Creativity is not always tortured genius, but it is about living right now

from mick's leadership blog

Creativity is not always tortured genius, but it is about living right now

I’ve just been reading Seth’s blog – his latest post is about genius. His most telling point – that “Genius is actually the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem” rather than some lightning bolt of insight.

This led me to wander around for a while, and I came back to Elizabeth Gilbert’s inspiring TED talk from 2009.

She takes on the idea that creativity is intertwined with being a “tortured artist”. Telling the story of creativity and artistry since the time of the Greeks, via the renaissance, she brings the story up to date with Tom Waits. Here’s a portion of the transcript of Elizabeth’s talk:

... http://bit.ly/bsfQi6

via Ping.fm

Dr William Li's list of Antiangiogenic substances ... which slow down cancer

Fascinating talk at TED 2010 about the power of diet to hold back the growth of cancers ... by restricting the blood flow to nascent cancer cells. Food that is "antiangiogenic" will help ...

via conferences.ted.com

TED 2010

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Firms in developing Countries are more centralized than Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian ...

From Harvard Business, Working Knowledge - "First Look" - by Martha Lagac

Do you need sign-off from headquarters when you want to make decisions? Or can you undertake capital investments, hire new employees, introduce new products, and otherwise exercise managerial independence in your daily work? In the age of globalization, the extent of firm decentralization and the reasons behind it are still something of a mystery, leading HBS professor Raffaella Sadun and colleagues to wonder whether product competition is one factor spurring the trend toward decentralization. The basic idea is this: Local managers' information might be increasingly valuable as more products crowd the marketplace.

To test this proposition Sadun, Nicholas Bloom, and John Van Reenen analyzed data on nearly 4,000 firms across 12 countries in Europe, North America, and Asia. "We find that competition does indeed seem to foster greater decentralization," they write in their working paper, "Does Product Market Competition Lead Firms to Decentralize?" [PDF]

The results by geography were also telling: "Intriguingly, we found that firms in developing countries (Brazil, China, and India), tended to be the most centralized, with almost all major decisions taken by the owners in the corporate headquarters. Japanese firms were also relatively centralized. In contrast, firms in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries (Canada, Germany, Sweden, UK, and US) were relatively decentralized. The rest of Europe (e.g. France, Italy, and Poland) tended to be in the middle of the decentralization ranking." Developing countries might experience tighter control from HQ due to less product competition, the authors suggest.

Posted via web from mick's posterous

LeaderValues January Newsletter just published - Bryan Ferry as leader, innovator, influencer ...

Click here to see this month's newsletter

It features ...

• Bryan Ferry - a biography by Victoria Yates
• When is Enough, Enough - Dan Elash
• Management 3.0: The Era of Complexity - Jurgen Appelo
• Lessons and Quotes
• Create marketplace Disruption - Adam Hartung

Posted via web from mick's posterous

What Matters Now - a fascinating (and free!) eBook from Seth Godin

I always find Seth Godin's work interesting (like so many other people do, of course). So I thought I'd help share his latest free eBook. Here's the post from Seth's blog:

"Now, more than ever, we need to shake things up.

Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. I hope a new ebook I've organized will get you started on that path. It took months, but I think you'll find it worth it the effort.

Here are more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about as we head into the new year. From bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert to brilliant tech thinker Kevin Kelly, from publisher Tim O'Reilly to radio host Dave Ramsey, there are some important people riffing about important ideas here. The ebook includes Tom Peters, Jackie Huba and Jason Fried, along with Gina Trapani, Bill Taylor and Alan Webber.

Here's the deal: it's free. Download it here.

Or from any of the many sites around the web that are posting it with insightful commentary. Tweet it, email it, post it on your own site. I think it might be fun to make up your own riff and post it on your blog or online profile as well. It's a good exercise. Can we get this in the hands of 5 million people? You can find an easy to use version on Scribd as well.

Please share.Have fun. Here's to a year with ideas even bigger than these. Here's a lens with all the links plus an astonishing array of books by our authors."

