Strategy

Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something, is the author of this week’s Tuesday Reading, “How to Write a Mission Statement That Isn’t Dumb”.  Her article appears in the December 1, 2009 issue of FastCompany. Lublin argues that our mission statements don’t have to be dumb, that is, neither clear nor useful.  They should, she continues, “convey clearly […]

Over the past several years, I’ve seen a number of articles about personal branding.  My favorite is a piece Tom Peters wrote some two years ago – “The Brand Called You” – that appeared in FastCompany on December 18, 2007.  Peters’ piece is this week’s Tuesday Reading. Peters begins by noting that today almost everything is branded, including […]

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 […]

This week, for the week’s Tuesday Reading, I turn to a recent message from the ITLP IX Vision Team:  “The Key to Getting Lucky:  PRACTICE!!!”   The Key to Getting Lucky: PRACTICE!!! A Golf Story When the golfer Tom Watson chipped in on the 17th at Pebble Beach in 1982 and then birdied the final hole to […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “Making Decisions Outside Your Repertoire”  by Ronald Heifetz (you remember him from the first session of the Leadership Program), Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow. The article begins by noting that in turbulent times like today, pressure in on to act quickly.  But, the authors argue, that strategic moves depend on making […]

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 […]

Somehow, Tuesday came and I was completely oblivious to my commitment to send out something for everyone to reflect on.  Don’t know where my thoughts were that morning!  In spite of my forgetfulness, we do have a very good piece for this week from ITLP IX’s Vision Team – Tom Lewis (University of Washington), Todd Rheinfrank […]

Recently, Adam Bryant, writer for the New York Times’ Coner Office column, interviewed John Donahoe, president and chief executive of eBay for the past year.  The condensed interview is today’s Turesday Reading – “There’s No Need to Bat .900”. Donahoe has a lot of good advice: •  You can’t change people.  …  Allyou can do is help them help […]

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 […]

For today’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to Dan and Chip Heath’s Made to Stick column in Fast Company for a piece about goals:  “Time to Aim Lower”. In this piece the focus is on those ambitious goals that we often set for ourselves.  Sometimes these goals, instead of energizing and empowering the goal-setter, do just […]

In ITLP, we talk a lot about meetings.  Greg Anderson, senior director for General Services at the University of Chicago, recently called my attention to a January 18, 2009 New York Times article “Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time”.  The author is Reid Hastie, Robert S. Hamada Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago’s […]

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 […]

A number of you are fans of David Allen and follow many of the recommendations in his book, “Getting Things Done.”  Our reading this week is “The Curse Of The Eternally Urgent” which you will find at <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-allen/the-curse-of-the-eternall_b_96512.html>. In this piece Allen argues that many of the fires and crises that we find on our desk […]

Over the past week or so, it has seemed that everywhere I turned I ran across an article or a book with leadership or leader in the title:  Vigilant Leadership, Adaptive Leadership, the Leader of the Future, Better Leadership, and Total Leadership.  Today’s piece, Mark Hanna’s “Probing the Periphery:  Mastering Vigilant Leadership” is from the June […]

During the course of a Leadership Program many of the participants ask how to conduct effective meetings and even more groan under the impact of the meetings on their calendars.  This weeks reading, Eight Steps to More Effective Meetings which can be found at <http://www.cio.com/article/141300/Eight_Steps_to_More_Effective_Meetings>, provides some concrete data on the negative impact of ineffective meetings […]

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 “Situational Awareness 101”, John Baldoni points out that “A sound sense of situational awareness is vital to leadership decision making.  A leader must know context (what is happening), circumstance (what has happened) and consequence (what could happen) at all times.” In this short piece, Baldoni talks about context, circumstance, and consequence and concludes “Ignoring […]

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 […]

Most of us cringe at the thought of saying no.  We think that it is not an option.  We don’t want to disappoint.  Etc.  However, saying yes to everything creates an untenable position for you and for your organization.  Esther Derby in “The Benefits of No” gives us an essential management tool, a three-point approach to saying no: 1.  Start by […]