True Leaders Are Also Managers - Harvard Business Review - Robert I. Sutton

Ever have occasion to do an in-depth review of the academic and practical literature on leadership? I have — twice in the past five years. The first time was for a 2006 book with Jeff Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. The second time was for my new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss .It is impossible to read it all. Tens of thousands of books have been written on leadership and there are several academic journals devoted entirely to the subject, including The Leadership Quarterly and The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies.

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Can't Change Your Leader? Change How You Follow - Li Xin Bai - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Consider the following findings from the Hay Group: 1. Research conducted worldwide shows that leadership contributes to 70% of corporate atmosphere, while corporate atmosphere contributes to 30% of corporate performance. Therefore, leadership can exert direct influence on 21% of corporate performance. 2. In Chinese companies, 19.1% of the managers are found to be high-performance leaders, 9.8% inspiring leaders, 13.4% leaders who create no obvious value, and 57.7% leaders who actually discourage their employees. That is to say, 70% of the managers either don't help or discourage their people. The first conclusion reinforces that leadership does have a significant impact on organizational performance. But the second conclusion tells us that leadership development in Chinese companies really has a long way to go.

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Getting the Best Out of Your People - Stop Telling Them to Get Outside the Box, Instead Tell Them About The Constraints..

A CEO friend of ours recently complained about the difficulty of keeping creativity alive in his business during this difficult period. He had previously cut back on "discretionary" spending—such as development of new products and marketing plans—in order to survive the Great Recession, and he hasn't yet seen his company's revenues bounce back enough to invest heavily in future growth. We told him he was nuts—that creativity is even more important in times when sales are harder to come by and customers are less loyal. We also told him that two separate research studies (one by Bain, the other by Booz Allen) showed long ago that market share gains made during bad times are more likely to stick than those made during growth periods. Despite our scolding, he still felt he couldn't afford to invest more resources to foster creativity, and simply had to get more from what little resources he had. So, could we help him or not?

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Helping As A Leadership Role - Edgar Schein, MIT School of Management

Leaders are increasingly finding themselves in situations where they need help from subordinates, and in which subordinates are asking for help in areas where leaders are not experts. To manage either situation effectively, a leader will have to develop a degree of humility and specific process skills. Readers will learn how to achieve those difficult goals in this article by the dean of organizational behaviour.

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How To Build a Creative Organization - Alicia Arnold, BusinessWeek

A 2010 study of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM's (IBM) Institute for Business Value identified creativity as the No. 1 leadership competency of the future. This paints a broad role for creativity in the business world in spurring economic growth. Creative solutions are needed for organizations to thrive, but how can business leaders deliberately increase creativity? Allow us to introduce the four Ps of Creativity, a holistic model for looking at creativity that leverages People, Products, Process, and Press to build creative competency, develop radically innovative solutions, and increase revenue.

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