How Managers Become Leaders Artwork: Adam Ekberg, Country Road, 2005, ink-jet print Harald (not his real name) is a high-potential leader with 15 years of experience at a leading European chemical company. He started as an assistant product manager in the plastics unit and was quickly transferred to Hong Kong to help set up the unit’s new Asian business center. As sales there soared, he soon won a promotion to sales manager. Three years later he returned to Europe as the marketing and sales director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, overseeing a group of 80 professionals. All of Harald’s hard work culminated in his appointment as the head of the company’s plastic resins unit, a business with more than 3,000 employees worldwide. Like Harald, many rising stars trip when they shift from leading a function to leading an enterprise and for the first time taking responsibility for a P&L and oversight of executives across corporate functions. Specialist to Generalist What is “enough”?
Legal Challenges Related To Crowdfunding, Volume 1 Editor's note: This is a guest post by Antti Hemmilä from Attorneys at law Borenius. While crowdfunding is not a new concept, it is getting a lot of media attention nowadays. Crowdfunding is evolving and new crowdfunding platforms provide an excellent tool for financing different projects, whether these are art projects, game or hardware/device development or even equity financing. Yet the use of these new platforms and practices needs to comply with the existing regulation, which sometimes causes conflict. This first guest blog looks into the legal issues related to using donation/rewards-based crowdfunding platforms mainly from Finnish perspective, and the second blog addresses the use of equity-based crowdfunding platforms. The magic word when considering legality of crowdfunding campaign is consideration. The above-mentioned pre-order crowdfunding structure is obviously not suitable for all projects. Antti Hemmilä Top image CC licensed by IvanWalsh.com on Flickr. inShare
Dave Kerpen | Speaker, co-founder and CEO of Likeable Media and New York Times best-selling author. Be more likeable. – The ROI of Gratefulness By Dave Kerpen and Theresa Braun It’s trite but true: what goes around comes around. Think about it as business karma. If you make it a practice to genuinely thank those who deserve your thanks, they will appreciate your expression of gratitude and will be far more willing to help you out when you need their assistance. Donors Choose and the ROI of Gratitude Charles Best is the founder and CEO of Donors Choose, an online non-profit organization that makes it easy for donors to give to classrooms in need. Charles shared with me a study he conducted to demonstrate the ROI of gratitude. Thank You Notes, NOT Emails, Make a Difference Though I thought I had been practicing gratitude in our business by constantly thanking staff and customers via email, an email “thank you” is just not that special these days. I began by writing three personalized thank-you notes each Wednesday and then increased to three thank-you notes each weekday. Be Thankful
The Focused Leader Idea in Brief The Problem A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. The Argument People commonly think of “being focused” as filtering out distractions while concentrating on one thing. The Solution Every leader needs to cultivate a triad of awareness—an inward focus, a focus on others, and an outward focus. A primary task of leadership is to direct attention.To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. Grouping these modes of attention into three broad buckets—focusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider world—sheds new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills. Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided. Focusing on Yourself Self-awareness.
'Dropbox' Is Taking Over The World BEFORE Apple launched iCloud in 2011, Steve Jobs allegedly offered to buy Dropbox, a file-sharing service founded in 2007, for $800m. When Dropbox declined, Apple's late boss disparaged it as a feature, not a company. Soon after, Dropbox raised $250m, putting its value at over $4 billion. In December Dropbox concluded a promotional campaign that, in just a few weeks, added 2m new users, bringing the total to over 100m, roughly double the number when Jobs made his comment. Consumers, it seems, can't get enough of the feature. Dropbox dominates online file-sharing. Most of them use the free version of the service. Dropbox relies on individuals and small firms, for whom its rudimentary security features are good enough; bigger businesses with sensitive information prefer more secure services like Box.net. Google and Microsoft clouds emulate Dropbox in these respects. Dropbox is also striving to make itself the default choice for smartphone users.
