Why good bosses tune in to their people - McKinsey Quarterly - Leadership - Prof. Bob Sutton, Stanford

Why it matters Your success and influence as boss depends on correctly reading those with whom you interact most frequently and intensely. Because your leadership style reverberates throughout the organization, ultimately it will bolster or undermine company performance and culture. What you should do about it The first and most important task is to convince others that you are in charge, otherwise your job will be impossible and your tenure short. Second, boost your subordinates’ performance by “watching their backs”: making it possible for them to learn, take intelligent risks, and feel pride and dignity along the way.

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What Value Cycle Leadership Is & Why It Matters - Gregory C. Unruh - Harvard Business Review

Last month, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the World Economic Forum's Sustainability Initiative team on a sustainable supply chain workshop, held as part of Summer Davos. Many issues that surfaced during the workshop focused on leadership — and they are the same issues that surface in my executive education teaching. Business leaders have been talking about "closed loop, cradle to cradle" value cycling of materials for a long time. Materials in a value cycle stay inside a closed loop, revolving from the suppliers, where they originate, to the manufacturer and on to the customer, who at the end of their useful life passes them back to the manufacturer where they are reincarnated into next season's model. The vision is elegant and simple to understand, but we have only a few examples operating today. The challenge, as the WEF workshop illustrated, lies in the nature of value cycle leadership.

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Start-Ups, Not Bailouts, is The Creative Way To Go - Thomas L. Friedman - NYTimes.com

Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

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The Death—and Reinvention—of Management - Stephen Denning

I am currently working on an article that synthesizes the thinking in a whole host of recent management books that propose the reinvention of management, including: Reinventing Management by Julian Birkinshaw, Reorganize for Resilience by Ranjay Gulati, The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, Peak by Chip Conley, Employees First, Customers Second by Vineet Nayar, Drive by Dan Pink, The Design of Business by Roger Martin, The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, Empowered by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, Open Leadership by Charlene Li, Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee, Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn, Buy-In and A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter, as well as my own book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. While doing full justice to none of the books individually, I have taken a shot in the article at drawing out the common themes

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What is The Role of the Chief Innovation Officer - Mark W.Johnson, Innosight - BusinessWeek

Innovation isn't new, but appointing a C-suite member to oversee it is. Mark Johnson looks at how the CIO's role should be executed Ten years ago, you'd have been hard-pressed to find a chief innovation officer on any company's leadership team. Today such leading companies as AMD (AMD), Citigroup (C), Coca Cola (KO), DuPont (DD), Humana (HUM), and Owens Corning (OC) each have one. Many others, including Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), have senior leaders who are tasked with heading innovation in effect, if not in name. Not that innovation is new: Organizations have been innovating as long as companies have existed. Why the new role now? There are many reasons. Three stand out.

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