sleep.  And, in spite of our frequent claims – “I don’t need sleep,” “I can […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Life and Leadership are Team Sports, is an essay by Connie Buechele, Director of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management.  Connie is an alumnus of the MOR Leaders Program.  Her essay first appeared as a program reflection last year.   Some of you may have read this book, All […]

In a recent coaching session, my client began by saying “I feel like I’m an impostor.”  What that means is that the individual felt that any successes experienced – admission to a prestigious school, a special job, a promotion, recognition, good fortune of any kind, etc. – was a mistake.  Any evidence of success is […]

Two weeks ago, the Tuesday Reading focused on Mindset – a habit of thinking that determines how we interpret and respond to situations.  There we introduced the concept of “fixed” and “growth” mindsets and how a child’s mindset impacts her or his approach to learning.  (Carol Dweck’s RSI ANNIMATE presentation on the subject is listed in the […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Setting Priorities, is an essay by Gretchen Kopmanis, Office Manager and Mac Team Lead in a regional group of IT for the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan.  Gretchen is a member of the current University of Michigan MOR Leaders Program cohort.  Her essay first appeared as […]

mindset  ––  a habit or way of thinking that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, has focused her research on motivation, personality, and development for over three decades and is best known for her research on intelligence and how […]

Being accountable is your ticket to earning the right to hold others accountable.     ––  Dan McCarthy In the course of our work, we develop strategies, we make plans, and assign or delegate the resulting tasks to teams (usually, through their team lead) or to individuals.  As we do this, we start the process […]

…face-to-face.  Amy Cuddy, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and author of Presence:  Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, recently wrote that there are lots of reasons to put your smartphones down – constantly checking and then responding to them takes us out of the present moment disrupting whatever you are focusing on:  for […]

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Before I started the leadership journey, I was doing a lot of just that. Wasting a lot of my time and mind focusing on the immediate, the unimportant, the routine tasks that certainly were not going to make a significant difference in creating, influencing, or advancing the […]