This book, by David Dotlich and Peter Cairo, highlights some specific leadership failures: The vast majority of leaders do not receive adequate feedback to help them understand their own personalities. Once they do, they are capable of adjusting their behaviors in ways that lead to increased success (p. xxi). So, why don’t we provide personality…
Cisco recently transitioned their CEO role after a long successful career by John Chambers. He was a leader who had a list of employees’ medical issues on his desk every day so that he could reach out to them personally. Their succession planning, led by a friend of mine, was to consider all options –…
20+ years ago, less than 3% of the world’s population had mobile phones and less than 1% were on the Internet. If we limited ourselves to those numbers, we would have missed out on the market today…Where it 2/3 and 1/3 respectively (Source: McKinsey). Contrast that with the next 10 years, when survey respondents said…
Employees are seeking deeper purpose from their employment, as they want to feel part of something bigger…a company that goes above and beyond. This is usually not the same for the shareholders and board of directors. How does a company balance these financial and operating goal differences? On top of this, organizational structures are changing,…
In 2007, Ford CEO Alan Mulally was dealing with a huge corporate mess. However, all the scorecards were “green.” There was obviously an issue with transparency, and Mulally did not have truth tellers around him. Peter Drucker said, “The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer…
Employees often create an “ideal image” of what a leader seems to be. When looking at an organization’s leader, employees tend to judge the book by its cover, because that is easier to digest than what is really “in the pages.” They ask themselves several questions. Does the leader: Care about me? Have high standards?…
Danish toy company, LEGO, was founded by woodworker Ole Kirk Christiansen originally as a wooden toy making company. He started during the Great Depression and his four sons joined him at work. When he saw the future in plastic toys, he bought a plastic molding machine. However, three of four sons left him to continue working…
To create a consistently strong, value-creating revenue growth – there has to be a good organizational execution in operations. In today’s business environment, there are significant changes to operating models: Lean – streamline processes, continuous improvement Digitization – customer self-service experience Automation – replace human tasks with robots / artificial intelligence Analytics – intelligence /…
Regis Chasse, a friend at Cap Gemini’s learning, has researched and written about digital learning. Three key takeaways are digital learning, business games and online communities: Employees are overwhelmed, distracted and impatient. Flexibility on where and when they learn is increasingly important. They want to learn from their peers and managers, just as much as…
Developing countries’ companies are becoming global innovation leaders. The leader is Alibaba in China, with a market value greater than Yahoo, Netflix, eBay, Yelp, LinkedIn, Twitter and Groupon put together. Samsung from South Korea outsells Sony, Panasonic, and Philips. Bimbo in Mexico is the largest bakery company, and purchased Sara Lee’s North American bakery business….
