Leadership Advice

A stretch goal is most often an outcome metric, and is influenced by so many variables that systematic, scientific improvement isn't possible. A "target condition," by contrast, describes how we want a process to function — and that description requires that you understand the current condition deeply enough to know where to begin your improvement efforts. Without sufficient knowledge of the current condition, there's no way to make intelligent progress towards your ultimate goal.  

Few things in business are more important than how a manager reacts to problems. Here is some great advice on that point by Scott Berkun. There's gold here including: "Calm down. Nothing makes a situation worse than basing your actions on fear, anger, or frustration." "Get the right people in the room ... the more complex the issue, the smaller the group should be." and "The best available choice is the best available choice, no matter how much it sucks (a crisis is not the time for idealism)."

Yes, you need confidence and conviction in your authority once you've reached the top. But you equally need humility and vulnerability if you want to evolve to an even more inspired type and level of leadership. Which is why it's so important for successful people to keep cultivating the attributes of a lucky attitude and a lucky network.

The seven attributes of a lucky attitude are among the most difficult ones for leaders to master and maintain. They are: humility, intellectual curiosity, optimism, vulnerability, authenticity, generosity, and openness. Self-awareness around these seven qualities is key to not becoming a disconnected leader with nowhere to go but down.

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of Generation Facebook. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of their worklife to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than a mid-twentieth-century bureaucracy.

How do you avoid the kind of leadership drift that destroyed Kodak?  Here's a metric to assess your personal leadership "drift." Leaders drift the moment their "in the office" time exceeds their "out of the office" time. When this "leadership drift ratio" exceeds 2:1, watch out. It's a great indicator that a leader is becoming increasingly disconnected with customers. The solution is moving the chair away from the desk, standing up, and walking out of the "drift inducing" cocoon of an executive office.

Here are a few tell-tale signs of incompetent management. Any one of these behaviors should sound a warning bell. If you see more than one, head for the exits

In the network era, things you can’t see are more valuable than things you can. Building the capacity to create economic value through things such as innovating and enhancing brand reputation is as important, or more important, than generating specific results from a specific initiative. Twenty-five years ago, intangibles accounted for less than a third of the value of the S&P 500. Today, intangibles can make up more than 80 percent of that value.

Most companies, far from being hives of busy, effective executives, could instead be seen as "a few isolated islands of action amid an ocean of inaction," the researchers found

Leaders. Here are seven remarkably practical, powerfully useful things you can do year round to make your organization better. 

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is tech’s leading philosopher-CEO. He was recently featured in a cover story in Forbes, and George Anders summarizes his key leadership lessons. This is great stuff:

“There are two kinds of companies: those that try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”

“In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”

We all like to think we are leading the way for our teams, but how do we know we aren't only in the way? Ask yourself these questions.

A powerful workplace motivator is our natural tendency to measure our own performance against the performance of others..  New research suggests that in deciding how hard we work and how well we think we're performing, social comparisons matter just as much as financial incentives."

No matter what business you're in, there will come a day when you'll be forced to sit someone down for a good old fashioned confrontation...

One reason that many organizations have not embraced flexible work programs is that middle managers fundamentally mistrust their employees. There is a pervasive belief that if an employee is “out of sight” his or her work will be out of mind. There is only one way to overcome that kind of basic mistrust: measure what employees produce, not how much time they spend on the job.

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.” Bill Gates said that, and he’s exactly right. More often than not, great accomplishments cause individuals and organizations to become comfortable with their way of doing things. Businesses turn static. Workers turn their focus inward. Even the most dynamic of organizations can turn complacent, thinking that what they are doing is right, that there is no need to change.