Managing Talent in Turbulent Times - Deloitte Consulting

Some significant insights on leadership in this report just released by Deloitte Consulting.

Some of the more important findings

• Nearly all executives surveyed “talk the talk” about the importance of leadership development and believe their companies have clear strategies in place to develop corporate leaders. Far fewer “walk the walk,” because they lack the necessary tools to make their leadership development programs more effective. As a result, manyadmit their pipeline of emerging leaders is less than robust.

• Companies heavily invested in leadership development— particularly those with “world-class” leadership programs—act and operate differently than their competitors. While many other companies are still focused on cutting headcount and managing costs, these organizations are effectively opening new career paths to their top performers and cherry-picking the best talent available in the marketplace.

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Firing Someone: What They Don't Teach You at Business School - Harvard Business Review

When I was 24, I quit an engineering job, declined offers to attend Harvard and Berkeley for grad school, and accepted a carpenter's job in Nantucket. The house I worked on was being built for the CEO of a major multi-national corporation. Without knowing it, I had entered the world of high-end custom building and within two years, I was supervising the construction of a 29,000 square-foot mansion on a 180-acre estate in Fairfield County, Connecticut. In all, I spent nearly five years running a construction company, and in those five years, I learned how to manage. This is the first of a series of posts on that education. I will relate salient experiences in construction with lessons I teach, and lessons that play out in the real world of leadership, every day.

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To Reinvent, Recruit The Rebels and Retrain the Brain

History is rife with stories of how people bursting with creativity were forced to take traditional safe jobs in deadening organizations while they toiled at creative pursuits on the side. Early American writer Nathanial Hawthorne was a customs agent. The ultra creative Franz Kafka worked for insurance companies. I had a relative who became one of Holland’s greatest regional writers, but spent his entire life working as an office manager. He would get up at 4 am each day to write before he went to work. This imperative to take a safe but boring job popped into my head during a recent discussion with someone who was tasked with reinventing a business operation that has been running sleepily in well-grooved tracks for some time.

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IDEO's Tim Brown on Using Design to Change Behavior - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Many large-scale phenomena are the sum of individual actions — sometimes millions or even billions of them. Apple's recent celebration of 10 billion songs downloaded represents 10 billion choices made by consumers to download a song rather than buy it in other formats. In the healthcare space, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported a 50 percent drop in respiratory infections in children, a drop attributable (in part) to the group's campaign to educate millions of children to change their behavior: To wash their hands. But what does it take to bring about such mass behavior shifts? Are there approaches that businesses could use, too, to influence behaviors on a micro level, and gain benefits on a macro one?

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Lessons from a Middle-Aged Revolutionary at W.L. Gore

Here is a piece from Gary Hamel's web site. It is genuinely interesting reading about an organisation W. L. Gore who has developed a unique DNA, recognised it and continues to innovate around it. This is a highly successful formula just like Apple. Yet, I have to ask you the question, could you use any their management concepts and techniques in your organisation. If not what might your organisational DNA look like. Here is Hamel's blog from the Wall Street Journal. As a management researcher, I’ve had the opportunity to peer inside a lot of organizations. In doing so, I’ve learned that most big companies are pretty much the same, at least when it comes to the way they’re managed. The rituals of goal-setting, planning, budgeting and performance appraisal differ only slightly from firm to firm. There’s even less variety in the architecture of power. Hierarchical authority structures, top-down leadership appointments and order-following employees have come to nearly every organization I’ve studied—nearly. One amazing exception is W.L. Gore & Associates.

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