Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 4/22/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
The Power of Why: Breaking Out in a Competitive Marketplace
Richard Weylman
Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
Bruce Nussbaum
The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius
Nancy C. Andreasen
Crisis Communications: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message
Steven Fink
Decide: Better Ways of Making Better Decisions
David Wethey
Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable
Steven Fink
Business Brilliant: Surprising Lessons from the Greatest Self-Made Business Icons
Lewis Schiff
INTERVIEWS
Jen Guzman (Stella & Chewy’s) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
Peter Gray (Part 1)
BOB
Thought Leader Conversation: Edgar Schein
Art Kleiner and Rutger von Post
strategy+business
Dennis Perkins (Part 1)
BOB
COMMENTARIES
“How to Expand Your Company’s Innovation Network”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“McKinsey & Company: Leading in the 21st century”
The McKinsey Quarterly
“How IDEO brings design to corporate America”
David Kelley
FORTUNE
“To Increase Innovation, Take the Sting Out of Failure”
Doug Sundheim
HBR
“Linked Data: Web Science and the Semantic Web”
Tim Berners-Lee
“Google’s Greatest Innovation May Be Its Management Practice”
Bruce Nussbaum
Fast Company
“The Five Stages of Disruption Denial”
Grant McCracken
HBR
“How to Create an Innovation Ecosystem”
Art Markman
HBR
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To check out these resources and other content, please click here.
To subscribe via RSS Reader, please click here.
Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 4/1/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
Steven Gary Blank
Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You: Retrain Your Brain to Conquer Fear, Make Better Decisions, and Thrive in the 21st Century
Marc Schoen with Kristin Loberg
Intelligent Leadership: What You Need to Know to Unlock Your Full Potential
John Mattone
INTERVIEWS
Francesca Zambello in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
Lawrence Cunningham
BOB
Gerard J. Tellis
BOB
Emily Bennington
BOB
Vijay Govindarajan
BOB
COMMENTARIES
“Remembering Roger Ebert “
Linda Holmes
NPR
“The Psychology of the Creative Class: Not as Creative as You Think”
Richey Piiparinen
“Five routes to more innovative problem solving”
Olivier Leclerc and Mihnea Moldoveanu
The McKinsey Quarterly
“The Originality Scale”
Marty Neumeier
Liquid Agency
“The Most Popular Articles (First Q 2013)”
The McKinsey Quarterly
“How to Tell Your Company’s Story”
Nadia Goodman
Entrepreneur
“Don’t Sandwich Negative Feedback”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“5 Insanely Simple Work-Life Balance Shortcuts From People Who ‘Have it all’”
Cali Williams Yost
Fast Company
“Lessons From Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg On How To Succeed In Business By Really Trying”
Sharon Poczter
Forbes
“Yes, women make better leaders.”
Margaret Heffernan
CBS MoneyWatch
“How Innovative Is Your Company’s Culture?”
Jay Rao and Joseph Weintraub
MIT Sloan Management Review
“What Losing My Job Taught Me About Leading”
Doug Conant
HBR
“How to Know the Difference Between Your Data and Your Metrics”
Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin
HBR
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To check out these resources and other content, please click here.
To subscribe via RSS Reader, please click here.
Five routes to more innovative problem solving
Here is a brief excerpt from an article featured by The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company, in which Olivier Leclerc and Mihnea Moldoveanu explain how and why tricky problems must be shaped before they can be solved. To start that process, and stimulate novel thinking, leaders should look through multiple lenses. To re3ad the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain Quarterly subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.
Source: McKinsey Strategy Practice
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Rob McEwen had a problem. The chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian mining group Goldcorp knew that its Red Lake site could be a money-spinner—a mine nearby was thriving—but no one could figure out where to find high-grade ore. The terrain was inaccessible, operating costs were high, and the unionized staff had already gone on strike. In short, McEwen was lumbered with a gold mine that wasn’t a gold mine.
