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Are You a Management Hedgehog or a Leadership Fox?

In Dan Gardner’s fascinating new book, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway, he cites the research of Professor Philip Tetlock, in dividing the expert forecasters he studied into hedgehogs and foxes. This comes from an essay entitled, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” by political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The […]

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Book Review of Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway

Once again we face a fresh New Year with countless possibilities stretching out far beyond the horizon. Will this year be filled with triumphs or tragedies? What changes lay ahead? Is the uncertainty daunting or exciting? Are we creating a new earth or witnessing the end of history? Will this be the year of “The […]

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New Year’s Prediction Alert: It’s Silly Season Again!

If the "experts" weren’t so serious — and often dire — with their predictions for 2011 and beyond, this could be a highly amusing time of year. Amongst all the holiday festivities we could be entertained — even laughingly regaled — by economists, analysts, futurists, tech experts, sociologists, and marketers with their computer models, colored […]

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Top 10 Blog Posts for 2010

While you’re recovering from all the feasting – or looking for some time to yourself – here’s a chance to review the most popular of last year’s 100+ blog posts. The links below will take you directly to the post. Many of the blog posts on this Top 10 list were published last summer. That’s […]

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Leadership Lessons from Santa

In the spirit making this a greener Holiday season I am recycling a blog from last year! It’s that exciting week before Christmas when kids cram for their big performance review. Where will the big guy watching from the North Pole mark them on the naughty-nice scale? Will it be enough to get them into […]

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Have a Purposeful Holiday for a Wonderful Life

This is a wonderful time of year. The bright lights, cheery music, parties, festive atmosphere, good wishes, and great food add to the fun of the Holidays. It’s a wonderful time for warming our hearts with the love of family and rekindling our spirits with friends. It’s a magical time of year when we even […]

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Thoughts That Make You Go Hmmm…on Reflective Learning

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” – Confucius, ancient Chinese thinker and social philosopher “… the most successful teams had leaders who actively managed the groups’ learning efforts. Teams that most successfully implemented the […]

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Tips and Techniques for Reviewing, Assessing, Celebrating, and Refocusing

As you look back over the past year and forward to 2011, schedule time to get your team re-energized and re-focused when you get back to work in January. Here are a few ways to do it: Summarize Your 2010 Accomplishments – this can be done as an “Annual Report” with photos, graphs, video clips, […]

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The Seven Sins of Learning Impaired Management Teams

My last blog post looked at using the Holiday Season as a reminder of the importance of reviewing, assessing, celebrating, and refocusing – both at home and at work. Besides energizing us, it’s critical to our ongoing learning and development. In offsite retreats and workshops, management teams agree on how critically important it is for […]

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Tis the Season to Review, Assess, Celebrate, and Refocus

As we scurry madly into the Holiday Season, the year-end retrospectives are beginning. It’s time to look back on what was and ahead to what can be. This is also what highly effective – and disciplined – management teams do so much more regularly that their mediocre peers. Many management teams have a limited or […]

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Learning from Southwest Airlines: Nurturing a Culture of Volunteerism

The New York Times recently published an in-depth look at the zany – and wildly successful – culture that propelled Southwest Airlines to become the largest U.S. domestic carrier over the past 40 years. Entitled “Pushing 40, Southwest is Still Playing the Rebel,” this entertaining and educational article explains how the company’s very powerful culture […]

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Tis the Season to Review and Reform our Habits

The payoff of all that frenzied flurry of preparations for the Holiday Season can be time for reflection and looking back over the past year. As we look ahead, resolutions to change some of our habits are often a good way to kick off the New Year. But planning isn’t doing. Forming new habits is […]

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Thoughts that Make You Go Hmmm on ….. Team Building

My last post reported on fascinating research from the world of honey bees providing profound and practical insights on building highly effective teams. Team effectiveness depends heavily on the team leadership skills of the person heading up the team. Here’s a look at recent and emerging research on team leadership for stronger team building. “Great […]

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Team Building Lessons from the Wisdom of the Hive

Management is about facts, analysis, and issues of the head. Leadership is about intuition, values, and issues of the heart. Logic is the language of management. Imagery is the language of leadership. Imagery is fuelled by metaphors, parables, analogies, stories, and examples. It’s how we’ve learned from each other and passed along our accumulated experiences […]

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Conference Board Webinar: Leadership and Culture Development for Peak Performance

The continued increase in registrations for my blog posting notifications and the steady growth in complimentary subscriptions to The Leader Letter (a monthly compilation of my biweekly blogs) leads me to believe that many readers feel they are getting more than they’re paying for from my writing. Because I am a “leadership nerd,” I quite […]

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Emotional Intelligence is a Strong Predictor of Job Performance and all about Leadership Smarts

I’ve extensively quoted and cited the expanding body of emotional intelligence research for many years in my writing and workshops. This rigorous and ever deepening research provides hard evidence for the catalytic power of “soft skills” in personal, team, and organizational performance. EI brings empirical science and greater clarity to the fuzzy topic of leadership. […]

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It Takes Strong Leadership Skills to Avoid the Deadly Incentives Trap

A few weeks ago one of my Tweets linked to a BusinessWeek article “How Incentives Can Undermine Your Influence.” The article focuses on Danny Meyer “the most influential restauranteur in New York City…today every one of his 10 restaurant brands have appeared every year in Zagat’s top 40 for New York City.” The article’s author, […]

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Habit Forming Tips and Techniques

My last blog post featured an inspiring verse on the power of habit to enable or enslave us. Our habits make or break us. A habit is a learned behavior causing us to think and act automatically. Many times, we’re not aware of the hundreds of tiny and bigger habits we’ve acquired over our lifetime. […]

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Harnessing or Hindered by This Powerful Force?

Like finding a $20 dollar bill in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn for a while, it’s always delightful to rediscover inspirational gems. Over the past few weeks I’ve been working with a very progressive and delightful Client to finalize a two-day management training workshop we’ve been customizing for their senior and middle […]

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Piecemeal Programs or Culture Change: Which Road Are you on?

With the Chilean miners successful rescue last month, the questions around how they became trapped in the first place will lead to numerous investigative media reports and inquiries. Those stories, reports, and inquires are now emerging around the giant BP oil disaster this spring and summer in the Gulf of Mexico. Early stories and reports […]

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