I hope you enjoy!

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Rays of Hope at General Motors

A guest post from Bill George, Author of "7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis"

Humiliated by a federal government bail-out and a forced bankruptcy declaration, General Motors (GM) experienced the worst ordeal in its history across the spring and summer of 2009.

Yet today – less than five months after emerging from bankruptcy – there are rays of hope on the horizon:

Billions of dollars in liabilities have been successfully unloaded and August 2009 month-over-month sales were up 21%. Definitively GM’s highest total and retail sales performance of 2009, GM delivered 246,479 vehicles, many by virtue of the controversial but generally successful “Cash for Clunkers” program.

Tom Stephens, GM’s Vice Chairman of Global Product Development, foresees more advanced technologies and better cars in the works, including a new line of appealing plug-in hybrids are projected for 2010 release.

An ambitious and confidence-inspiring ad campaign has been rolled out with Board Chair Ed Whitacre stamping his face and reputation on the GM brand (shades of Lee Iacocca and Chrysler in the 1980’s).

On September 22, 2009 GM announced that “third shifts” would be added for workers at three Midwest plants, ramping up production on customer-desired vehicles and putting 2,400 employees back to work.

If GM re-emerges as a great automobile company, it will be due to the wise leadership of three people: CEO Fritz Henderson, Board Chair Ed Whitacre, and unsung hero Steve Rattner, President Obama’s former auto czar.

However, the great American car company is not out of the woods yet. And unfortunately, GM has a long-standing tradition of ineptitude and unrealized promise to overcome.

For decades I have been highly critical of GM leadership. Growing up in western Michigan as the son of an automobile supplier president, I witnessed the festering complacency of GM leadership. Success bred insularity, arrogance, and ultimately hubris at what was once America’s largest employer. As ex-president Charles Wilson declared to Congress, “For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”

Styling, size, and comfort took precedence over safety, air quality and fuel efficiency. When outsiders dared to challenge this approach by proposing innovations like seat belts, catalytic converters, air bags, and gas mileage standards, GM management rallied its loyal Michigan delegation to squash the measures in Congress. When consumer advocate Ralph Nader began his lonely crusade, he was viewed as merely one more roadblock on the Interstate highway to GM’s success.

GM was so successful financially that its loyal board began a tradition of appointing finance leaders as CEO rather than “car guys” who had grown up immersed in the details of design and manufacturing. These finance leaders hit their short-term numbers but moved GM steadily away from standards of operational excellence set decades before by legendary CEO Alfred P. Sloan.

Even the growing power of the United Auto Workers didn’t sufficiently alarm GM management. Without real threats from foreign producers, GM, Ford or Chrysler would negotiate “sweet heart” deals for union workers, expecting the other companies to fall into line. Then, the Big 3 raised prices to cover added costs such as lucrative pension plans, 100% health care coverage, limitations on outsourcing, and even a “jobs bank” that provided laid off workers full compensation and benefits.

Pity former chair and CEO Rick Waggoner, a decent leader who inherited these traditions and associated legacy costs in 2000. Trained in GM’s finance tradition, Waggoner worked to preserve the short-term bottom line, but never acknowledged that GM no longer made the automobiles Americans wanted. And as GM’s market share plummeted from its high of 54 percent to 19 percent, there were always excuses why: cheap Japanese imports, rising gasoline prices, and skyrocketing health care costs. Meanwhile, no one ever got fired except for Robert Stempel, the one interloper from operations who lasted less than two years.

Of course, all this changed amid the specter of bankruptcy. With President Obama’s approval, auto czar Rattner unceremoniously fired Waggoner in March and promoted operating chief Fritz Henderson to CEO. Superficially, Henderson appears in GM’s finance mould, but there the similarity ends.

It’s little known that Henderson left GM for six years to work for Delphi, GM’s former parts company spun off in 1999. There he gained first-hand understanding of the high quality standards of Delphi customers, like Toyota, the engineering excellence of German producers like BMW, and the razor-thin margins automobile suppliers face day-to-day.