Then inspiration struck. Attending a conference about recent developments in IT, McEwen was smitten with the open-source revolution. Bucking fierce internal resistance, he created the Goldcorp Challenge: the company put Red Lake’s closely guarded topographic data online and offered $575,000 in prize money to anyone who could identify rich drill sites. To the astonishment of players in the mining sector, upward of 1,400 technical experts based in 50-plus countries took up the problem. The result? Two Australian teams, working together, found locations that have made Red Lake one of the world’s richest gold mines. “From a remote site, the winners were able to analyze a database and generate targets without ever visiting the property,” McEwen said. “It’s clear that this is part of the future.” [Note: Please see Linda Tischler, “He struck gold on the Net (really),” fastcompany.com, May 31, 2002.]
McEwen intuitively understood the value of taking a number of different approaches simultaneously to solving difficult problems. A decade later, we find that this mind-set is ever more critical: business leaders are operating in an era when forces such as technological change and the historic rebalancing of global economic activity from developed to emerging markets have made the problems increasingly complex, the tempo faster, the markets more volatile, and the stakes higher. The number of variables at play can be enormous, and free-flowing information encourages competition, placing an ever-greater premium on developing innovative, unique solutions.
This article presents an approach for doing just that. How? By using what we call flexible objects for generating novel solutions, or flexons, which provide a way of shaping difficult problems to reveal innovative solutions that would otherwise remain hidden. This approach can be useful in a wide range of situations and at any level of analysis, from individuals to groups to organizations to industries. To be sure, this is not a silver bullet for solving any problem whatever. But it is a fresh mechanism for representing ambiguous, complex problems in a structured way to generate better and more innovative solutions.
[Here's the first of five that Leclerc and Moldoveanu discuss.]
The flexons approach
Finding innovative solutions is hard. Precedent and experience push us toward familiar ways of seeing things, which can be inadequate for the truly tough challenges that confront senior leaders. After all, if a problem can be solved before it escalates to the C-suite, it typically is. Yet we know that teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do. [Note: Lu Hong and Scott Page, “Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2004, Volume 101, pp. 16385–89. For more on the benefits of open innovation, see John Seely Brown and John Hagel III, “Creation nets: Getting the most from open innovation,” mckinseyquarterly.com, May 2006.] When a diverse range of experts—game theorists to economists to psychologists—interact, their approach to problems is different from those that individuals use. The solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innovative answer will be found.
Obviously, people do not always have think tanks of PhDs trained in various approaches at their disposal. Fortunately, generating diverse solutions to a problem does not require a diverse group of problem solvers. This is where flexons come into play. While traditional problem-solving frameworks address particular problems under particular conditions—creating a compensation system, for instance, or undertaking a value-chain analysis for a vertically integrated business—they have limited applicability. They are, if you like, specialized lenses. Flexons offer languages for shaping problems, and these languages can be adapted to a much broader array of challenges. In essence, flexons substitute for the wisdom and experience of a group of diverse, highly educated experts.
To accommodate the world of business problems, we have identified five flexons, or problem-solving languages. Derived from the social and natural sciences, they help users understand the behavior of individuals, teams, groups, firms, markets, institutions, and whole societies. We arrived at these five through a lengthy process of synthesizing both formal literatures and the private knowledge systems of experts, and trial and error on real problems informed our efforts. We don’t suggest that these five flexons are exhaustive—only that we have found them sufficient, in concert, to tackle very difficult problems. While serious mental work is required to tailor the flexons to a given situation, and each retains blind spots arising from its assumptions, multiple flexons can be applied to the same problem to generate richer insights and more innovative solutions.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Olivier Leclerc is a principal in McKinsey’s Southern California office. Mihnea Moldoveanu is associate dean of the full-time MBA program at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, where he directs the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking.
Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 3/18/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
Gary Keller with Jay Papasan
The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, Third Edition
Warren Buffett; Edited by Lawrence A. Cunningham
Judgment On the Front Line: Why the Smartest Companies Trust their People to Make Real Decisions
Chris DeRose and Noel Tichy
INTERVIEWS
David Rock (the NeuroLeadership Institute) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
Capturing the Energy of Anese Cavanaugh
Glenn Burr
Inc. Small Giants Community (ISGC )
CONVERSATION AT THE EDGE with Joseph Henrich
Edge.org
Karl Weber
BOB
Exclusive Interview with Author Stan Phelps
Glenn Burr
Inc.
