Leadership Strategy

Company leaders are making their organizations more open and interactive, according to a new IBM study.
What’s the buzzword for CEOs across the globe right now? Connection.

Kees Kruythoff described himself as a bit arrogant when he first applied to work at Unilever in the 1990s. He had a vision of where he wanted to go in his career and was forthright in sharing those aspirations with his interviewers. "I told them I wanted to work four years in marketing, then two years in sales and then I would go abroad and work in places like China, South Africa, Indonesia or Brazil," Kruythoff said during a recent Wharton Leadership Lecture. "'I will tell [them] what I want from this company,' I told myself when I went in there. I was naïve, I admit."

Since 1982, historian Robert Caro has been chronicling the life of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson. The first three volumes of the Years of Lyndon Johnson series were met with wide acclaim.
The third volume, Master of the Senate, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Now, Caro has released volume four: The Passage of Power, which focuses on Johnson in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination in November 1963. Fast Company recently spoke with Caro, who said that one of the best ways to understand leadership is to observe leaders “during their most intense struggles, when they have to use every resource available."

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus’s “The Plague.” It wasn’t that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn’t done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them.

When I heard that Deloitte had purchased more than one hundred acres to construct a leader development facility in Dallas, I was stunned. What were they thinking?
 
Then I heard that, in the midst of the great recession, they intended to spend as much as three hundred million dollars in constructing their center. What were they thinking?

Years ago, General Motors (GM) launched a marketing campaign to attract new buyers to an old concept: the Cadillac. Declining sales led GM to update its classic model to appeal to new and younger car owners. Like the Cadillac, the concept of leadership in family medicine is in need of a makeover to suit a new generation of leaders. Traditional notions of leadership were espoused at a time when the majority of physician leaders were male, the doctor-patient model was patriarchal and life balance was defined as one early afternoon tee-time, never mind the countless sleepless nights and missed family dinners.
Today, shifting demographics and values require new models of leadership.

It’s easy for leaders to fall into the trap of thinking they need to have the answer to every problem or situation that arises. After all, that’s in a leader’s job description, right? 

 
Who's really effective at the office?
To get a handle on that question, a handful of bosses are taking decision-making power out of the executive suite and asking employees to help identify—and reward—talent by experimenting with internal markets in which workers "invest" in co-workers' performance and ideas.
Coffee & Power, a San Francisco odd-jobs start-up, granted each of its 15 full- and part-time employees 1,200 stock options this past January, to distribute among co-workers in whatever way they chose. A worker can plunk all his options onto one colleague or split them among the group, so individual bonuses are tied to how co-workers perceive each other's work.

Most entrepreneurs don't realize the art of storytelling can help you succeed in the start-up world.
Storytelling is a timeless human tradition. Before the written word, people would memorize elaborate stories full of morals that shaped cultures for generations. 

In today’s digital age, it's hard to focus. But the Not-Right-Now list can help you get things done.
Most people operate with To-Do lists. If you're like me, it seems as though that To-Do list never ends and you never check everything off of it.

What does a real-life CEO have in common with the central figures of a fictitious Mafia crime family in The Godfather? According to Justin Moore, CEO and founder of Axcient, plenty. 

Problems always come in pairs. There’s the immediate problem that must be fixed. Then there’s the problem behind the problem—the breakdown in the process, the policy, or the people that led to the problem.