Henderson saw Delphi heading for bankruptcy and understood GM could be next. And upon becoming CEO, he faced that reality and prepared accordingly. He undertook painful cost reductions and oversaw plant closures as well as staff and executive cuts. He terminated 30 percent of GM’s dealers, dumped five major product lines – Pontiac, Opel, Volvo, Saturn, and Hummer – and began revamping GM to be more fuel efficient and attractive to American consumers. He also brought back 77-year-old Robert Lutz, America’s premier car designer, as vice chair.

With Rattner’s backing, he has gained support from UAW boss Ron Gettlefinger to make sharp cuts in wages and benefits, narrowly winning majority vote from the rank-and-file. For the first time in many years, a light is appearing at the end of the tunnel.

Henderson’s partner in rebuilding GM, Ed Whitacre, became board chair in July. Whitacre is the former CEO of AT&T, saving the company by successfully integrating it with SBC in 2005.

Aggressive and performance-focused, Whitacre came out of retirement to take on this massive challenge and will transform the formerly-complacent GM board into an active monitor of GM management. He is providing Henderson cover by serving as a buffer between Washington politicians and company management and ensuring the U.S. government doesn’t overreach.

GM faces uncharted territory. Never before has a company of its size and reputation fallen so far from prominence. Luckily, the leadership of Henderson and Whitacre is precisely what the company needs to compete in the global automobile market. We owe these men a debt of gratitude if they can restore this formerly great company.

If they cannot, what may be “good for our country” is to rid ourselves of GM. For good.

-----------------

Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and author of "7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis", "True North", and "Authentic Leadership".

The former chair and CEO of Medtronic, he currently serves on the boards of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs and previously, Novartis and Target.

Read more at www.BillGeorge.org, or follow him on Twitter @Bill_George.

Bill will be an introductory speaker at the Oct. 6th-7th World Business Forum at New York’s Radio City Music Hall.

"All I do is work here"

From Seth Godin's blog ...

"Over the past few months, I've had quite a few interactions with several people who work at a (previously great) brand.

One person will email to ask me for a favor or a connection, and I'll point out that just yesterday, I got three emails, all spam, from three different people at the organization either selling me something irrelevant or sending me a press release I didn't ask for. And the unsubscribe button doesn't work. And I've unsubscribed ten times before. When I pointed this out, he said, "Oh, that's those guys. I'm not related to them, all I do is work here. If you don't like getting that stuff, you should take it up with them."

Then, a few days ago, I heard from someone in a different group at the same company, asking for help with a project she was working on. I explained that the last time I helped someone in her group with a project, I was misquoted, my time was wasted and they violated whatever trust we had. Susan said, and I'm quoting precisely the same line, "All I do is work here. They pay my salary, but I'm me, not them."

No, Susan, you are them.

Read the rest of Seth's post ...

Kind of Blue: Pushing Boundaries with Miles Davis

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, by Robert D. Austin

Ask jazz fans the world over to name their favorite compilation, and chances are their response is Kind of Blue. With music that is sophisticated and sublime, spare yet complex, trumpeter and composer Miles Davis (1926-1991) reached dazzling new heights of creativity when the album was recorded in only two short sessions in 1959.

At the age of 32, Davis coaxed innovative ideas out of his players—among them greats including John Coltrane and Bill Evans—that took everyone by surprise. He also remade the industry, introducing longer, more contemplative songs like the now-classic "So What."

Since 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Kind of Blue, it's a good time to ask: How did he do it?

One of the answers is "radical simplicity," according to HBS professor Robert D. Austin and Carl Størmer, founding principal of JazzCode, a consulting and entertainment firm specializing in improvisational collaboration and communication in high-performance teams.

In their case, "Miles Davis: Kind of Blue", they reflect on the beauty of the music as well as the unusual story behind its creation. And they suggest that nonmusicians—such as managers who aim to spark and sustain innovation for competitive advantage—can learn a lot of new notes from Davis's example.

Read the rest of the article ...