Why the Best CEOs Listen More - OPEN Forum Listening is the most valuable--and probably the most underrated--skill CEOs need to succeed. Dave Kerpen outlines how to measurably improve your own listening skills. November 15, 2012 Listening is an essential, yet often overlooked aspect of business communication. 1. 2. 3. 4. But can you actually measure how well you’re listening? Of the 11 principles of a likeable business, he believes listening is far and away the most important. As leaders mature, two specific key performance indicators (KPIs) can be used in any important meeting with a customer, supplier or internal team: First, measure the number of minutes you spend listening compared to talking. Second, measure the ratio of questions you ask versus answers you give. If you’re serious about improving your listening, you’ve got to measure it. Do you consider yourself a good listener? Photo: Thinkstock
Making Yourself Indispensable Idea in Brief Good leaders can become exceptional by developing just a few of their strengths to the highest level—but not by merely doing more of the same. Instead, they need to engage in the business equivalent of cross-training—that is, to enhance complementary skills that will enable them to make fuller use of their strengths. For example, technical skills can become more effective when communication skills improve, making a leader’s expertise more apparent and more accessible. Once a few of their strengths have reached the level of outstanding, leaders become indispensable to their organizations despite the weaknesses they may have. Artwork: Vincent Fournier, Space Project: MDRS #04, Mars Society, 2008, U.S.A. A manager we’ll call Tom was a midlevel sales executive at a Fortune 500 company. As far as Tom could tell, nothing. But how? Learn more about developing your strengths with this slideshow. So it is with leadership competencies. The Interaction Effect
How To Become Valuable To A Start Up (If You’re Not An Engineer) For all the glamor and noble intentions attributed to start-ups, working at an early-stage technology start-up isn’t fundamentally dissimilar from working at an established technology company. Products are built, released, iterated upon based on customer feedback, and the cycle is repeated. And while I don’t think I’d ever want to trade in jeans and a t-shirt for slacks and a button-down, I know I could probably get a job at GeneriCorp, the company that makes automated accounting process optimization software for mid-sized wastewater treatment plants, and not feel totally out of place. One key distinction does exist between life at an early-stage technology start-up and at an established technology company, though: diversity of workload. The idea is that, rather than specializing, employees at start-ups are given the latitude to engage in a diverse range of activities, all of which contribute to product development. Or business analysis. Top image stolen from the Grey Area blog. inShare
6 صفات يتحلى بها رجال الأعمال الناجحين يجب أن تتميز بها أنت عندما تقرر أن تكون شخصا مميزا عن الأخرين فإن سيلا من التحديات ستواجهك من كل حذب و صوب ، و أقصد بان تكون مميزا أن تسعى للنجاح و تعمل على الوصول إليه ، نفس الأمر حدث من قبل و لا يزال يحدث مع الكثيرين ممن حولك ، خصوصا الذين قرروا الاستقلالية و بناء مشاريع تترجم أفكارهم و نظرياتهم ، نعم لقد واجهتهم تلك التحديات و بقوة لكن قرروا في لحظة ما أن يتميزوا بستة مميزات جعلت منهم رجال أعمال ناجحين. لكن يا ترى هل تعرف هذه الصفات ، أنا عن نفسي لا أعرف إلا بعضها و اليوم دعونا نسافر معا بين السطور التالية لنتعرف عنها و نضيفها إلى شخصيتنا كي ننجح أيضا الصبر صفة من الصعب هذه الأيام أن نجدها في كثيرين ممن نعرفهم و ممن هم حولنا ، فسريعا ما نسعى لرؤية النتائج و النجاح و لا نريد أن نمضي وقتا أطول في مواجهة التحديات و القيام بالأعمال ، بعبارة شاملة الجميع يريد النتيجة و من الصعب عليهم أن يستمروا في عملهم لمدة أطول اذا لم يصلوا إلى ما يهدفون إليه. الإيمان الإقتناع المثابرة الشغف التسامح 6 صفات فرض أن تكون فينا ان كنا نود الأفضل مقال شخصي … تم جلب الخصال من مقال أجنبي … أما البقية فقد تطرقت إليه من فكري و تجاربي.
Develop the Leaders You've Been Overlooking - Jack Zenger , and Joseph Folkman by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman | 12:00 PM February 13, 2014 Say the word leader and most people immediately think of those with business cards that says “manager,” “director,” or other such lofty title. That is, the people who hold positions of stature within a company’s hierarchy, to whom several individuals report, and whose influence comes in great measure from the positions they hold. But anyone who has worked in organizations knows that there are also people without managerial titles, and who have no direct reports, and yet wield great influence and make critical contributions to the firm. In some organizations (like, say, the National Football League), their importance is obvious, and rewarded. We submit that every organization has such people. We think there’s a huge opportunity to provide this group with much of the same development experiences their managerial colleagues receive. We can see a host of reasons for investing in this group.