Speaking of Leadership® – Billy Beane in Your HR Department
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn his best-selling book “Moneyball :The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”, author Michael Lewis profiles Billy Beane, who was named manager of the Oakland A’s and given a mandate to cut team payroll. Using a form of analytics known as sabermetrics he was able to find and field a competitive roster that
Speaking of Leadership® – Keeping Your Business Models Relevant
Reading Time: < 1 minuteTechnology and demand for content are disrupting the entertainment business and making life tougher for other content creators and the middlemen. Maybe you can learn how to change your own business model before time and circumstance make if a matter of life and death by absorbing the lessons of those who
Giving Feedback – Are you a Leader?
Reading Time: < 1 minute “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend of his faults. If you are angry with a man, or hate him, it is not hard to go to him and stab him with words; but so to love a man that you cannot bear to
Gladwell on the Preconditions for Disruption
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe great innovations that have become part of the fabric of our lives were once extraordinarily disruptive. Check out this short article that summarizes remarks made by Malcolm Gladwell this week at the World Business Forum on the “preconditions” for effective disruption; the first consisting of being somewhat “disagreeable.”
If You Can’t Wait for Karma, Try This
Reading Time: < 1 minuteMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella garnered some unwelcome publicity this week when he suggested that women in tech should be patient and wait for “karma” to bring their salaries in line with those of their male counterparts. Social media quickly excoriated Nadella for his remarks and he has spent the past few days
May the Strategic Forces (all five of them) Be With You
Reading Time: < 1 minuteMany companies are getting ready for their annual planning retreats and wondering how to create a winning strategy. If one person can be associated with the development of strategy as a discipline in the past thirty years it’s Michael Porter whose book “Competitive Strategy” is the final word on understanding
“How We Got to Now”
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe past 150 years has seen more innovation and invention since people started, well, innovating and inventing. But what made all this possible? If you’re curious about how the world you live in came to be, check out this two page executive summary of a wonderful new book “How We Got
Another Lost Art: Political Leadership
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe price we pay for technology is that certain art forms go by the wayside. Email and telephones virtually wiped out letter writing; keyboards made the cursive writing most of us learned a thing of the past. Former assistant director of the CIA looks at another lost art: political leadership. In a
Four Reasons Your Strategic Plan Will Fail
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe’re almost to the last quarter of the year and many organizations will begin their annual strategic planning ritual. Before you launch whatever strategy planning process you use, check out this short article in Forbes that offers some cautionary tales about the things that usually take the planning process off the
“What I Really Learned from Running 20 Companies”
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe problem with taking advice from successful people is that their experience, like everyone’s, is a sample size of one. You can’t always be sure if a particular executive was smart or lucky based on just one company, or one career. This is why James Altucher who has run 20 companies and writes