Tuesday Reading

Today’s Tuesday Reading is the Conversation Starter by Larry Senn “Lead from the Top of the Mood Elevator” from Harvard Business Publishing.  Senn is the founder of Senn Delaney and an authority and practitioner in the field of culture shaping. The key point of this piece is rather straight forward:  Almost everyone experiences mood changes throughout […]

Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something, is the author of this week’s Tuesday Reading, “How to Write a Mission Statement That Isn’t Dumb”.  Her article appears in the December 1, 2009 issue of FastCompany. Lublin argues that our mission statements don’t have to be dumb, that is, neither clear nor useful.  They should, she continues, “convey clearly […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is a piece which I reproduce below “Using Curiosity to Create Accountability with Powerful People” by Roger Schwarz of the Skilled Facilitator. In his piece, Schwarz notes that when people are accountable to you, you [should] expect then to explain the key decisions and actions they have taken.  Yet, when we are talking […]

Today’s reading “Lessons from Your Leadership Journey” is a recent entry in Brian McDonald’s blog at the ITLP Leadership Development Community Practice website <http://bit.ly/L7Om>.   Early in every Leadership Program cycle, everyone has an opportunity to reflect on their past experiences as a leader and identify lessons they learned from these experiences.  In doing this, some people […]

Over the past several years, I’ve seen a number of articles about personal branding.  My favorite is a piece Tom Peters wrote some two years ago – “The Brand Called You” – that appeared in FastCompany on December 18, 2007.  Peters’ piece is this week’s Tuesday Reading. Peters begins by noting that today almost everything is branded, including […]

Today, we turn to Business Week’s September 18, 2009 Leadership column for the piece “How Authentic Leaders ‘Walk the Walk’”. In the article, Alan Deutschman, says that being an authentic leader means two things: 1.  You must share the struggle and the risks with your people. 2.  You must make sure that your actions consistently reinforce the […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading takes a look at Higher Ed 2.0.  Our reading is “Who Needs Harvard?” from the September 2009 issue of Fast Company.  The article’s subheading says it all:  “Free online courses, wiki universities, Facebook-style tutoring networks – American higher education is being transformed by a cadre of web-savvy edupunks.”   This piece makes the point that the […]

For today’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to a Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Q&A – “How Team Leaders Show Support – or Not”– with HBS faculty member Teresa Anabile. Though from 2004, the findings remain valid.  Professor Anabile’s research points to two key concepts for leaders who want to gain their staff’s confidence: 1.  Perceptions […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading is an entry –  “Humility as a Leadership Trait”– from John Baldoni’s Harvard Business Publishing blog. Baldoni asserts, and I agree, that leaders who want to inspire followers need to demonstrate both their accomplishments and their character.  Key to demonstrating character is being humble.  And, humility is essential to leadership because […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading is from BusinessWeek’s August 25, 2009 Communications Column:  “How to Give a Lousy Presentation”.  We all make a lot of presentations.  And, I know that you are like me and know that you are able to do better most of the time.  This piece gives you 15 excellent ways to make a lousy presentation.  It […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “The Success Trap”, from Jeffrey Pfeffer’s August 25th,  BNET Column, The Corner Officer on August 25, 2009. Pfeffer’s thesis is simple:  When we become successful, it is very easy to drop our guard, to not maintain our standards (much less build on them), and to rest on our laurals. He argues that to […]

The Tuesday Reading for today is Jeffrey Pfeffer’s piece, Stop Working for Technology – Make it Work for You which appeared in BNET’s The Corner Office on July 22, 2009.  Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Pfeffer’s point in this piece is simple and straight-forward:  For some, maybe most, of us […]

For today’s reading we turn to John Baldoni’s blog at the Harvard Business Review for his piece “How to Make People Passionate About Their Work”.   Baldoni notes that generating passion for what you do is essential, and doubly so in difficult times.  He goes on to say that it is essential for a leader to have passion […]

Much of a leader’s time is spent, formally or informally, working to influence decision makers, typically peers, cross-organizational colleagues, or those higher up in the organization.  The Tuesday Reading this week – Effectively Influencing Decision Makers:  Ensuring That Your Knowledge Makes a Difference – focuses on just this subject. To begin the article, Marshall Goldsmith quotes […]

There’s lots of advice on finding and attracting staff and on identifying and retaining top performers you already have.  Stephen DeMaio, in a recent blog entry – “How to Identify Employees’ Hidden Talents” – argues that it is even more important to look for your current staff’s hidden strengths to find new skills and talents that have […]

It seems like every week I hear of universities planning for, going through, or having recently experienced layoffs, terminations, or position eliminations as a result of the economic crisis we are experiencing.  Today’s reading – “Ask the Expert:  How Do Effective Leaders Handle Change?” — is by Mark Hannum, Principle Consultant at Linkage and looks at practices that […]

Well-integrated, high-performing teams, teams that “click,” is the subject of today’s Tuesday Reading – “How Leaders Get Their Teams To ‘Click’”  by Phil Harken.  Such teams never lose slight of their goals and are largely self-sustaining.  They often seem to take on a life of their own.  Studies by the European Centre for Organizational Research show that […]

This week, for the week’s Tuesday Reading, I turn to a recent message from the ITLP IX Vision Team:  “The Key to Getting Lucky:  PRACTICE!!!”   The Key to Getting Lucky: PRACTICE!!! A Golf Story When the golfer Tom Watson chipped in on the 17th at Pebble Beach in 1982 and then birdied the final hole to […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “Making Decisions Outside Your Repertoire”  by Ronald Heifetz (you remember him from the first session of the Leadership Program), Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow. The article begins by noting that in turbulent times like today, pressure in on to act quickly.  But, the authors argue, that strategic moves depend on making […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is from the April 28, 2009 Ask Annie column of Fortune Magazine:  “How to work better with Gen Y”.  The April 28th question has to do with working with a new class of interns – Generation Y individuals;  birth years 1978-1990 – who are very much like our younger employees. Anne Fisher, who writes the […]