Engaging Ideas

From the marktd blog, by Nico Margolis

A while back, we wrote a short post about the Engaging Ideas Card Pack and mentioned, “We haven’t gotten our hands on the full set, but it looks like a neat package for a broad range of ideas.” Well, now (thanks to Rob Fox) we’ve gotten our grubs on the entire pack and sifted through the stack of colorful cards.

The first impression is that they look like a deck of large novelty sized playing cards printed on thick stock cardboard. The front side of each card is an image meant to invoke the message or activity presented on the back. For the most part, the full card formatted images are stellar, ranging from iconic art and expressive photography down to some painfully low resolution and pixelated images. However, given the goals of the cards to engage employees through practical exercises, this is a rather minor point.

52-card deck (not including two jokers) is meant to stimulate positive discussion through identification of business goals and ideals. The cards are divided into three general categories: Discover, Design and Deliver. In this hierarchy of inspiration the cards build on each other by slowly introducing more complex activities, interspersed with straightforward tips.

The themes that appeared the most were honing the effectiveness of leadership, identifying core values and honing the business environment to suit the challenges ahead.

Here are two sample cards that we think embody the entire project:

21. Distributed Leadership

We tend to think that leadership is something that happens at the top. True, but what is perhaps more true is that acts of leadership happen across and throughout business, day in, day out. Identify these acts of leadership, encourage them and communicate them widely. Doing so helps to demonstrate that all people can offer leadership and will also help acts of leadership to flourish. This exercise also begs an answer to a fundamentally important question necessary to achieve higher levels of engagement: what does your business recognize as leadership?

48. Heartstorming

A success factor for any engagement effort is to discover, design and deliver better ways to connect emotionally with people to inspire their commitment and action. To help accomplish this make “heartstorming” rather than just brainstorming, a core aspect of your business’ problem solving and change practices. Demonstrating difference, “heartstorming” will help to uncover and build stronger emotional connections by focusing groups on questions like:

• I love it when…
• I get a kick out of it when…
• My heart beats faster when…
• I’m energized when…
• It frustrates me when…
• I feel undermined when…
• I’m intimidated when…
• I feel powerless when…

Read the rest of the review ....

Learn at All Levels

From Fast Company, by Marcia Conner

I'm a voracious learner. In addition to reading magazines, books, blogs, tweets, and faces, I persistently look for patterns, connections, anomalies and what's new. I tolerated school only because it was where my friends were and because occasionally I could talk with adults who seemed to know a bit about topics that might someday matter.

The Internet's debut seemed better suited for my unmitigating curiosity. The sites I tunneled to represented people with knowledge and perspective I could learn from around the clock. My brainspan soared. Still, I knew there was more, locked inside people's heads, unfolding in the little moments between the times they took to post something profound.

Although my professional life often focuses on helping organizations understand learning across generations, my personal time is spent testing my theories in my own social environment, with my colleagues, with my family, and sometimes with those in line at the market or boarding a plane.

My real-world lab validates ample research people are learning from one another all the time. While we learn some details, theorems, and history from people who are school teachers, corporate trainers and college professors, more than 75% of what we learn comes from experiences outside of any formal education program and from people we know outside the walls of any class.

It was from this perspective I felt disoriented as a perspective client used Compete Inc.'s analysis of what people do on Facebook as proof (proof?) it's not a place where people learn. The manager was echoing nonsense I hear from educators and business people alike who argue social networking does not constitute learning and that a platform like Facebook is too immature to foster authentic education.

Is it even possible to look through a personal profile or status update and not at least learn something? Do people still believe only big heavy formal intentional topics count?

A highschool student sees what his friends did last weekend. A college student reads about and then signs on to a rebuilding trip in a hurricane-damaged city. A genNext employee discovers a conference where she can market the company. A boomer businessman finds a group of fellow entrepreneurial spirits. And a parent watches over her children without intruding into their lives. Each finds a place and a space on Facebook to learn.

Facebook provides a compelling outlet for people who enjoy learning, and it helps those seeking something else to accidentally and informally learn along the way.