Mark Goulston and John Ullmen
BOB
COMMENTARIES
“Beyond corporate social responsibility: Integrated external engagement”
John Browne and Robin Nuttall
The McKinsey Quarterly
“Why Persuasion Doesn’t Require Manipulation”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“Stop Reinventing Disruption”
Maxwell Wessel
HBR
“Women on the home front: Debate over work-life balance continues”
Bernie D. Jones
From the Square (NYU Press Blog)
“The second step to brain mastery”
Nick Morgan
“Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling”
Emma Coats
“The New Aesthetic Resonates in Ferruccio Laviani’s Good Vibrations”
Janelle Zara
ARTINFO.com
“Some Things You Might Not Know About Sheryl Sandberg…But Lucky Us, We Got the Chance to Ask”
Sara Nelson
Amazon.com
“International Women’s Day 2013: Defining Success”
Accenture Global Research Results
“Why the Publishing Industry Isn’t Doomed: Readers’ Control In the Future of Reading”
Baratunde Thurston
Fast Company
“How to Survive Networking Events by Being Generous”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“Findings of Harvard Business School’s 2012 Survey on U.S. Competitiveness”
Michael E. Porter, Jan W. Rivkin, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter
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To check out these resources and other content, please click here.
To subscribe via RSS Reader, please click here.
The Case for Stealth Innovation
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
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You have an idea for a daring, innovative project that could have a significant impact on your business. However, you suspect that your idea will meet with internal resistance: The innovation would upend the status quo, and chances are good that other parts of the organization will try to stop it. What’s your next step?
The conventional answer is simple: Get a mandate from the top. As many innovation experts rightly point out, only the most incremental ideas pass through the corporate-approvals gantlet unscathed. The more unusual your idea, the greater the risk that it will fall victim to turf wars, myopic incentive systems, or simple resistance to change. For this reason, innovators are often counseled to go straight to the top, secure backing, and build a corporate sense of urgency around their ideas.
The “top first” strategy, however, carries its own risks. CEOs of large organizations are constantly barraged with proposals for new, untested projects, and typically, the ideas get a five-minute perusal followed by a “no.” And even if your idea does win support from the C-suite, early exposure is a double-edged sword: It buys you legitimacy and resources, but it also thrusts you squarely into the corporate spotlight—and that can be a dangerous place for young, unproven ideas. Our experience working with innovative managers has revealed an alternative approach: innovating under the radar.
Consider the story of pfizerWorks. Jordan Cohen, then a human resources manager in Pfizer’s New York office, created the productivity initiative to allow employees to outsource “grunt work” and other routine parts of their jobs, giving them more time to focus on important tasks and allowing Pfizer to make better use of its highly skilled (and highly paid) employees. PfizerWorks, launched in 2008, quickly became an acknowledged success story, and Cohen was featured in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and other publications. In a 2011 internal survey, the users of pfizerWorks rated it as the company’s most popular service offering, even though they had to pay for it out of their own budgets.
But Cohen didn’t bring his idea to fruition by going straight to the top. To the contrary, he stayed under the radar for more than a year, developing the service, accumulating evidence, and gaining allies. When he finally pitched it to Pfizer’s top executives, he was able to show them much more than an idea: He presented existing users who were passionate about the project, outlined a proven business case, and pointed to the backing of several senior managers. Pfizer’s decision to support the project came quickly, and Cohen received not just a budget for it but a new job as the head of pfizerWorks.
Innovating under the radar carries its own set of challenges, to be sure, but going into stealth mode can often yield better results than trying to get the CEO on board from day one. In our experience, stealth innovation involves four critical challenges. First, you need to marshal allies who can help you operate off the grid and make sure that you don’t lose perspective as you do so. Second, you need to build proof of concept so that when you’re ready to make your case to the higher-ups, you have hard evidence to support you. Third, you must obtain access to funds and other resources to keep your project afloat. And finally, you need a good cover story so that you can work on the project without attracting unwanted attention or scrutiny. If you address these challenges effectively, you can sidestep corporate obstacles and give your idea the best possible chance for success.
