I am convinced that you can't lead without a vision of where you want to be going. People are craving to give meaning to their work (myself including), and that's the job of a leader to give it to them.
Simple Rules for a Complex World. Artwork: Nuala O’Donovan, Pinecone Heart, 2008, porcelain, unglazed, 27 x 22 x 24 cm Photography: Sylvain Deleu A decade ago, in the course of studying why certain high-tech companies thrived during the internet boom, we discovered something that surprised us: To shape their high-level strategies, companies like Intel and Cisco relied not on complicated frameworks but on simple rules of thumb. This was true even though they were in extraordinarily complex, challenging, and fast-moving industries. The rules were not only simple, we found, but quite specific. We reported our findings in HBR (“Strategy as Simple Rules,” January 2001).
Simple Rules in Action The story of América Latina Logística (ALL) illustrates how simple rules can help companies shape strategy in an uncertain environment. In the late 1990s the government of Brazil privatized the country’s freight lines. ALL was spun off from the Brazilian railway authority in 1997 to manage one of the country’s eight freight lines. Evgeny Morozov: The Naked And The TED. The new pamphlet—it would be too strong, and not only quantitatively, to call it a book—by Parag and Ayesha Khanna, the techno-babbling power couple, gallops through so many esoteric themes and irrelevant factoids (did you know that “fifty-eight percent of millennials would rather give up their sense of smell than their mobile phone”?) That one might forgive the authors for never properly attending to their grandest, most persuasive, and almost certainly inadvertent argument.
Only the rare reader would finish this piece of digito-futuristic nonsense unconvinced that technology is—to borrow a term of art from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt—bullshit. No, not technology itself; just much of today’s discourse about technology, of which this little e-book is a succinct and mind-numbing example. At least TED Books—the publishing outlet of the hot and overheated TED Conference, which brought this hidden gem to the wider public—did not kill any trees in the publishing process. How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline | Business. To the saccharine rhythm of a Muzak clip, Steve Ballmer crouched into a tackling stance and dashed across a ballroom stage at the Venetian Las Vegas.
A 20-foot wall of video screens flashed his name as the 55-year-old Microsoft chief executive bear-hugged Ryan Seacrest, the ubiquitous television and radio host, who had just introduced Ballmer’s keynote speech for the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show. More than 150,000 techies and executives were swarming the city’s hotels last January in the annual bacchanalia of cutting-edge gizmos and gadgets. Attendees ran from one vendor to the next, snapping up fistfuls of freebies, inhaling flavored oxygen, and rubbing elbows with stars such as LL Cool J and Justin Bieber.
But this night, an air of discomfort filled the Palazzo Ballroom, where Ballmer was about to give the show’s opening presentation, one delivered by Microsoft’s C.E.O. for 14 of the previous 17 years—the first 11 by Bill Gates and the rest by Ballmer. No, really. You Can Only Win in Sports, or Anywhere Else, if You're Ready for Chaos. How to Create a Powerful Vision for Change. Why Many CEOs Can't Build Legacies Anymore - Thomas J. Saporito. By Thomas J.
Saporito | 11:00 AM August 9, 2012 The success criteria for today’s corporate leaders are shifting. Executives no longer have the time necessary to develop the leadership skills for long-term success. A highly competitive marketplace that moves at lightning speed has replaced the days of legacy building — an era associated with the soaring successes of the steel industry or the heyday of the blue-chip company. This need for speed means that companies and shareholders are less forgiving of CEOs than they once were. In the days of blue-chip glory, the forgiving nature of corporate boards meant that a CEO was capable of seeing a corporation through its various life cycles. Today, the CEO high-wire act is far more value-driven, squeezing executive priorities and leaving little room for error. As this CEO “high-wire” gets even higher and grows even more tenuous, corporate leaders are increasingly seeking roles outside of the public eye, or taking their companies private. 1. 2.
Demonstrate Your Credibility as a Leader - HBR Tip.