For those leading and managing, it's time to change. The life-safety of our colleagues is of paramount importance in every sector. The economic safety of our employees is right there with the financial security of our customers. And, the road ahead isn't clearly marked. We'll have to navigate together.
The world of business lost a giant thinker recently, who by all accounts was a fabulous person. I'm referencing Harvard's Clayton Christensen, perhaps best known for his thinking and books focused on The Innovator's Dilemma. Wally Bock and I connected on the latest episode of our podcast to talk about Christensen and his books.
Here’s a little secret. When I use the phrase “emerging leader,” I’m talking about all of us. You’re never done learning to lead. Some of us are a bit more experienced, and others are more effective than others, yet even at retirement, the job of learning to lead is incomplete.
The role of top leaders in guiding strategy creation is well documented. Less understood is that once the strategy is formed and shared, the leader’s actions must focus on minimizing organizational friction—the processes, cultural nuances, and political and personal impediments that threaten the organization’s speed-of-execution.
When was the last time you read a book or attended a training session on Situation Awareness (SA)? Unless you work around the military, aviation, or in crisis management situations, chances are the answer is never. That's a mistake. Increasingly, I see what I interpret as the skills to assess, understand, project, and act based on that analysis as a critical set of behaviors for leaders at all levels.
In this episode of the Leadership Caffeine podcast, Art Petty talks with author and digital transformation expert, Charlene Li, about her new book, The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Organizations Transform While Others Fail.
Succeeding with organizational transformation is no easy task. Success demands a confluence of conditions and behaviors in a perfect storm of the right actions. Here are seven things that must fall into place to have a chance with organizational transformation:
A number of my recent articles on strategy and strategy execution are found only at SmartBrief on Leadership. This post points you to those articles.
There are more than a few reasons your firm or industry won't make it through the next decade. While you won't derail or defuse the power of the many disruptive market forces swirling in our world, it's the lack of imagination for harnessing these forces that may ultimately relegate your firm to the business history books. Ironically, imagination may be the most controllable and most important of the tools you need to survive and even thrive in this world.
Unless you're in a start-up or small business, it's impossible to have everyone in the firm physically "in-the-room" for strategy sessions. However, using a strategy-as-a-continuous-process approach, it is possible and desirable to involve everyone in the work of strategy from ideation to execution. But first, you've got to re-plumb the trickle-down strategy process approach to something significantly more inclusive.