Why Early Exposure Can Kill
The conventional overt approach to innovation is more risky than it may seem. Consider a company we’ll call RedTec Media, whose European division came up with an idea for a potentially game-changing consumer product aimed at the luxury market. Excited about the idea’s potential, the European team presented it to leaders at corporate headquarters. The response was much less enthusiastic than the team had expected. While the executives didn’t kill the idea outright, they questioned the project’s technical feasibility and expressed strong doubts about whether there was a market for it.
The European team members, recognizing that their enthusiasm was not contagious, set out to make a better case for the idea. So over the next few months, they built a working prototype and tested it with consumers, with great success. They also asked key retailers whether they thought the product would sell. The response was overwhelming; several of them asked, “Can I get this now?” Even better, the price the retailers suggested was higher than the team had hoped.
The team members made sure that their testing was rigorous and reliable, and carefully documented their findings. Consumers’ reactions, for instance, were not only recorded on paper but also filmed and compiled in a short video that demonstrated their support for the product.
But none of the new evidence seemed to change the minds of the top managers. After a long silence, the team received the news that headquarters had decided to kill the project. “To be fair, there were legitimate reasons to oppose the project,” one team member told us. “But we also got the feeling that the leadership made an early judgment call based on their gut feelings about the first presentation, and then pretty much stuck by that call irrespective of all the evidence we sent them subsequently.”
The phenomenon is not unusual. As research by the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman and others has demonstrated, people suffer from what is called confirmation bias: Once you’ve made a decision, however uninformed, you tend to look for more evidence supporting it, and ignore or discredit evidence that points in other directions. This effect is exacerbated if the judgment call is made in public or in front of colleagues or a boss. That’s because in corporate life, as elsewhere, it’s often considered preferable to be wrong than to be a flip-flopper. Just look at any political campaign and see what happens to candidates who change their stance on an issue, no matter how legitimate the reasons. As an innovator, you often get only one shot at pitching an idea to people at the top—and their default reaction is frequently “no.” You don’t want to waste your shot too early in the process, before you’ve built sufficient evidence for your idea.
A premature judgment call is just one of the dangers that come with early exposure. Ideas can be held hostage in political power plays; they can be forced Procrustes-style to follow corporate procedures that prevent rapid iteration; they can be appropriated and distorted by other stakeholders with legitimate but differing goals; and perhaps most frequently, they can face crushing pressure for short-term results that either kills them or warps them beyond recognition. In The Little Black Book of Innovation, Scott Anthony shares Clayton Christensen’s concept of the “ticking clock,” a deadline for creating results that all innovators face. “You never know quite how fast the clock is ticking,” Anthony writes, “or when the alarm is set, but you can be darn sure that at some point, it will ring….If that moment comes and all you have is potential, you’d better start polishing your résumé.”
This is where stealth innovation comes into the picture. While aiming to deliver some quick wins is excellent advice, and if at all possible, you should follow it, the nature of your idea may be such that doing so is simply not possible. By starting your project in stealth mode, you can postpone the moment that the clock starts ticking for your idea. Let’s now look in detail at the four challenges of stealth innovation and how to overcome them.
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Paddy Miller is a professor at IESE Business School. Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is a partner at the Innovation Architects. They are the co-authors of Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), from which this article is adapted.
Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 3/4/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
REVIEWS
Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life
Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Finding Keepers: The Monster Guide to Hiring and Holding the World’s Best Employees
Steve Pogorzelski and Jesse Harriott with Doug Hardy
Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life
Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior Across Cultures without Losing Yourself in the Process
Andy Molinsky
Leadership: A Master Class
Daniel Goleman, Host
Success Under Stress: Powerful Tools for Staying Calm, Confident, and Productive When the Pressure’s On
Sharon Melnick
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Innovation
Various Contributors with Editors of Harvard Business Review
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
John Ratey with Eric Hagerman
BrandingPays: The Five-Step System to Reinvent Your Personal Brand
Karen Kang
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Steven Johnson
INTERVIEWS
Kris Duggan (Badgeville) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
COMMENTARIES
“Business Insights from Abraham Lincoln”
BOB
“7 Secrets to asking effective questions”
Shane Snow
Fast Company
“Pragmatic Pathways to Fundamental, Long-Term Change”
John Hagel II, John Seely Brown, Christopher Gong, Stacey Wang, and Travis Lehman
Deloitte Center for the Edge
“5 ways to use brain science to create persuasive presentations”
Susan Weinschenk
Business Insider
“Big data in the age of the telegraph”
Caitlin Rosenthal
The McKinsey Quarterly
“How to Keep Your Star Employees”
Kasey Wehrum
Inc.
“Focus on the problem, not the person”
Daniel Goleman
LinkedIn
“Narcissism: The problem with ‘bold’ leadership”
Margaret Heffernan
CBS MoneyWatch
“12 Ways to Be the Leader Everyone Wants to Work For
Jeff Schmitt
Forbes
“One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education”
Michael Noer
Forbes
“Embrace Work-Life Imbalance”
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
HBR
“Global Tilt and the Dexterity That Cross-Cultural Management Now Requires
From Global Tilt: Leading Your Business Through the Great Economic Power Shift
Ram Charan
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Achim Nowak : An interview by Bob Morris
Achim Nowak is an internationally recognized authority on executive presence and interpersonal connections. His just-published book Infectious: How to Connect Deeply and Unleash the Energetic Leader Within (Allworth Press) has already received acclaim in Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Leadership Excellence, and Forbes. His first book Power Speaking: The Art of the Exceptional Public Speaker has becomes an essential leadership development tool with Fortune 500 companies around the world.
Influens, the international training and coaching firm Achim founded in 2004, is based in South Florida. It has guided thousands of leaders from organizations such as Sanofi, Dover Corporation, HSBC Bank, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield to better connect and be more influential.
Achim holds an M.A. in Organizational Psychology and International Relations from New York University. He served for over a decade on the faculty of New York University and has been a frequent guest speaker at other universities and industry events. Achim and his work have also been featured on 60 Minutes, The Today Show, NPR, and CNN.
Here is an excerpt from my interview of him. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: Before discussing Infectious, a few general questions and then a few others about high-impact communication. First, who has had the greatest impact on your professional development? How so?
Nowak: In 1992 I was trained at the Brooklyn Courts to become a mediator. Mediators are highly skilled at shaping the flow of a conversation and using language with strategic precision. The skill sets – validating, paraphrasing, reflecting feelings, identifying underlying issues, speaking in neutral – are priceless. These skills instantly elevated the quality of the conversations I was having, anywhere. They should be required study for any business leader!
Morris: Years ago, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please explain.
Nowak: I spent six weeks in the late 1980s at a retreat in the Arizona desert. I had never done anything like this before. I had never just stopped to take a look at myself – I was your classic results-driven alpha male. The retreat center sat atop an old Anasazi burial mound. The Anasazi spirit energy was electric. I soon had daily visits from power animals. In one very long night I had repeated visions of a white house on an island, overlooking a sparkling dark blue ocean. I knew instantly that this house was not a metaphor, it was a real place. Six months later I had left my life as a theatre director in New York City and was living in a small white house on the island of Tobago, overlooking the Atlantic. This was the first time in my life that I listened to deep inner guidance and followed suit – even though at no time prior had I ever had a yearning for island life. This was the start of my journey into a life and career that looks different from anything I might have envisioned for myself.
Morris: To what extent has your formal education been invaluable to what you have accomplished in life thus far?
Nowak: My formal education has been marginally valuable, at best. There are great minds whose work I cherish – Peter Drucker, Daniel Goleman – and I greatly believe in continuous learning, but my most meaningful lessons happened while working in the trenches: Doing transformational work in North-American AIDS communities, facilitating co-existence dialogues in countries that are at war – and in every one-on-one coaching conversation I have with a C-level leader!
Morris: From which business book have you learned the most valuable lessons about business? Please explain.
Nowak: FLOW by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi is my favorite book about business – and life. Distinctions between business and non-business are often artificial since we tend to spend more time at work than we do in our non-business life. The common denominator between both is that we are in constant relationship with others. Csikszentmihalyi’s insights about how we attain peak performance, and how our engagement in peak performance leads to a state of flow, are instantly relevant, in all parts of life. I recommend to everyone.
Morris: Here’s one of my favorite quotations from Oscar Wilde to which I ask you to respond: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”
Nowak: There are tantalizing questions behind this clever quip. Do I know who I am? Is this knowledge of who I am growing and changing over time? (Yes – I hope!) And most importantly – which parts of myself do I choose to reveal in public? The ability to be myself at all times and make enlightened choices about how I show up – that’s the mark of a mature leader.
Morris: Here’s a brief excerpt from Paul Schoemaker’s latest book, Brilliant Mistakes: “The key question companies need to address is not ‘Should we make mistakes?’ but rather ‘Which [end mistakes should we make in order to test our deeply held assumptions?’” Your response?
Nowak: I love the title of this book – Brilliant Mistakes. I tend to be a risk-taker, and the moment we take risks we will make mistakes. Only when we test deeply-held assumptions do we get to the unknown – which is a world that we, by definition, do not know before we know it. How many mistakes we can tolerate, well, that’s the personal frontier everyone one of us needs to explore. I’m thinking of a few situations in my life just recently where I feel like I pressed for results a little too hard. My job is to learn from that experience. Were my actions mistakes? It’s up to me to decide how I frame it up for myself, isn’t it? It always boils down to assuming responsibility for my actions without beating myself up for having taken a risk. That’s my personal bottom-line.:
Morris: In your opinion, why do so many C-level executives seem to have such a difficult time delegating work to others?
Nowak: My experience doesn’t entirely match your statement. I know quite a few C-level executives who do know how to delegate. The key, of course, for all C-Level executives is to be secure enough to surround themselves with amazing talent – and to let this talent shine. Part of letting the talent shine is having real, tough, challenging conversations when everyone meets in person, without ever denigrating the brilliance of others. And, of course, there has to be the willingness to let go of those who do not wish to play your game or support your vision.
Morris: The greatest leaders throughout history (with rare exception) were great storytellers. What do you make of that?
Nowak: They’re smart. Well-told stories tap into our deepest yearnings and desires. They stir us. Leaders who are unable to stir folks, especially in a democracy, simply will not get elected. Because we know that stories work, every modern politician these days has been coached on telling stories. The key now is to move from the easy and predictable stories – rags-to-riches, immigrant-to-success – and tell stories that involve taking a true personal risk in the telling. Stories that are mere marketing clichés come across as mere marketing clichés. They fail to stir!
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
Achim cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 2/18/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
Success Under Stress: Powerful Tools for Staying Calm, Confident, and Productive When the Pressure’s On
Sharon Melnick
The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership
Bill Walsh with Steve Jamison and Craig Walsh
Who Says It’s a Man’s World: The Girls’ Guide to Corporate Domination
Emily Bennington
The Genius Machine: The Eleven Steps That Turn Raw Ideas into Brilliance
Gerald Sindell
The Art of Explanation: Making Your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand
Lee LeFever
This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
John Brockman, Editor
INTERVIEWS
Lily Kanter (Serena & Lily) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
Lina Echeverría
Achim Nowak
David Goldsmith: Part 2
COMMENTARIES
“7 Tips for Handling Criticism”
Gretchen Rubin
“How Companies of All Sizes Are Moving Beyond Command and Control Cultures”
David C. Forman and Friso van der Oord
Talent Management
“Tim Ferriss: How to develop ‘reality distortion field’ charisma”
Jessica Stillman
CBS MoneyWatch
“Why the Best Managers Ask the Most Questions”
Nadia Goodman
Entrepreneur
“Top 10 Famous Stutterers”
El the erf
Listverse
“Death To Core Competency: Lessons From Nike, Apple, Netflix”
Austin Carr
Fast Company
“Making Star Teams Out of Star Players
Michael Mankins, Alan Bird, and James Root
HBR
“How to Defuse Difficult People”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
When It Comes to Content Strategy, Spreadable Is the New Sticky
Sam Ford
Fast Company
“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data
Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira
iEEE iNTElliGENT SYSTEMS
“The startling cost of inefficient collaboration”
Editors
MIT Sloan Management Review
* * *
To check out these resources and other content, please click here.
To subscribe via RSS Reader, please click here.
Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 2/4/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration
Leigh Thompson
This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
John Brockman, Editor
Unrelenting Innovation: How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance
Gerard J. Tellis
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
Chris Brown
Lincoln: A President for the Ages
Karl Weber, Editor and Contributor
The Architecture of Innovation: The Economics of Creative Organizations
Josh Lerner
INTERVIEWS
Robert LoCascio (LivePerson) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
TALES FROM THE WORLD BEFORE YESTERDAY: A Conversation with Jared Diamond
John Brockman
Edge
Terry Leahy (Tesco) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
COMMENTARIES
Why “Management Is (Still) Not Leadership”
John Kotter
HBR
“How to Successfully Manage Opposing Strategies”
Roger Martin
HBR
“New Research on The Innovation Bottom Line”
David Kiron, Nina Kruschwitz, Knut Haanaes, Martin Reeves and Eugene Goh
MIT Sloan Management Review
“Here’s an easy IQ test for really intelligent people”
BOB
“Silicon Valley’s most important document ever”
Janko Roettgers
GigaOM
“How to battle-test your innovation strategy”
Marla M. Capozzi, John Horn, and Ari Kellen
The McKinsey Quarterly
“How Do Innovators Think?”
Bronwyn Fryer
HBR
“5 Biggest Leadership Lessons From 2012″
Les McKeown
Inc.
“The Skills Most Leaders Don’t Have”
Brian Evje
Inc.
“How to Proactively Manage Your Digital Reputation”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“Lincoln’s School of Management”
Nancy F. Koehn
The New York Times
“How To Make Your Employees Happier”
Anne Kreamer
Fast Company
* * *
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Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 1/28/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK/CD REVIEWS
Executive Toughness: The Mental-Training Program to Increase Your Leadership Performance
Jason Selk
The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well
Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield
Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence: Selected Writings
Daniel Goleman
a fine line: how design strategies are shaping the future of business
Hartmut Esslinger
Resonant Leadership: Inspiring Others Through Emotional Intelligence (CD)
Richard Boyatzis
INTERVIEWS
Terry Leahy (Tesco) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey‘s advice for entrepreneurs
Rebecca Jarvis
CBS MoneyWatch
THE NORMAL WELL-TEMPERED MIND: A Conversation with Daniel C. Dennett
with John Brockman
Edge
Kevin Cashman: An interview by Bob Morris
Simon Pont: An interview by Bob Morris
COMMENTARIES
“Why the Publishing Industry Isn’t Doomed: Readers’ Control In the Future of Reading”
Baratunde Thurston
Fast Company
“How To Make Your Employees Happier”
Anne Creamer
Fast Company
“Five of Steve Jobs’s Biggest Mistakes”
Peter Sims
HBR
“The Narcissistic Leader: Not as Good as He (Or You) May Think”
Maria Konnokova
“Leadership lessons from the Royal Navy”
Andrew St. George
The McKinsey Quarterly
“10 Creative Block Breakers That Actually Work”
Susan K. Perry
Psychology Today
“Several of the Major Business Challenges to Be Faced in 2013″
Gerard J. Tellis
“Preparing for a new era of work”
Susan Lund, James Manyika, and Sree Ramaswamy
The McKinsey Quarterly
“My Favorite Quotations About Women: Part 2″
BOB
“This Explains Everything: 192 Thinkers on the Most Elegant Theory of How the World Works”
Maria Popova
Brain Pickings
“Who says it’s a man’s world?”
Emily Bennington
from Who Says It’s a Man’s World?
“The 5 rules of happy employees”
Lydia Dishman
from It’s Always Personal
“How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries”
Adam Savage
TED
* * *
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