I wrote earlier about leadership and creating a learning organization. Further thinking revealed that a learning organization is not possible without learning individuals. Here are my top 20 lessons to cultivate lifelong learning: As professionals, ability (and drive) to learn constantly is a competitive advantage. Learning is not a one time event, but a lifelong […]
I recently came across a company (somewhere on the social web) that claimed that they “shipped leaders”. It looked like they offered leadership training services. It took me back to the old debate of whether leaders are born or made. One thing is clear – leaders cannot be manufactured in a training factory and shipped. […]
Improvements don’t happen if organizations don’t have someone responsible for it. This is the reason why a lot of organizations have senior executives who think about and plan improvement initiatives. From a strategic viewpoint, this makes a lot of sense. However, there is another side to it. Just because there is one person responsible for […]
Drucker got it wrong. Drucker famously wrote that “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” I’m as much a fan of Drucker’s as any management scholar, but I have to part ways with him here. The purpose of business is NOT to create or to keep a customer. Certainly it is […]
Across the web, I have recently read articles/posts that underline an important thing – technology is taking a toll on our productivity and is keeping us from doing work that really matters – that is, if we allow. I have seen both sides of the coin. I often get into a state when my work […]
Last year, Seth Godin showed us a way to become a Linchpin. This year, he urges us to “Poke the Box” – to act, to start, to initiate, to experiment, to try (and fail and learn from it) and most importantly to finish and deliver. Poking the box is about taking initiatives, not just waiting […]
In organizations, I have seen people who are “designated” as leaders. I have seen many such designated leaders, who raised their game to meet the expectations that come along with leadership. They make an effort to learn about leadership, read books, blogs and consciously put those lessons in action. On the other hand, I have […]
When leaders undertake process improvement/change initiative, they walk on a tight rope. On one hand, they have to improve the processes to deliver positive business outcomes. On the other, they have to ensure that improvement/change initiative does not slow down the current work and bring the overall efficiencies down. Both are crucial and striking the […]
We live in times where more and more work is executed by teams that are geographically distributed. Leading a virtual team, fostering collaboration and binding them to common set of objectives is one of the key challenges for business leaders. In most of the troubled projects I have seen, the real challenges were not technical/engineering […]