MOR Insight

Yesterday, Dave Logan's column "Leadership Lessons from the Debt Deal Fiasco" appeared in the BNET newsletter.  Given the timeliness of the subject, I wanted to share the column and its lesson with you.  Logan is a faculty member in USC's Marshall School of Business.  He teaches leadership and management.  In addition, he's a Senior Partner in CultureSync, a management consulting firm he co-founded in 1997, and author of four books including "Tribal Leadership."

Today’s reading is a July 17, 2011 column “’Let’s Meet’ doesn’t have to be death knell for productivity” <http://bo.st/qG5ac3> by Boston Globe Columnist, Scott Kirsner.  Kirsner is the author of the book “The Future of Web Video,” editor of “The Convergence Guide: Life Sciences in New England,” and a contributor to “The Good City: Writers Explore 21st Century Boston.” 

Today's Reading, "The Right Response is Not Always Instant" , is from the pen of Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of "The GE Work-Out."  His latest book is "Simply Effective."

Too many of the flood of messages we receive each day have an implied, or sometime stated, urgency that suggests, requires, or even demands that we drop everything and address the request.  You have to wonder, with seemingly everything "labeled" urgent whether anything really is.

This week’s reading comes from an interview Robert Mcgarvey had with Larry Bossidy that appeared in the July 2003 issue of the AmericanWay – “It’s All In The Follow-through” – about the time Bossidy’s book Execution was published.  Of particular attention is the sidebar at the very end of the piece.

John Baldoni is an internationally known leadership educator, coach, author, and speaker.  Today’s reading, a recent BNET blog post, is “’I Don’t Have Time’ and Other Excuses Managers Give for Not Coaching” and can be found at <http://bit.ly/mPG92a>.

Today’s reading is an article from the May 11, 2011 issue of Knowledge@Wharton – “Leadership as the ‘Norm, not the Exception'” <http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2771>, a report on a speech at Wharton by Barry Salzberg, who became global CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited on June 1, 2011.

In his remarks, Salzberg identified ten leadership lessons for the next generation of leaders:

I found this interesting read “Why Leadership Programs Don’t Work” by Kelly Goldsmith and Marshall Goldsmith in BNET.  It’s really short infomercial aimed squarely at you.

Today’s Reading “Why Leaders Play Chicken” comes to us via the HBR Blog Network and is from the pen of Ron Ashkenas.  Ashkenas is managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and author of the recent book, Simply Effective.

In this piece, Ashkenas reminds us of the game of chicken that most of us played when we were children.  It was a foolish, immature way of showing who had the most guts, the most nerve, and the most will-power.  And, the winner became the respected dominant leader of the group.

One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that people behave differently when their environment changes.  When we are at a place where people are quiet, say a church or a library, we’re quiet;  when we are at a sporting event where it’s loud, we’re loud.

Why then, when we try to make changes at work do we, almost always, focus on people changing rather than on changing the environment.  Often, changing the environment is the easiest way to effect meaningful behavioral change.

Joe Urich from the University of Iowa shared this piece with his on-campus cohort last month and I thought it was worth sharing with everyone.  “Lessons of Fort Sumter”was published in early April in the Wall Street Journal.  The author is Bret Stephens, a columnist for the Journal.

In the short piece he distills from the battle for Sumter five important leadership lessons:

1.  Listen to many opinions.  Don’t just listen to the loud voice, seek options.