Tag Archives: Organizational change

Leadership Is Not a Solitary Task

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by John Coleman

 

 

An inspiring historical story is once again making the rounds at least partially because of its inclusion in Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, David and Goliath. In it, Gladwell tells the story of the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which became a safe haven for Jews in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Led by minister André Trocmé, the residents of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon saved between 3,000 and 3,500 Jews (in addition to others seeking refuge) from 1940 until the end of the war, bringing them into the community and hiding them from French and Nazi officials. By any measure, their actions were courageous and inspiring. They were also an example of the power of community in leadership. Continue reading →

How Business Can Help Measure Education Outcomes that Matter

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80-kantrowby Alan Kantrow

Employers the world over tell us that what truly counts in hiring decisions is not the rote knowledge that helps college students answer examination questions, but skills and competencies that are essential for, and often developed at, work.  To be useful, the bricks of modern education need the straw of experience-based skills.  Bricks without straw tend to crumble; they cannot support weight, as has been known from Biblical times. Continue reading →

Five Questions Every Leader Should Ask About Organizational Design

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80-john-beeson by John Beeson

A few years ago Dave Ulrich, a management thought leader from the University of Michigan, made a comment I found both insightful and profound: “Every leader needs to have a model of organization design.” Typically a graphic depiction of the organizational components to be addressed in a redesign (for example, McKinsey’s 7S model, which includes strategy, structure, systems, staff, skills, and so on), every consultant and his brother flogs an organization design model. Dave didn’t advocate any particular design model, just one the leader knows how to employ and one flexible enough to be applied to the range of organizational situations a leader faces in the course of a career. Continue reading →

Motivating People to Perform at Their Peak

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80-art-markman  by Art Markman

 

Almost all decisions, big and small, are choices between exploring new possibilities and exploiting old ones. When you explore, you select an option that’s unknown—or reexamine one that wasn’t optimal in the past to get new information about it. When you exploit, you choose something that’s yielded good results before, believing it will do so again.

Of course, the known course is safer. But if the newer, riskier one works out, chances are it will also pay off more handsomely. Continue reading →

The Focused Leader

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by Daniel Goleman

A primary task of leadership is to direct attention.To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. But a wealth of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathways—some of which work in concert, while others tend to stand in opposition. Continue reading →