The 10 Most Popular Leadership Stories Of 2014. In 2014, we tried to keep our work and lives in balance, find stillness in the chaos, and keep our personal brands shiny and optimally effective. We worked the social media scene, rearranged our office spaces, and discussed the merits of caffeine and mentorship—and combinations of the two. We've covered a lot this year, but the stories our readers loved most played with your imagination: A career that's found in your wildest dreams, big-picture statements of personal purpose and seemingly harmless words that have societal and psychological implications.
Our top stories hoped for chances at a better life with more fulfilling work, and maybe even gave you the nudge to get there. Which of this year's stories was your own favorite? #10: 5 Dream Jobs You Probably Didn’t Know Exist How would you like to babysit pandas for a living, or be a water slide tester? #9: The Exact Amount Of Time You Should Work Every Day #8: How A Popular Two-Letter Word Is Undermining Your Credibility So, what? Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle - Scott Edinger. By Scott Edinger | 9:00 AM January 17, 2013 In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I’ve never heard anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well.
On the contrary, the most common improvement suggestion I’ve seen offered up on the thousands of 360 evaluations I’ve reviewed over the years is that it would be better if the subject in question learned to communicate more effectively. What makes someone a good communicator? There’s no mystery here, not since Aristotle identified the three critical elements — ethos, pathos, and logos. — thousands of years ago. Ethos is essentially your credibility — that is, the reason people should believe what you’re saying. In writing this blog I made an effort to demonstrate my ethos in the introduction, and here I’ll just add that I have a degree in communication studies (emphasis in rhetoric for those who want the details) for good measure.
These three elements of communication reinforce one another. Two Routes to Resilience. Photography: Aurélien Mole Artwork: Henrique Oliveira, Desnatureza, Galerie Vallois, Paris, 2011, plywood, 3.1 x 3.8 x 3.6 m Sooner or later, your company will probably need to transform itself in response to market shifts, groundbreaking technologies, or disruptive start-ups.
Some strategists suggest doing this quickly and aggressively, by making a clean break from the past and turning your firm into something entirely new. In our experience, though, organizations built for legacy markets rarely pull this off. It can take years for an innovative initiative to become large enough to replace the revenue an incumbent has lost to disruption. And if your company completely abandons its old model, it throws away any advantage it still has. We propose an approach that’s both more practical to implement and more sustainable. First, major transformations need to be two different efforts happening in parallel. IBM and Apple both took this dual-transformation approach. A Seismic Disruption. What Makes a Leader? It was Daniel Goleman who first brought the term “emotional intelligence” to a wide audience with his 1995 book of that name, and it was Goleman who first applied the concept to business with his 1998 HBR article, reprinted here.
In his research at nearly 200 large, global companies, Goleman found that while the qualities traditionally associated with leadership—such as intelligence, toughness, determination, and vision—are required for success, they are insufficient. Truly effective leaders are also distinguished by a high degree of emotional intelligence, which includes self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill.
These qualities may sound “soft” and unbusinesslike, but Goleman found direct ties between emotional intelligence and measurable business results. Every businessperson knows a story about a highly intelligent, highly skilled executive who was promoted into a leadership position only to fail at the job. Evaluating Emotional Intelligence. Welcome Doctoral Students in Educational Leadership! Q&A with Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin | Harvard Magazine Sep-Oct 2012. An interview with Michael E. Porter, Lawrence University Professor, and Jan W. Rivkin, Rauner professor of business administration and head of HBS’s strategy unit.
Read the complete article, Can America Compete? (September-October 2012) Harvard Magazine: What prompted you to begin this inquiry? Michael Porter: There was a clear feeling at HBS that something different was happening in the U.S. economy—this was not just a deep recession caused by the housing mortgage crisis and so forth. As Jan and I started looking at the data, a whole set of indicators validated disturbing trends that began well before the Great Recession. Most obvious and most important is the job-creation machine. The data also showed what many had known—that wages started stagnating well over a decade ago. The question was, “Why did this happen?” HM: In the 1980s, Americans were concerned about the competitive challenge from Japan. MP: And business has become substantially more global. A competitive economy does both. Accelerate! Perhaps the greatest challenge business leaders face today is how to stay competitive amid constant turbulence and disruption.
