The AGSM Executive Programs in collaboration with The Creative Leadership Forum

The Creative Leadership Forum and The AGSM Executive Programs are collaborating together to develop a two and half day program for executives on Leadership, Creativity and Innovation.

Following on from the AGSM Executive Roundtable on Leadership, Creativity and Innovation on 20th February 2009, this program caters for the needs of executives that emerged.

Rosemary Howard and Ralph Kerle have produced a podcast below that provides a fantastic insight into the background and importance of this program in our current challenging times...

Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Chip Heath and Dan Heath have introduced a new "sticky guide" on making your ideas stick, and eliminating the ones that ought to die. How do you make your ideas stick or prevail (without being a dictator)? Just today, I was trying to make my thirteen year old son do some backyard work (cleaning the table, chair, moving the garbage bins, and picking up our dog's poop). As a dad, I asked him twice to do this chore (and forgot that this was a weekend when he wanted to relax a bit). He told me he already did the work (he had only partially done the work). Finally, I had to raise my voice and even yell at him to get up and go out, and finish the work. Which he did, albeit grudgingly.

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Alain de Botton on Status Anxiety

Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety, first published in 2004, remains a thought-provoking and helpful text as I continue to think about happiness (and its absence.) De Botton, "a philosopher of everyday life," seeks in this book to acknowledge the intensity of status anxiety in contemporary Western society, to explore its causes, and to suggest some means of relief. He begins with a brief set of definitions and a concise statement of his thesis:

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Grant McCracken on the "Swift Self"

Author and anthropologist Grant McCracken had a good line a few months ago on the conventional wisdom about the generational divide: The other day I found myself thinking that every time I hear Millennials described: 1. the tone is that of a smug outsider. 2. the speaker is not a Millennial. I'm a Gen X executive coach who works closely with Millennial students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and Grant's observation serves as a useful reminder of the dangers of over-generalizing, a perspective reinforced by a Millennial commenter on Grant's post: "[W]e have such fine control over our own identities that we don't need to resort to big, poorly-defined memes like generational labels." Points well taken. So with the foreknowledge that I'm getting into a "big, poorly defined meme" here, I want to talk about a concept of Grant's that isn't a generational difference per se but that has implications for Millennials and anyone who works with them. (And I sure hope I don't sound like a smug outsider, so please let me know if I do.)

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The Virtues of Being Unsettled

Phred Dvorak's "Theory & Practice" column in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) talks about the dangers of experience: "The more experience we have, the more overconfident we get," [says Kishore Sengupta, an associate professor at INSEAD who designs simulations that test for effectiveness in areas such as project management.] Alan Over, a managing consultant at U.K.-based PA Consulting Group who participated in Mr. Sengupta's simulation, says he now questions his assumptions more... "I try to force myself to be nervous," [Over] says. "Whenever I find myself falling back on what I did last time, or think I'm doing well, I try to unsettle myself." [My emphasis] I suspect Over's strategy of "forcing myself to be nervous" is an over-correction, but he's touching on an important dynamic. I've found that I'm more likely to make mistakes when I'm too comfortable, when I assume that I understand a situation because it feels familiar--in a word, when I'm settled.

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