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?
2. What will actually be different because of the change?
3. Who’s going to lose what?
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.
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 write, challenging their colleagues in the next stages of their leadership journey.
Today’s Tuesday Reading is “Stay Out of the Bunker”from the New York Times Under New Management column. There Kelly Holland says that even though this may be a very challenging time for managers, employees still need leadership if they are to function effectively. She suggests seven behaviors for leaders:
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, Too“, in Stew Friedman’s blog which made sense for today’s Tuesday Reading. Friedman is a professor at the Wharton School and the author of the book ”Total Leadership.“
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 the opposite. We dread getting started. We may feel overwhelmed. We may feel that we’ll fail or succeed (and not like the result). And, the list goes on.
For today’s reading we turn to advice from José Carlos Eiras, former CIO of DHL-Express US and also European CIO and Global Services Information Officer at General Motors, found in “Practical Advice for CIOs Struggling to Survive in Tough Times".
After talking briefly about the choices IT leaders struggling with tough times -- either ”hunker down and wait timidly for fate,“ or ”seize the moment“ -- Eiras advocates seizing the moment and makes seven recommendations:
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 Booth School of Business.
This week’s Tuesday Reading “How New Leaders Can Achieve Quick Wins” is an interview with Mark E. Van Buren and Todd Safferston who looked at how quick wins affected the success and futures of new leaders. (A full article on this subject, The Quick Wins Paradox,“ appears in the January 2009 of the Harvard Business Review.)
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”.