100 Lectures Every Leader Should Listen To ... from OnlineClasses

Carol Brown, from OnlineClasses sent this post on "100 Lectures A Leader Should Listen To". It includes links to MIT Open Courseware (OCW), amongst other sites, and the list is definitely worth checking out.

Here's the post and the first 10 out of 100 links:

"History has been empowered by triumph scarred by tyranny; both great leaders and tragic dictators alike have shaped the way we look at the world and the way future generations will feel about their generations. Whether you aspire to be student body president or president of the United States of America; whether you dream of being a school principal or a school teacher, it is vital you find within yourself the best, most merciful and just, leader you can possibly be. These lectures, videos, and even songs, will help you on your journey toward greatness so that you, too, can help change history for the better.

College Courses for Leadership

It’s always a great idea to start with the basics, and these courses have what you need. From defining "leadership" to showing common tactics and techniques, these links will serve as a drawing board for the game plan that works best for you.

1. Special Seminar in Communications: Leadership and Personal Effectiveness Coaching: This course gives students many opportunities to fine-tune their communication skills through several in-class activities. [MIT]
2. Practical Leadership: This course is an interactive seminar where students get individualized feedback on their leadership techniques from the instructor. [MIT]
3. Leadership Lab: This interactive workshop looks at how leaders should promote social responsibility and generate fiscal success. [MIT]
4. Dynamic Leadership: Using Improvisation in Business: The first part of this course serves as an overview of performing improvisation. [MIT]
5. Leadership Development: This course’s readings and assignments emphasize the characteristics of great leadership. [MIT]
6. Cross-Cultural Leadership: This course is a collaborative environment that examines what constitutes "effective" leadership across cultures. [MIT]
7. Leadership Tools and Teams: In this class, you will be helping students at Sloan develop leadership tools. [MIT]
8. People and Organizations: This course examines the historical context of civilization and organization. [MIT]
9. Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship: This course discusses the basics every manager to be successful entrepreneurial and established firms. [MIT]
10. Managing and Volunteering In the Non-Profit Sector: This is a course that gives students an overview of the management challenges of the non-profit sector. [MIT]

Check out the rest of this list ...

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Beginner's Mind

I was talking with friends today about the Zen concept of "Beginner's Mind" - where one needs to empty one's mind of extraneous things to be able to make space to learn new things. This is always easier said than done, as we also need to capture and learn from our experiences and not just start every task afresh.

To quote Abbess Zenkei Blanche Hartman

"Beginner's mind is Zen practice in action. It is the mind that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgements and prejudices. Beginner's mind is just present to explore and observe and see "things as-it-is." I think of beginner's mind as the mind that faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and amazement. "I wonder what this is? I wonder what that is? I wonder what this means?" Without approaching things with a fixed point of view or a prior judgement, just asking "what is it?"

In discussion, it struck me that this is concept could also be illustrated with a parallel in computer storage. It can take terabytes to store every single data point - but maybe only kilobytes to store the rules and principles that they illustrate.

So, one way to add prior understanding to "beginner's mind" is also to continuously seek clarity on rules and principles rather than try to remember facts and figures ...

Posted via web from mick's posterous

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 .....

How Styles Affect Promotion Potential

From Gary Salton's Organizational Research Blog

"I Opt" research has revealed a statistically significant connection between "I Opt" strategic styles and organizational rank (e.g., manager, VP, CEO). The research is also able to reveal why this condition exists. The connection between style and rank is not a mere association. It is causal in the sense that X causes Y.

The only way the relationships will change is if information flows change.The implications for Leadership Development are clear. The current stress on skill sets and techniques is necessary but not sufficient. Prospective leaders must master a sequence of processing patterns suitable to the level to which they aspire. What works at one level will be suboptimal for another. There is no "one" leadership strategy suited to all levels.

................

The findings reported in this blog expose a gap in current leadership development programs. A focus on techniques, methods and practices is valuable but insufficient. Candidates for leadership must be taught how to adjust their information processing profile to match the level that they are targeting."

Read the rest of the article ...

Learning & Motivation

I received this e-mail from Gary Salton at iOpt, and the research he cites is compelling.

"The research uses data from 184 learners participating in 5 classes conducted in Texas, Arizona and North Carolina. The research revealed two different kinds of motivation. One is between 3 and 6 times more powerful than the other and they respond to totally different kinds of initiatives and interventions.

[We] also applied the above motivation research to the Kolb Learning Model.

It shows a way of calculating the optimal allocation of learning strategies for any particular class. It shows that strategies that ignore motivation and those that incorporate it will yield significantly different results both practically and statistically."

You can read the full study on Gary's Google blog at http://garysalton.blogspot.com/2007/08/adding-motivation-to-kolb-learning.html . You can also see it at his website at http://www.oeinstitute.org/ under Recent Publications.