Tuesday Reading

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 […]

I recently stumbled across a post “ The Toughest Choices a Leader Must Make”(which is alternatively titled “Thinking Strategically About What You Want to Accomplish in Life”) that really caught my attention.  Its author is Ray Blunt, who is Associate Director and Fellow at the Washington Institute fro Faith, Vocation, and Culture.  His focus as a leadership […]

For this week’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to a Harvard Business Review blog post by Linda Hill and Kent Lineback “Better Time Management is Not the Answer”.  Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professof of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Lineback has spent many years as a manager and executive in business […]

Are you up for a challenge?  Josh Linkner in a recent Fast Company blog post, “The 5% Creativity Challenge”, challenges each of us to schedule two one-hour thinking sessions each week.  Linkner is the author of Disciplined Dreaming – A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity and CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners. He suggests […]

Today’s reading is “Managing Yourself:  Stop Holding Yourself Back”from the Harvard Business Review.  The authors are Ann Morriss, managing director of the Concire Leadership Institute and Robin Ely and Frances Frei, both professors at the Harvard Business School. Morriss, Ely, and Frei have been studying for over a decade what gets in the way of […]

Luca Baiguni, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Personal Development at the Politecnico di Milano, was recently was in Barcelona on business and spent some time visiting the city.  One of his must see places was the Sagrada Famìla, the basilica universally considered the masterpiece of Antoni Gaudì, the Spanish architect who lived from 1852 to […]

The reading today, “Take ownership of your meeting experience”, appeared in the Facilitate.com blog and comes from the keyboard of Danuta McCall, a senior member of the Facilitate.com team.  The reading’s key point is that we, each as individual participants in a meeting, play a role in whether that meeting is successful or not.  We do […]

Today’s reading comes from Anthony Tjan’s Harvard Business Review Blog.  Tian is CEO of the venture capital firm Cue Ball and is a recognized business builder.  The piece “Six Habits of a Talent Magnet,” which he wrote with Tsun-yan Hsiehm chair of the LinHart Group, can be found at <http://bit.ly/e5VSWy>. In the piece, the authors […]

A few weeks ago, one of the Harvard Business Review Blogs contained a short post by Linda Hill and Kent Lineback with the eye-catching title “The Words Many Managers Are Afraid to Say”.  Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor Business Administration at Harvard Business School.  Kent Lineback spent many years as a […]

Last week my attention was drawn to a 2007 article by Harry M. Jansen Kraemer, Jr. “What is this thing called CEO leadership?“.  Kraemer is clinical professor of management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and an executive partner with Madison Dearborn, a private equity firm based in Chicago.  He is also the former […]