As we build relationships with other people, we tap into their networks of knowledge and sense, creating learning webs, making our compound knowledge more valuable than compound interest.

Read the rest of the article .....

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

From Fast Company, by Clive Thompson

"Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?") began wearing the shoes.

These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. "What we are really saying," he writes, "is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." In modern marketing, this idea--that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends--is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.

Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims "E-Fluentials" can "make or break a brand." According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That's on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.

Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.

In the past few years, Watts - a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo - has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."

Read the rest of the article ...

Leaders in Need of a Good Idea

From the Financial Times, German Edition, by Lucy Kellaway

"It's all very well using buzz-words and slogans like "thought leader" to describe new innovations, but what do they actually mean? After a bit of investigation, the concept seems to boil down to this: "thought leader' is simply a new and unhelpful way of saying successful.

First we were employees, plain and simple. Then we were knowledge workers. After that came "Brand Me" and the notion that we were all CEOs of Me, Inc. Now our taste for hyperbole in describing our place in the economic order has become still more rarefied: what every modern worker aspires to be is a thought leader.

The blame for this latest craze rests with the editor of Strategy and Business, a management magazine. In 1994, he needed a name for a new interview slot and came up with "Thought Leader'. Back then it seemed a forgivably pompous title for the pompous thoughts of management gurus. Thirteen years on, it has come to be a much less forgivable name for any old fool in possession of an ego and a blog.

The title offends for three reasons, and pomposity is the least of them. It is inappropriately Orwellian: in free societies, thoughts can be provoked or stimulated or gathered. But not led. Worse still, no one seems quite sure what "thought leader' means. You might think that to qualify as a thought leader you needed to have a thought (preferably a new one) and be able to influence other people with it. Yet mostly when the term is used there is no sign of any thinking or leading going on at all."

Read the rest of the article ...

Soggy

Seth Godin's blog has to be one of the "must reads" out there - so I hope he will forgive me for quoting this entry from a few days ago ....

"New organizations and new projects are so crisp.

Things happen with alacrity. Decisions get made. Stuff gets done.

Then, over time, things get soggy. They slow down. Decisions aren't so black and white any more.

Why?

Here are some things that happen:

• Every initiative, post launch, still has a tail of activity associated with it. Launch enough things and over time, that tail gets bigger and bigger.
• Most projects either succeed or fail. Successful projects raise the stakes, because the team doesn't want to blow it. There are more people watching, more dollars at stake, things matter more. So things inevitably get more review, more analysis and slow down. Projects that fail sap the confidence of the group. They want to be extra sure that they're right this time, so, ironically, they slow down and end up sabotaging the new work.
• The paper isn't blank any more. Which means that new decisions often mean overturning old decisions, which means you need to acknowledge that it didn't used to be as good as it was.
• And the biggest thing is that there is a status quo. Something to compare everything to.

I'm not sure you can eliminate any of these issues. But, you can realize that they're there. And you can be really strict about priorities and deadlines... it's so easy to let things slip, rather than confronting the fact that you're stuck and probably afraid. Speak up, call it out... and ship!"

Go to Seth's blog....

My book. Let me show you it ...

From Clay Shirky's blog - an ingenious way to get "attention"?

"I’ve written a book, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which is coming out in a month. It’s coming out first in the US and UK (and in translation later this year in Holland, Portugal and Brazil, Korea, and China.)

Here Comes Everybody is about why new social tools matter for society. It is a non-techie book for the general reader (the letters TCP IP appear nowhere in that order). It is also post-utopian (I assume that the coming changes are both good and bad) and written from the point of view I have adopted from my students, namely that the internet is now boring, and the key question is what we are going to do with it.

One of the great frustrations of writing a book as opposed to blogging is seeing a new story that would have been a perfect illustration, or deepened an argument, and not being able to add it. To remedy that, I’ve just launched a new blog, at shirky.com/HereComesEverybody/, to continue writing about the effects of social tools.

