Employees First, Customers Second - The How of Management Innovation:Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 - WSJ

Transforming an organization takes you on an interesting journey, without a map. There are wrong turns, surprising discoveries and moments of both exhilaration and discouragement. Not everyone agrees on the destination – at least in the beginning – much less on how to get there. When you reach an important milestone, you risk mistaking it for your goal. Instead of stopping at that point, you need to review what you’ve collectively learned – some of it the result of passionate debate – and continue on the quest to make your organization far better than ever seemed possible.

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The drivers of the leadership brain - to acquire, to defend, to bond, to comprehend - HBR

"Humans have evolved a leadership brain," says HBS professor emeritus Paul R. Lawrence. "Good leaders are people with a conscience who respect and reward all the four drives of other stakeholders [the drive to acquire, to defend, to bond, and to comprehend], even as they respect and reward their own drives." Inspired by the writings and insights of Charles Darwin, specifically his 1871 masterwork The Descent of Man, Lawrence's new book, Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership, offers managers an integrated understanding of the complex decision process at the heart of good and wise leadership. In the following excerpt, Lawrence describes how various forms of globalization—classic trading, international sales, and transnational outsourcing—reveal examples of good, bad, and misguided leadership behavior through the lens of humans' four drives.

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Extroverted leaders get the best results, right? A draft research paper to be published in the The Academy of Management Journal

Extroverted leaders get the best results, right? Not so fast. Research to be published in a forthcoming Academy of Management Journal finds that team performance improves under extroverted leaders if the team is passive, but declines if team members are proactive.  Download the draft of this paper soon to be published by Adam M. Grant, Francesca Gino, and David A. Hofmann.

Mindful Leadership: When East Meets West — HBS Working Knowledge

Asian beliefs, philosophies, and practices are influencing everything from the way we treat the ill to how we make cars. Now, a Harvard Business School professor is looking to the East as a model for developing strong business leaders. William George, an expert on leadership development, recently teamed with Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche to present a conference on "mindful leadership," a secular process to explore the roles of self-awareness and self-compassion in developing strong and effective leaders. "To our knowledge, this is the first time that a Buddhist Rinpoche and a leadership professor have joined forces to explore this subject and see how Eastern teaching can inform our Western thinking about leadership and vice versa," George says. You can read George's summary of the Mindful Leadership conference on his Web site.

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No Strategy – No Innovation!!!

You’d think with all the fawning press many companies and executives receive that defining a clear, concise corporate strategy would be a “no brainer”. After all, don’t we hire and pay executives exorbitant sums due to their vision and strategy? You’d think that with the hordes of “management consultants” available from a wide array of highly compensated consulting firms that well-conceived strategic plans would simply flow like water from these founts of knowledge. And let’s not forget the virtual library of books on corporate strategy, from the likes of Drucker, Porter, Hamel, Prahalad, and so forth. Clearly there is a wealth of information, advice and knowledge about corporate strategy.

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