How often do you read a business book and come away completely satisfied? Like a perfect five course meal with three wines. In this case my metaphorical five course meal was in a restaurant that has been open since 1981 and I’ve never visited, so all the more surprise that it catered perfectly to my tastes which are not, as you may know, entirely mainstream…Enough of the analogy – I have just been through “Gary Yukl’s Leadership in Organizations (7th ed)” published by Pearson.
Yukl has been researching and writing on leadership for 40 years and this textbook for business
The findings of the Lord Davies Review, published recently, with its recommendations on how to increase the number of women on the boards of listed companies in the UK establishes the following as key development needs:
1. Companies should treat women’s leadership as a dynamic and strategic opportunity rather than an equal opportunities issue.
2. Companies should consider raising their board’s and their nominating committee’s understanding of and ability to address unconscious bias.
3. Board placement researchers and interviewers should understand and adopt processes to eliminate unconscious bias.
4. Boards should provide senior women with influential board or executive level mentors either from within the organisation or
7 ways to bring meaningful engagement to your business
Mar 16th
It’s a big ask. Chief executives are suddenly recognising that ‘effective engagement of our employees’ is the key to increased productivity, to profitability, to the successful implementation of strategy, the retention of key talent and thus the key to competitive advantage. They instinctively know it’s important to ensure employees want to follow through on delivering the strategic intent, yet there is much confusion about what it is, how you create it, whose job it is to make it happen and how you measure it.
In reality it’s about getting people involved and inspired about something important and then contracting with each
In turbulent economic times – and after a very long winter – how do you keep yourself going? Research suggests that ‘talking out’ your concerns does not always help and that suppressing negative thoughts can be just as bad for you. However, research also shows that ‘expressive writing’ can boost your well-being, reduce health problems and increase your happiness.
If you are struggling to come to terms with a negative experience (a professional setback or even redundancy), try spending a few minutes each day writing a short account of it. Constructing a written narrative (which is naturally more coherent than a
My colleague Rupert wrote last week about challenging constructs.
I’ve been working recently with some companies that are by any reckoning very successful. They’re highly profitable, well led and well managed. They’ve developed strong business ‘formulas’ in their different markets and are disciplined in sticking to what they know works. They have stripped costs out, made their supply chains highly efficient, and honed a way of growing their existing businesses. In short they’re doing all the right things and delivering the results.
So what’s the problem?
It’s this. The very discipline of their approach is an inhibition to thinking more broadly about their
Could something stunning happen if you freed your mind?
Feb 16th
Travelling to work the other day on the bus, I absent-mindedly reached for my iPod and looked at it. Simple, minimalist and beautiful. And a great example of what can happen if you question your constructs.
By construct I mean an assumption or web of assumptions that helps us make sense of our world. Constructs help us organise our activities, and identify important things from the extraneous. They can occur on multiple levels: individual, organisational, business model, and industry. Multiple constructs typically converge and form a ‘dominant logic’ for a company and for an industry.
“My mantra is simplification, both internally and with the clients I am working with. That means always asking the questions, is this the simplest way of doing it? Is this an elegant way of doing it? Is this absolutely necessary, does it really add value? Is it freeing up time for people to add value doing the things that really matter, or is it just eating up your time? The most successful businesses have simplification ingrained in their DNA”
In these belt tightening times, exactly how can businesses keep growing? Management Today gathered a group of corporate leaders and asked what
This paper is sparked by a dinner discussion, facilitated by Stanton Marris and hosted by Addleshaw Goddard in November 2010 with participants from a number of financial service businesses with the theme Have our leaders led us down the garden path and how do we get back up again?
A recent paper by Douglas Board † suggested that there had been a deafening silence about the role of leadership up to and during the crisis in financial institutions. We wanted to test if a focus on leadership and leadership development had become irrelevant and we wanted to find out if leadership