Also, I’ve convinced the good folks at Penguin Press to let me give a few review copies away to people in the kinds of communities the book is about. I’ve got half a dozen copies to give to anyone reading this, with the only quid pro quo being that you blog your reactions to it, good bad or indifferent, some time in the next month or so. Drop me a line if you would like a review copy — clay@shirky.com"

Interesting ...

Innovation is an Inside Job

From the Heart of Innovation weblog, by Mitch Ditkoff.

"These days, almost all of my clients are talking about the need to establish a sustainable culture of innovation. Some, I am happy to report, are actually doing something about it. Hallelujah! They are taking bold steps forward to turn theory into action. My hat is off to all of them -- and sometimes, my head. Nevertheless, the challenge remains the same for them as it does thousands of other forward-thinking companies and that is, to find a simple, authentic way to address the challenge from the inside out -- to water the root of the tree, not just the branches. In other words, to get down to the essential DNA of what drives innovation.

In today's process-driven, OD-centric, Six-Sigma savvy organization, the tendency is to focus on systems as opposed to people -- as if systems were sufficient to guarantee change. Guess what? Systems are not sufficient to guarantee change. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Systems die. Instinct remains."

Read the rest of the article ...

Leadership and Innovation

From the McKinsey Quarterly, by Joanna Barsh, Marla M. Capozzi, and Jonathan Davidson.

"Innovation has become a primary force driving the growth, performance, and valuation of companies. Our research reveals a wide gap between the aspirations of executives to innovate and their ability to execute.

Many companies make the mistake of trying to spur innovation by turning to unreliable best practices and to organizational structures and processes. Our research shows that executives who focus on stimulating and supporting innovation by their employees can promote and sustain it with the current talent and resources—and more effectively than they could by using other incentives.

Three approaches can help executives mount innovation efforts. First, senior management should actively support behavior that promotes innovation. Second, network analysis can identify where the capacity for innovation already exists within an organization and help it build more innovative networks. Finally, executives should seed innovative thinking by focusing on selected managers and projects."

Read the rest of the article ...

Best Practices in Leadership Development

It is just being announced that Mick is co-chairing the "Best Practices in Leadership Development Summit" in San Diego, September 16th -19th this year.

The keynote faculty includes:

• Carly FIORINA, CEO, Hewlett-Packard (1999-2005) and author of Tough Choices
• Bill GEORGE, professor, Harvard Business School; former CEO of Medtronic; author of Authentic Leadership
• Steve KERR, former managing director and CLO of Goldman Sachs, former CLO and VP of Leadership Development at GE
• Tom KELLEY, general manager of IDEO; best-selling author of The Art of Innovation
• Gary HAMEL, “the world’s reigning strategy guru” according to The Economist
• W. Chan KIM, author of Blue Ocean Strategy; professor of management, INSEAD
• Kelly HANNUM and Jennifer MARTINEAU, Center for Creative Leadership
• Roger NIERENBERG, former conductor of the Stanford Symphony; creator of The Music Paradigm
• Stephen MILES, regional managing partner Americas, Heidrick & Struggles; author of HBR article entitled: The Leadership Team—Complementary Strengths or Conflicting Agendas?
• Erin GRUWELL, celebrated and inspirational teacher depicted in the movie The Freedom Writers
• Bob FULMER, renowned expert in leadership development, co-author, Leadership by Design

The idea is to gain insight into the critical success factors, latest innovations, and greatest strategies used by the most advanced management and leadership development practitioners.

Developing great leaders and building a distinguished leadership brand is becoming more complex and more difficult with every passing year. How do you acquire or develop leaders with the range of skills, knowledge, and abilities required? How do you provide them with the tools and techniques needed for success? How do you stand apart from your competitors?

The Summit aims to provide the knowledge, network, and tools needed to maximize an organization’s leadership capability and brand.

You can find out more here ...
Technorati leadership tag

In Summary .... Tom Peters

From Tom Peters Blog ...

