MOR Insight

Today’s reading is a short essay, reproduced below, by Roger Schwartz in his newsletter Fundamental Change.  He makes two significant points that caught my attention:  First, accountability is a two-way street.  Not only do your staff have accountability to their manager, but the manager, you, have accountability to them.  And, second, all feedback needs to be timely.  Said differently, it becomes stale very rapidly.  Schwartz suggests that if you have not given the feedback within a week of observing either something good that needs to be recognized or something ineffective that needs to b

Today’s reading “How to Stop the Blame Game” is by Nathanael Fast, assistant professor of Management and Organization at USC’s Marshall School of Business.  It appeared in the May research blog of the Harvard Business Review.

Fast points back to the recent “grilling” of three oil company executives by U.S. Senate committees.  He noted that the executives “fell over each other in attempts to shift the blame.” And, that “No one was impressed.”

Today’s reading comes from an Amy Gallo posting How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team to the Harvard Business Review BLOG.  Gallo is a writer, editor, and business consultant.  Her writing on management issues regularly appears in the HRB BLOG.  Earlier she was a consultant at Katztenbach Partners, a strategy and organization consulting firm where she was involved in the firm’s research and thinking on the “informal organization.”

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of “Made to Stick,” released a new book in February – “Switch:  How to change things when change is hard.”  Today’s reading is a review of the book by Keith McFarland which appeared in BusinessWeek. McFarland is founder of McFarland Strategy Partners and author of The Breakthrough Company, and BOUNCE.

In Switch, the Heath brothers take on the subject of organizational change.  And, according to McFarland they make the often dry subject “suddenly relevant for anyone trying to get a bunch of people to change directions.”

After my June 1st Tuesday Reading “Drilling for Certainty” – which made the point that our world has become extremely technologically complex and that the possibility for catastrophe is imbedded in the fabric of day-to-day live – I received several emails making the same or similar points.

A couple of months ago, Gary Augustson posted a BLOG at the Leaders Community Site which has a powerful message for all of us:  “Life is full of ‘wins’ and ‘losses’."  In the end, how you deal with both will be one of the keys to your success as a leader.”  Given the importance of what Gary says, I’ve included the entire post below as this week’s reading.

 .  .  .  .  .     jim

No matter who we are, we will meet resistance on some matter every day.  And, according to Kevin Daley, founder of Communispond, Inc. and author of “Talk Your Way to the Top” and “Socratic Selling,” the way we handle that resistance is often counterproductive.

In “Overcome Resistance with the Right Questions”, Daley notes that our default response to resistance is more selling.  When we meet resistance, we roll out more evidence to support the idea.  And, still we hear “no.”

David Brooks’ May 27, 2010 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times was titled “Drilling for Certainity”which is today’s Tuesday Reading.  The piece also appeared in the May 29th Pittsburgh Post Gazette and was seen by Annie Stunden, Former CIO, University of Wisconsin and IT Leaders Presenter and Coach.  

In today’s readings “Why Brainstorming Doesn’t Work”and “Better Brainstorming:  4 Ways to Generate Great Ideas", Margaret Heffernan reminds us of several shortcomings in our brainstorming practices and suggests improvements.  Heffernan is visiting professor of entrepreneurship at Simmons College in Boston, CEO, author, and speaker.

This Tuesday’s reading is “Communicating Vision”, by John Maxwell, prolific writer and speaker on leadership.

In this short article, Maxwell outlines an approach for communicating a clear and compelling organizational vision.  (You will notice many similarities to the SUCCES tool that we have presented in many of the MOR leadership program workshops.)

He makes six recommendations: