Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 1/21/13)

I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:

BOOK REVIEWS

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Iain McGilchrist

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
Maria Konnikova

The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism
Robert William Fogel

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
Danny Meyer

The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers
Bill Conaty and Ram Charan

The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action
Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton

INTERVIEWS

Victoria Ransom (Wildfire) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

Making internal collaboration work: An interview with Don Tapscott
Rik Kirkland
The McKinsey Quarterly

Frank Luntz on the FRONTLINE
PBS

Mel Brooks: “Unhinged” and Loving It
Renee Montagne
NPR

An interview with the COO of Electronic Arts Labels: Bryan Neider
Krish Krishnakanthan
The McKinsey Quarterly

COMMENTARIES

“How to Find Your Flow”
Daniel Goleman
LinkedIn

“How To Make Your Employees Happier”
Anne Creamer
Fast Company

“My Favorite Quotations About Women: Part 1″
BOB

“Peter Thiel’s Extreme Philosophy of Focus and Prioritization”
Walter Chen
BusinessInsider

“What entrepreneurs can learn from artists”
Tim Leberecht
CNNMoney

“Solitude and Leadership”
William Deresiewicz
The American Scholar

“The Catch-22 of Being a Female Boss”
Karen Firestone
HBR

“Guardians of the Fairy Tale: The Brothers Grimm”
Thomas O’Neil
National Geographic Society

“How to Create Rituals to Get More and Better Work Done”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR

“Why saying NO is so easy””
Josh Linkner

“The 6 Most Frequently Quoted Brain Facts (That Are Total BS)”
J.N. Chaney
Cracked.com

“Why do only long-term, high-impact books become business classics?”
BOB

“What makes a great leader?
Daniel Goleman
HBR

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Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 1/14/13)

I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:

BOOK REVIEWS

A Technique for Producing Ideas: The Simple, Five-Step Formula Anyone Can Use to Be More Creative in Business and in Life!
James Webb Young

HBR Guide to Better Business Writing
Bryan A. Garner

Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen
Michael Roberto

Winning with Transglobal Leadership: How to Find and Develop Top Global Talent to Build World-Class Organizations
Linda Sharkey, Nazneen Razi, Robert Cooke, and Peter Barge

101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization
Vijay Kumar

Train Your Brain For Success: Read Smarter, Remember More, and Break Your Own Records
Roger Seip

The Catalyst: How You Can Become an Extraordinary Growth Leader
Jeanne Liedtka, Robert Rosen, and Robert Wiltback

INTERVIEWS

Kon Leong
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

Rich Horwath
Bob Morris

Mark W. Schaefer
Bob Morris

COMMENTARIES

“The 10 Rules of Change”
Stan Goldberg
Psychology Today

“Don’t Sacrifice Long-Term Growth Just to Hit Your Forecast”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR

“Five Keys to Enhancing Your Emotional Intelligence”
Preston Ni
Psychology Today

“If Peter Thiel and Garry Kasparov Are Right About the Innovation Crisis, Then We’re In Trouble”
Peter Rogoff
BusinessInsider

“Three Secrets to Make a Message Go Viral”
Chip and Dan Heath
Fast Company

“Quotations of Timeless Relevance”
BOB

“The Disadvantages of an Elite Education”
William Deresiewicz
The American Scholar

“Leadership lessons to be learned from a brilliant symphony conductor”
BOB

“How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective”
Maria Popova
Brain Pickings

“Delegate, Delegate, Delegate”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR

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Solitude and Leadership

William Deresiewicz

Here is an excerpt from an article written by William Deresiewicz for his “All Points” column that is featured online by The American Scholar website.

“The American Scholar is the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won four National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.”

Given the recent S.E.A.L. mission in Pakistan, I think this article has even greater meaning and significance.

To read the complete article, check out other resources, sign up for email updates, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts.

The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October of last year. mind solitude, the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership. This lecture will be an attempt to explain why.

We need to begin by talking about what leadership really means. I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution that, like West Point, liked to talk a lot about leadership, Yale University. A school that some of you might have gone to had you not come here, that some of your friends might be going to. And if not Yale, then Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and so forth. These institutions, like West Point, also see their role as the training of leaders, constantly encourage their students, like West Point, to regard themselves as leaders among their peers and future leaders of society. Indeed, when we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions—senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth—we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.

So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of. My students, like you, were energetic, accomplished, smart, and often ferociously ambitious, but was that enough to make them leaders? Most of them, as much as I liked and even admired them, certainly didn’t seem to me like  leaders. Does being a leader, I wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful? Does getting straight As make you a leader? I didn’t think so. Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even ex cellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning. And it seemed to me that that had to be especially true of the kind of excellence I saw in the students around me.

See, things have changed since I went to college in the ’80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to start a lot earlier. We didn’t begin thinking about college until we were juniors, and maybe we each did a couple of extracurriculars. But I know what it’s like for you guys now. It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to jump through, starting from way back, maybe as early as junior high school. Classes, standardized tests, extracurriculars in school, extracurriculars outside of school. Test prep courses, admissions coaches, private tutors. I sat on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the committee was read what they call the “brag” in admissions lingo, the list of the student’s extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12.

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To read the complete article, check out other resources, sign up for email updates, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic. His book, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, will be published later this month. His piece in the Spring 2010 issue of the SCHOLAR, “Solitude and Leadership,” is a finalist for this year’s National Magazine Award in the category of Essays & Criticism.

David Brooks’ Annual Sidney Awards

David Brooks

Every December, David Brooks announces his Sidney Awards to those who during the concluding year have written what he considers to be the best essays. Because I have such great respect for his judgment, I am always eager to read those I had not previously read…and am never disappointed.

In a column written for The New York Times, he announces the 2010 recipients. Please click here to read his comments about each.

Michael Lewis for “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds” published by Vanity Fair.

Hanna Rosin for “The End of Men” published by The Atlantic.

Beth Kowitt for “Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe’s” published by Fortune.

Sam Anderson for “The James Franco Project” published by New York Magazine.

William Deresiewicz for “Solitude and Leadership” published by The American Scholar.

Darin Wolfe for “To See One’s Self” published by American Scientist.

“Everybody’s worried about the future of print journalism, but this has been an outstanding year for magazines. On Tuesday [December 28, 2010], I’ll offer more suggestions for holiday reading.”

Thank you, David Brooks.