Any company that has made it past the start-up stage is optimized for efficiency rather than for strategic agility—the ability to capitalize on opportunities and dodge threats with speed and assurance. I could give you 100 examples of companies that, like Borders and RIM, recognized the need for a big strategic move but couldn’t pull themselves together to make it and ended up sitting by as nimbler competitors ate their lunch. The examples always play out the same way: An organization that’s facing a real threat or eyeing a new opportunity tries—and fails—to cram through some sort of major transformation using a change process that worked in the past. But the old ways of setting and implementing strategy are failing us. We can’t keep up with the pace of change, let alone get ahead of it. What to do, then? Can the U.S. compete? A discussion with Harvard Business School faculty members | Harvard Magazine Sep-Oct 2012.
Does the United States face insoluble economic challenges? In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession, growth has been sluggish—with unemployment devastating far too many Americans. Yet the real problem, obscured by this acute, cyclical downturn, may be a long-term erosion of competitiveness in a more challenging global economic era. For a third of a century after World War II, U.S. economic prowess was unquestioned.
But as other nations prospered, America’s status came to seem less certain. That changing relative position attracted the interest of Harvard Business School (HBS) scholars. The school’s U.S. Competitiveness Project (www.hbs.edu/competitiveness), launched last spring, draws together expertise from colleagues and from other institutions, under the leadership of two members of HBS’s strategy unit: Lawrence University Professor Michael E. The importance of the business “ecosystem.” The competitiveness agenda is daunting. Next: The Strategic Context. How Do You Create A Culture Of Innovation? This is the third part in a series by Scott Anthony, author of The Little Black Book Of Innovation. It sounds so seductive: a “culture of innovation.” The three words immediately conjure up images of innovation savants like 3M, Pixar, Apple, and Google--the sorts of places where innovation isn’t an unnatural act, but part of the very fabric of a company.
It seems a panacea to many companies that struggle with innovation. But what exactly is a culture of innovation, and how does a company build it? While culture is a complicated cocktail, four ingredients propel an organization forward: the right people, appropriate rewards and incentives, a common language, and leadership role-modeling. The Innovator’s DNA Has Four Components If you ask most people what makes a great innovator, the most common response is innate gifts from parents or a higher power. At the core is what the professors call “associational thinking.” Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. 6 Leadership Styles, And When You Should Use Them. You don’t need an MP3 player, a turntable, or a CD player to listen to Tristan Perich’s new album, Noise Patterns. All you need is a pair of headphones—"not earbuds," says the composer—and a willingness to hear music in noise.
The 34-year-old Perich’s compositions push the border between white noise and electronic music, frequently straddling the two as if the static on your old television started emitting a strangely beautiful pattern of sound. But Perich doesn’t just compose music: His music is the instrument itself. He composes sound in code, carefully stringing together each 1 and 0 to transform numbers into a symphony. Perich, who studied math, music, and computer science at Columbia and received a masters from NYU's fabled hacking-meets-art Interactive Telecommunications Program, has spent the last dozen years of his life exploring the frontiers of one-bit sound, transforming those lines of 1s and 0s into a living art form. A recorded excerpt from Noise Patterns. Learning Charisma. Jana stands at the podium, palms sweaty, looking out at hundreds of colleagues who are waiting to hear about her new initiative. Bill walks into a meeting after a failed product launch to greet an exhausted and demotivated team that desperately needs his direction.
Robin gets ready to confront a brilliant but underperforming subordinate who needs to be put back on track. We’ve all been in situations like these. What they require is charisma—the ability to communicate a clear, visionary, and inspirational message that captivates and motivates an audience. So how do you learn charisma? While we agree with the latter contention, we disagree with the former. What Is Charisma? Charisma is rooted in values and feelings. Several large-scale studies have shown that charisma can be an invaluable asset in any work context—small or large, public or private, Western or Asian. In our research, we have identified a dozen key CLTs.