How Companies Develop Great Leaders - Summary of Hays Consulting Leadership Research 2009

At first glance, Zappos.com, the online retailer, appears to have little in common with General Electric (GE), the multinational conglomerate. Hit hard by the recession, GE is in the throes of scaling down its financial services subsidiary, GE Capital, by an estimated 40%. Zappos, on the other hand, is tapping into changing consumer habits and ramping up for 30% growth over the next 12 months. Yet surprisingly, these two organizations with their rapidly shifting environments face similar challenges in motivating and engaging their employees. For Zappos, it's about creating and maintaining passion in a call-center culture. For GE, it's about keeping people engaged in a changing climate. Named among the 20 Best Companies for Leadership in a recent BusinessWeek.com/Hay Group survey, both GE and Zappos put a premium on

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Creating Collaboration Takes More Than Technology - BRW - Evan Rosen

Wikis, Web conferencing, and the like won't help people work together if the corporate culture is internally competitive and hierarchical, Why should any organization adopt collaboration? There's only one reason—value creation. After all, if we're not creating value, what's the point? With a growing consciousness for collaboration, many companies are investing in collaboration tools and technologies. These range from enterprise instant messaging and unified communications, wikis, and enterprise social media to virtual worlds, Web conferencing, and telepresence. In a typical scenario, the months fly by after the collaboration tools are implemented. As the seasons change, decision-makers anticipate reaping the benefits of collaboration. And perhaps they can even point to successes within particular business units or functions. Often, though, it's the same old story.

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What is Design Thinking Anyway? : Roger Martin - Design Observer

Design thinking, as a concept, has been slowly evolving and coalescing over the past decade. One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be. More concretely, Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” [1] A person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation. The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning. Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with the term.

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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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How To Spread Critical Behaviors Across Organisations

A few years ago we were studying a dozen front-line supervisors at a large telecommunications company in North America. These supervisors had been selected because of their widely recognized ability to motivate the people they worked with — emotionally as well as rationally. Their people simply did not ever want to disappoint them. The managers counter-intuitively simplified the guidance they received from HR into a singular focus on making people take pride in their day-to-day work. As we came to understand what they did that most "good managers" did not do, we realized that this was a learnable skill. What they did could be captured in a few simple behaviors. When we shared these behaviors with the CEO, he became impatient. "This seems pretty straightforward — so why don't more supervisors do this stuff?" he asked. At first we suggested the obvious:

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