The truth is that the real world defies engineering and logic. Perhaps that’s one reason why human life expectancy is roughly 80 years and increasing, while corporate life expectancy is now less than 20 years and shrinking.

When hiring a digital leader, companies must consider not just the individual’s background and expertise, but also his or her position within the organization and the governance mechanisms from which he or she will derive the responsibility and authority needed to carry out the mission.

McKinsey's new Corporate Horizon Index provides systematic evidence that a long-term approach can lead to superior performance for revenue and earnings, investment, market capitalization, and job creation.

Download the full report here. 

Study shows that 90% of executives believe their businesses are being disrupted or reinvented by digital business models, and 70% believe they do not have the right skills, leader, or operating structure to adapt. It’s not a good position to be in.

How can leaders learn to adapt quickly to new knowledge and trends — to disrupt themselves before others do? Speed and agility in learning are critical.

The overriding lessons from Bernie Swain's questioning is that successful leaders are self-aware. They have an inner voice and pay attention to it. They understand the defining moments of their lives and thereby better understand their own strengths, biases, and weaknesses as leaders.

A company becomes big by finding a successful business model — and then scaling it massively. This necessitates building a finely tuned system with highly standardized processes. To get promoted in such an environment requires an almost singular focus on execution. In other words, it requires action more than thinking. However, once executives are promoted to a senior level, these new business leaders must be able to think strategically. Ironically, the very skills in execution that led to their promotions often make these executives ill-equipped for their new roles, since their strategy thinking muscles have withered from disuse.

The argument against idealism is an argument against democracy, an argument against love, an argument against justice and equity, and all the things that our culture has abandoned in the name of privatisation and economic profit maximization.

We have moved from the “Command, Control, Compartmentalisation” way of leading organisations to a more interactive, informative, and Innovation-oriented model. To be truly effective, today’s organisations need to have leaders who have the emotional intelligence to create meaning, and have the capability to inspire and empower their people to get things done.

Innovation is a journey, a collaborative problem-solving process—most often among people with diverse perspectives and expertise. And very rarely are innovations developed full blown; rather, they are created through a process of trial and error, false starts, missteps, and even mistakes. 

Is the mindfulness boom really a revolution? If it is, what exactly has been overturned or radically transformed to garner such grand status?

Wall Street and corporations are still conducting business as usual, special interests and political corruption goes unchallenged.

As Nicole Ashoff points out in “The New Prophets of Capital,” “people must willingly participate in and reproduce its structures and norms,” and in times of crisis, “capitalism must draw upon cultural ideas that exist outside of the circuits of profit-making.”  Mindfulness is one such new cultural idea serving this purpose.

Leadership capacity - Two percent come by it naturally. Two percent will never get it. The other 96% lie in between. The job is to move people forward in a productive direction — to help them “be wiser, younger.”

Excellent piece by Om Malik in the New Yorker. 

Whether self-driving cars and trucks, drones, privatization of civic services like transportation, or dynamic pricing, all these developments embrace automation and efficiency, and abhor friction and waste.

People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up. 

I am a big fan of Jonathan Gottschall's book The Storytelling Animal. In this blog post, Jonathan explains how powerful, emotion-drenched stories is at the heart of every con job and how important it is to build a storytelling culture on an ethical foundation. 

A relentless focus on people, on developing everyone in the organization, leads to an organizational culture designed for adaptive change. In this sense, culture is strategy.

While engagement is an important determinant of performance, performance is also affected by other factors – and sometimes those factors matter more than engagement. For example, a recent study by Google found that the critical drivers of effective team performance were an open and safe team culture, clear goals, and a strong sense of purpose. Likewise, scientific studies show that leaders’ judgment and decision making ability can affect team and organizational performance beyond engagement. This explains why certain leaders – think Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos – can be so effective despite not displaying great people-skills or emotional intelligence: you can get away with it if you also have great judgment and vision.

Revisiting W. Edwards Deming helps in an era of short-termism and mistrust.

Edgar Schein investigates organizational culture, process consultation, research process, career dynamics, and organization learning and change. He analyzes how consultants work on problems in human systems and the dynamics of the helping process, and defines Humble Inquiry as “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.”