Tuesday Reading

The Tuesday Reading this week is “Become an Extraordinary Leader” comes from Scott Edinger’s blog at the Harvard Business School.  Edinger is the executive vice president of Zenger Folkman leadership development consultancy. Your kids bring home their report cards.  Where do you focus – the As or the B– or C?  Of course, on the C.  It is really where […]

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 […]

For today’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to an Adam Bryant interview of Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons which appeared in the December 3, 2011 NYTimes.  IT Leaders Coach Greg Anderson called this interview – which can be found at <http://nyti.ms/tw4lR0> – to my attention.  It seemed to be a particularly fitting way to begin the […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently”was posted by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and originally from the Harvard Business Review blogs.  The author is Hiedi Grant Halvorson, motivational psychologist and author of Succeed:  How We Can Reach Our Goals. Halvorson notes that we are all very successful at reaching some of our goals;  and not so successful at […]

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, […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading, “Three Questions for Effective Feedback”, comes from the pen of Thomas J. DeLong, the Phillip J. Stomberg Professor of Management Practice in the Organizational Behavior area at the Harvard Business School.  His research focus is on the challenges facing individuals and organizations in the process of change. No leader improves without […]

Today’s reading “The Secret of Dealing with Difficult People:  It’s About You” comes from Tony Schwartz’s blog at the Harvard Business Review.  Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent At Anything.  Almost everyone of us has someone who routinely triggers us.  It may be the cynic in […]

Today’s reading “You are what you learn”comes from Scott Adam’s blog at dilbert.com and was drawn to my attention by my oldest son. The key point in Adam’s short essay is simply: A person changes in a fundamental way as he or she engages with a particular field of knowledge, i.e., when he or she […]

It’s easy for me to imagine that I don’t procrastinate.  But that would really be stretching the truth, stretching it a lot.  The reality is that no one of us is immune to procratination. Today’s reading is “Stop Procrastinating…Now”by Amy Gallo, a contributing editor at the Harvard Business Review. There are lots of reasons why we procrastinate: […]

This week’s reading “3 Ways to Improve Your Relationship with Staff”comes from the pen of John Baldoni, executive coach, author, and speaker. Baldoni begins the column with this strange sounding advice:  “Act like Mike Rowe” adding that this is the advice that he would give to leaders seeking guidance on how to connect more authentically with […]

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 […]

In MOR’s several Leaders Programs, we routinely talk about the need for everyone to set aside time on a regular basis for reflection, for work on strategic projects, and for planning.  In today’s reading “An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day“, Peter Bregman proposes a very structured plan for planning and thus for gaining control of […]

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 […]

Over the past several weeks I’ve seen many reviews of Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s new book “ The Progress Principle:  Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work.”  Today’s reading “How Small Wins Unleash Creativity” from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge is a summary of that book.*   Amabile and Kramer’s research […]

By selecting this article for today’s Tuesday Reading, I’m not suggesting that you should be out looking for a job.  Rather, given the author, Steve Tobak, who has extensive experience on both sides of the hiring desk, I thought that his piece “What Hiring Managers Really Look For” was excellent advice for the hiring manager. So, […]

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 think we are all micromanagers at heart.  This week’s reading is a short piece by John Baldoni, “Get Involved without Being a Micromanager:  3 Tips” which recently appeared in BNET’s leadership blog. We all dive deeply into the details;  sometimes when we are the only one with the necessary skills and expertise.  But, more often […]

I first saw reference to an E-mail Charter in Davig Pogue’s NYTimes column “We Have to Fix Email“on June 30, 2011.  In the column Pogue calls attention to the email overload that we all are experiencing almost every day in real time. That column points to a blog post by Chris Anderson, organizer for the […]

Today’s Reading, “Go Ahead, Take That Break”, comes from Whitney Johnson’s HBR Blog.  Johnson is a founding partner of Rose Park Advisors (Clayton M. Christensen’s investment firm), and is author of the forthcoming book “Done-Dream-Do:  Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream.” Many studies have shown how important rest is to the human brain.  […]