Tuesday Reading

Recently Daniel Markovitz wrote “To-Do Lists Don’t Work” for the Harvard Business Review blogs.  I found the posting to be a good discussion of why we all wrestle with making our to-do lists work and decided to share it as today’s Tuesday Reading.  Markovitzis president of TimeBack Management and the author of A Factory of One. He […]

Today’s Reading, “Go to Lunch and Clean Out Your Inbox,” was originally written as a weekly reflection by Stephen Kemp.  Stephen is the Coordinator for Help Desk Services at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Every semester I perform employee reviews for my student workers; this is an opportunity for me to give […]

Today’s Reading, Christensen on disruptive innovation in higher education, comes to us from the Changing Higher Education blog.  (Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” in 2003, having used “disruptive technology” earlier for the same concept.) This blog post draws from a well-written white paper – Disrupting College – that describes the challenges facing higher education today, […]

Today’s reading – “Why Appreciation Matters so Much” – comes from the pen of Tony Schwartz, President and CEO of The Energy Project and author of Be Excellent at Anything. Schwartz observes that a recent world-wide study by Towers Watson found that the single highest driver of engagement is whether or not workers feel their managers […]

Today’s reading “Wilderness Leadership – on the Job”comes from the pens of John Kanengieter and Aparna Rajagopal-Durbin.  Kanengieter is director of leadership at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and Rajagopal-Durbin is the school’s diversity and inclusion manager and a faculty member.  NOLS is a non-profit outdoor educational school dedicated to teaching environmental ethics, technical outdoor skills, […]

Roger Schwarz writes an occasional newsletter titled “Mindset. Behavior.  Results.”  In a recent edition he noted that collective wisdom is often found in unexpected places, for example, bumper stickers.  Here is his article:   BUMPER STICKERS FOR LEADERS   I like bumper stickers. They’re brief, to the point, and often clever. Here are a few of […]

This past year Michael Useem’s new book “The Leader’s Checklist” was published.  Professor Useem is Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.   The checklist has 15 leadership principles that taken together can constitute an effective playbook for leadership decisions whatever […]

Anna Biggers, ITLP alum from University of Oklahoma, suggested today’s reading –  “’No’ is the New ‘Yes:’  Four Practices to Re-prioritize Your Life”.  Tony Schwartz is author of this article, which appeared in the Harvard Business Review blog last January.  He is president and CDO of The Energy Project. Schwartz notes that we all have back-to-back meetings, more email […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading was written by Dana Stasiak, a participant in IT Leaders 2012, as a reflection on leadership for her cohort.  Dana is the manager for Web Services at Argonne National Laboratory.  She writes:   I was channel surfing on Sunday night after our first session and ended up on Great Performances on PBS.  As it […]

Earlier this year Arianna Huffington, author and syndicated columnist, spoke on the Penn State campus as part of their 2011-2012 Distinguished Speaker series.  The centredaily.com account of the event <http://www.bit.ly/wFmdtk> is today’s reading. In her remarks, Huffington provided a number of leadership truisms that Gary Augustson, ITLP coach and former CIO of Penn State, urged me […]

The Tuesday Reading today is a piece, “The Power of Pause”, by Ana Dutra which recently appeared in a Harvard Business Review blog.  Dutra is CEO for Leadership and Talent Consulting and Executive Vice President, at Korn Ferry International. No leader likes to be called out as tactical, short-term oriented, or for always being in the […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “Not Achieving Your Goals?  5 Common Mistakes”which appeared in the CBS business blog recently.  Kelly Goldsmith is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.  Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading leadership thinkers.  He is author or editor os some 30 books on leadership and management.  Each of us sets goals […]

Research by Bradley Owens from the University of Buffalo’s School of Management and David Hekman from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee’s Luber School of Business has shown that “Leaders of all ranks view admitting mistakes, spot lighting follower strengths and modeling teachability as being at the core of humble leadership.”  “And, they view these […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “What to do when you’re stuck” is from Margaret Heffernan’s blog atCBS News.  Heffernan has been CEO of five businesses in the United States and United Kingdom.  A speaker and writer, her most recent book Willful Blindness was shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book 2011. Heffernan begins by noting that […]

Today’s reading “This One Leadership Quality Will Make or Break You”is from the pen of Mike Myatt, author (Leadership Matters…The CEO Survival Manuel) and managing director and chief strategy officer at N2growth.  The piece appeared at Forbes.com. If you’re asking, which quality, Myatt’s answer is pursuit.  He says “Great leaders are never satisfied with traditional practice, strategic […]

We all need to have a “listening” tune-up from time-to-time.  Today’s reading “How to Really Listen”serves that purpose.  The article is from the Harvard Business Review Blogs and was written by Peter Bergman, author (“Get the Right Things Done”) and strategic advisor to CEOs and their leadership teams. Listening is hard, one or the hardest of the […]

Peter Bergman, author of today’s reading – “What’s Your One Big Theme?” – takes time each year at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year to identify what he wants to change during the coming year.  Others, write New Year’s resolutions.  And, when you think about it, there’s no magic in any particular day.  So today may be your day […]

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 […]