Tuesday 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.  […]

Today’s reading is a short piece by Jeff Haden, “One Small Step for You – One Giant Leap for Employees”.  Haden learned much of what he knows about management as he worked his way up the printing business from forklift driver to manager of a 250-employee book plant.  The rest he picked up from ghost writing books […]

Today’s reading is the Schumpeter* column “Too much information”, from the July 2, 2011 issue of The Economist. The column notes that “information overload is one of the biggest irritations of modern life.”  The author goes on to note that the ”data fog“ is thickening at the time when workers are compelled to take on additional […]

Yesterday, Dave Logan’s column “Leadership Lessons from the Debt Deal Fiasco” appeared in the BNET newsletter.  Given the timeliness of the subject, I wanted to share the column and its lesson with you.  Logan is a faculty member in USC’s Marshall School of Business.  He teaches leadership and management.  In addition, he’s a Senior Partner in […]

Today’s reading is a July 17, 2011 column “’Let’s Meet’ doesn’t have to be death knell for productivity” <http://bo.st/qG5ac3> by Boston Globe Columnist, Scott Kirsner.  Kirsner is the author of the book “The Future of Web Video,” editor of “The Convergence Guide: Life Sciences in New England,” and a contributor to “The Good City: Writers […]

Today’s Reading, “The Right Response is Not Always Instant” , is from the pen of Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of “The GE Work-Out.”  His latest book is “Simply Effective.” Too many of the flood of messages we receive each day have an implied, or sometime stated, urgency that suggests, […]

This week’s reading comes from an interview Robert Mcgarvey had with Larry Bossidy that appeared in the July 2003 issue of the AmericanWay – “It’s All In The Follow-through” – about the time Bossidy’s book Execution was published.  Of particular attention is the sidebar at the very end of the piece. Bossidy is the former chair of […]

John Baldoni is an internationally known leadership educator, coach, author, and speaker.  Today’s reading, a recent BNET blog post, is “’I Don’t Have Time’ and Other Excuses Managers Give for Not Coaching” and can be found at <http://bit.ly/mPG92a>. Baldoni notes that most leaders know that coaching is part of their job.  And, companies that have […]

Today’s reading is an article from the May 11, 2011 issue of Knowledge@Wharton – “Leadership as the ‘Norm, not the Exception’” <http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2771>, a report on a speech at Wharton by Barry Salzberg, who became global CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited on June 1, 2011. In his remarks, Salzberg identified ten leadership lessons for the […]

I found this interesting read “Why Leadership Programs Don’t Work” by Kelly Goldsmith and Marshall Goldsmith in BNET.  It’s really short infomercial aimed squarely at you. A few years ago Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan studied eight different companies with 86,000 participants, including 11,000 recognized as leaders, in executive coaching programs.  Every leader focused on one […]

Today’s Reading “Why Leaders Play Chicken” comes to us via the HBR Blog Network and is from the pen of Ron Ashkenas.  Ashkenas is managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and author of the recent book, Simply Effective. In this piece, Ashkenas reminds us of the game of chicken that most of us played when we […]

Joe Urich from the University of Iowa shared this piece with his on-campus cohort last month and I thought it was worth sharing with everyone.  “Lessons of Fort Sumter”was published in early April in the Wall Street Journal.  The author is Bret Stephens, a columnist for the Journal. In the short piece he distills from […]