There are informal leaders in every organization.  These are the people in the organization who, without formal title or authority, get things done, and done well, show others how to do them, and have a large network interconnecting many people in a variety of teams and organizations across the entire organization.  Often we do not even know who these people are nor recognize their importance in our organization’s success or understand the breadth of their networks.

What's the difference?

Someone asked the other day, “What do you think?” and I wondered, is this a time to coach or a time to mentor?  In our interactions everyday we may have the choice to adopt one approach over the other.  Yet we need to be able to make the distinction between coaching in contrast to mentoring.  When is coaching the better path;  when would mentoring be a better option?

I suspect that you, like me, must answer “yes.”  From a neuroscience perspective, our brains are constantly, subconsciously scanning the world around us seeking to identify and examine “events” of note – for example, the school bus that went down my street this morning at 

Earlier this summer we introduced the idea (in a series of Tuesday Readings, as referenced below) that if we understand how our brain works, we can better understand why we react the way we do.  I wrote, then, that the individual’s brain, in the days of our early ancestors, had one key goal – survival, avoiding threats and seeking food (rewards).  And, avoiding threats had a much higher priority with five times more neural networks devoted to threat detection than to identifying rewards. 

On April 1 we reached out to the MOR Leaders alumni on behalf of Ed Clark, fellow program alum and current CIO of University of St Thomas, with a survey on "IT Centralization and the Innovation Value Chain in Higher Education".  This was part of his PhD dissertation work, in which I am happy to report he passed and earned his degree.  Congratulations Dr. Ed!  As an expression of appreciation, Ed has drafted a summary of his findings to share with you all.  Below please find that output.

Thank you,

Sean McDonald

As I listened to an interview with Rick Levin this morning, CEO of Coursera, what seems to me as a decreasing value of content, was further being validated. 

Over the past years, we’ve written about the skill of listening several times.  (You can check them out at MOR Insights.)  Today, I want to return to that topic with some data.  Today’s Tuesday Reading is Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman’s essay What Great Listeners Actually Do which appeared on a recent HBR blog. 
 

By Maria Curcio, [email protected] 

MORLP 2016, August 29, 2016.

In his article, “Why Luck Matters More Than You Think” (Atlantic, May 2016), Robert H. Frank discusses luck in terms of wealth and success: