MOR Insight

For today’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to Dan and Chip Heath’s Made to Stick column in Fast Company for a piece about goals:  “Time to Aim Lower”.

In this piece the focus is on those ambitious goals that we often set for ourselves.  Sometimes these goals, instead of energizing and empowering the goal-setter, do just the opposite.  We dread getting started.  We may feel overwhelmed.  We may feel that we’ll fail or succeed (and not like the result).  And, the list goes on.

For today’s reading we turn to advice from José Carlos Eiras, former CIO of DHL-Express US and also European CIO and Global Services Information Officer at General Motors, found in “Practical Advice for CIOs Struggling to Survive in Tough Times".

After talking briefly about the choices IT leaders struggling with tough times -- either ”hunker down and wait timidly for fate,“ or ”seize the moment“ -- Eiras advocates seizing the moment and makes seven recommendations:

In ITLP, we talk a lot about meetings.  Greg Anderson, senior director for General Services at the University of Chicago, recently called my attention to a January 18, 2009 New York Times article “Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time”.  The author is Reid Hastie, Robert S. Hamada Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

This week’s Tuesday Reading “How New Leaders Can Achieve Quick Wins” is an interview with Mark E. Van Buren and Todd Safferston who looked at how quick wins affected the success and futures of new leaders.  (A full article on this subject, The Quick Wins Paradox,“ appears in the January 2009 of the Harvard Business Review.)

In the current issue of Fortune Magazine, Jim Collins is interviewed by Fortune Senior Writer Jennifer Reingold for the article “How Great Companies Turn Crisis Into Opportunity”.

How often have you laid out for your team, perhaps in a presentation followed by a clearly written document, a future state for the team as well as the strategies for getting there.  And, you wait, and wait, and nothing happens.

This is the situation that Marshall Goldsmith addresses in “Don’t Just Check the Box”.  Though written four years ago, his advice is as timely today as it was in 2005.

Power is a subject that is not often discussed in public.  Yet, an individual cannot be a leader without having power, “the potential to influence others.”  In this week’s Tuesday Reading, “Power Plays:  How to Use Your Power Wisely” from the December 2008 Issue of the Center for Creative Leadership’s Newsletter Leading Effectively, outlines nine strategies for levering your power more effectively:

1.  Make relationships a priority.  To improve relational power you need to:

This week’s Tuesday Reading “Taking Control of Your Work Life Balance and Gaining Personal Fulfillment” takes a hard look at work life balance.  In her review of clinical psychologist Henry Cloud’s new book "The One Life Solution," Meridith Levinson, a CIO staff writer, wrote:

” Work will consume as much time as we allow it.  It will take over our whole lives if we let it.“

Today’s reading “IT Careers:  5 Tips for Charting Your 100 Day Plan" by Mary Pratt, a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, MA, focuses on developing a plan for the next 100 days.  The point being that the more you have a vision of where you want to be in 100 days and a well thought out plan for how you might get from here to there, the more likely you will be successful.

Today’s reading, “Degrees of Giving” by Bruna Martinuzzi, comes from the MindTools November 25th, 2008 newsletter.  

Last week we celebrated Thanksgiving and were with our families and thought about all the reasons we have to be thankful.  We may have thought about giving -- giving thanks, giving of our time, giving material gifts, etc.  Such gifts can give us some understanding of the power of generosity and lead naturally to asking how the ideas of generosity and giving translate to the workplace and leadership.