"I've been working on various forms of my Master Presentation, pretty much fulltime, for the last couple of weeks. A post yesterday started a rather vigorous discussion about success "rules" that withstand the test of time. Virtually nothing—you, me, the corporation, the nation—withstands the test of time. And one of the principal reasons is hardening of the philosophical arteries—increasingly rigid interpretations of yesterday's "success" rules.

So I outright reject success "rules" or "eternal" principles. Nonetheless (whoops, here it comes), you gotta do something. What follows is as far as I will go. My first list has three items:

• Cause (worthy of commitment)
• Space (room for/encouragement for initiative-adventures)
• Decency (respect, grace, integrity, humanity)

That is, find something useful that turns folks on, give them a lot of room to try their own interpretations thereof—and offer them the respect they deserve for participating in the game with commitment and determination.

I actually like my second list better, consisting of some four items:

• Hire Great People (Resilient, Passionate)
• Try a Lot of Stuff (S.A.V.-Screw Around Vigorously/R.F.A.—Ready. Fire. Aim.)
• All "Wow" All the Time (Shoot for the moon—in every circumstance)
• Enjoy It While It Lasts (And it ain't gonna last forever, so you might as well keep swinging)"

Read the rest of the article ...

Apples are Square

I don't often recommend books, but there is a new one out which you might find interesting - "Apples are Square", by Dr. Susan Smith Kuczmarski and Thomas Kuczmarski.

From their website:

"For centuries, leaders have been operating within a “control and compete” mindset. But the times are changing. More and more, at the helm of successful companies, you’ll find a different sort of leader. Collaborators, not controllers, they are “square apples,” bold men and women who dare to create success by reshaping the workplace in unexpected ways. In Apples Are Square, innovation consultants and celebrated authors Dr. Susan Smith Kuczmarski and Thomas Kuczmarski share with you the secrets of how to become a square apple in your organization.

To develop their groundbreaking strategy for success, the authors interviewed 25 leadership pioneers from many different work settings - media, the arts, government, sports, education, and business, including Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist; Mary Ellen Weber, former NASA astronaut; and NFL star Chris Zorich, whose personal story inspired the title of this book. With the tools in Apples Are Square, you’ll be able to take any bruised environment and reshape it into a positive force."

Read the rest of the article ...

Who Should Manage Innovation Projects?

From the InnovationTools blog, by Chuck Frey

I'm reprinting this is full, as I like the article and I know Paul's work ...

"At many organizations, innovation projects are often assigned to young, ambitious junior executives. But these efforts tend to be doomed to failure, according to Paul Sloane, writing in his new book, The Innovation Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity.

Why isn’t this a good idea? Paul says that junior executives often get stymied by process and political obstacles that innovation projects usually face. An experienced manager with more political clout within the organization is more likely to be successful under these circumstances. Paul cites the example of IBM, whose culture used to be overwhelmingly focused on generating short-term results, which tended to short-circuit promising new products and services.

To reverse this trend, CEO Lou Gerstner and senior VP in charge of strategy J. Bruce Herrold reassigned their most experienced and talented executives to emerging business opportunity (EBO) units. The mission of these executives was to find new areas for IBM that could yield profitable billion-dollar businesses in five to seven years. This initiative was overwhelmingly successful, resulting in additional annual revenues of over US$15 billion and growth of over 40% per year.

"The lesson from IBM is clear. If you want to change the culture of an organization so that it values innovation and new business start-ups, then get your most senior and best people involved in these activities. Don't delegate to work to lower-level staff and hope for the best."

I think Paul is onto something here. Conventional wisdom says that if you have an established line of business, a cash cow that is generating millions of dollars a year in revenues, the last thing you want to do is move that person into a new business venture that may take years to turn a profit. But these are the very people that have the contacts and the clout within the organization to get things done, to build consensus and to overcome hurdles.

Of course, you will need to select senior-level people who also have an entrepreneurial spirit and who are open to new ideas, because the skills needed to successfully launch a new business are significantly different than those needed to manage an existing one.

So who's in charge of your company's innovation initiatives?"


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