In a recent portrait of Avatar director James Cameron, Rebecca Keegan outlines five leadership rules the director brings to each movie set. Reading it I was struck by how Cameron’s style matches what we’ve learned about Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But don’t go teaching these traits, which admittedly produce incredible innovation, to MBA students. In…
Category: Leadership
Connecting is More Skill than Natural Talent
Here’s another great article from John C. Maxwell. “When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.”~ Attributed to Abraham Lincoln Seldom do we consider ourselves to be boring or out of touch…
Why Good Spreadsheets Make Bad Strategies
We live in a world obsessed with science, preoccupied with predictability and control, and enraptured with quantitative analysis. Economic forecasters crank out precision predictions of economic growth with their massive econometric models. CEOs give to-the-penny guidance to capital markets on next quarter’s predicted earnings. We live by adages like: “Show me the numbers” and truisms…
Turbulent Times Highlight the Need for Succession Planning
How much risk is your company willing to take? If your organization does not have an actionable and cost-effective CEO succession plan in place, then its willingness to gamble is high. Research shows that faulty integration of senior executives can cost a company 10 to 20 times the executive’s salary in lost opportunity costs. Moreover,…
Making an Impression vs. Being Impressed – John C. Maxwell
Admired for her beauty, Jennie Jerome (Winston Churchill’s mother) glided through the loftiest social circles in Great Britain. Once, on consecutive nights, Ms. Jerome dined with England’s premier politicians: Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his chief rival, William Gladstone. When questioned about her impressions of the two men, Ms. Jerome made the following observation: “When…
Accidental Growth Versus Purposeful Growth – John C Maxwell
In 1940 two brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald, started McDonald’s Barbeque Restaurant in San Bernardino, CA. Typical of the drive-ins of its time, McDonald’s offered an expansive menu from which customers could order and then be serviced by carhops. Through time, the brothers noticed a trend in their sales. A small number of items on…
Yahoo’s Turnaround Efforts Straight from Steve Jobs’ Playbook
Carol Bartz, the still new CEO of Yahoo, convened her first meeting for Wall Street analysts a few weeks ago. Forget the specifics for a moment. She could have been talking about another iconic Silicon Valley company that had gone astray under experienced but ineffectual leaders who had been brought in from other industries to…
The Difference Between Leadership and Management
Leadership and management must go hand in hand. They are not the same thing. But they are necessarily linked, and complementary. Any effort to separate the two is likely to cause more problems than it solves. Still, much ink has been spent delineating the differences. The manager’s job is to plan, organize and coordinate. The…
Leadership Research on Singapore SMEs (Services)
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of Singapore’s economy, contributing 47% of the country’s GDP and generating 62% of available jobs. According to official records, there are about 126,000 SMEs in Singapore and most of the owners are so preoccupied in their daily operations to think of anything else. Many of them face…
High Performers Get Fed Up
High performers have been disproportionately affected by organizations’ responses to the recession. The 2009–2010 U.S. Strategic Rewards Survey by Watson Wyatt and WorldatWork found that employee engagement levels for all workers at the surveyed companies have dropped 9% since last year — but the number was nearly 25% for top performers. The number of people…
The Ways Systems Maximize Our Lives
I bring to you an excerpt of an article from John C Maxwell, one of my favorite leadership gurus. I believe this will be beneficial for you as it is for me.___________________________________________________ From a high level, we have already looked at how systems benefit our leadership. I’d like to go a little deeper by sharing…
Leaders who Energize
Some people become leaders no matter what their chosen path because their positive energy is so uplifting. Even in tough times, they always find a way. They seem to live life on their own terms even when having to comply with someone else’s requirements. When they walk into a room, they make it come alive….
Everyone A Leader 