The Inauthentic Community of the Modern Executive - Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review

Marshall McLuhan famously said: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." The same, I believe, holds for community. We shape our community by choosing which actors comprise it and what roles they play. And we want to be a valued member of that community, so we adhere to its norms and conventions — our happiness depends on it. For this reason, the community we choose is critically important. If it is a productive community, it will help make us better. If it is unproductive, it will quietly but surely make us worse. So it behooves us to explore the quality of the community of the modern business executive. As mentioned in my last post, customers, employees, home city and long-term shareholders loomed large in the typical community of the 1950s and 1960s. The intimacy of these communities was aided by the more manageable scale of the enterprises of the day. GM, the behemoth of 1960, pulled in revenues that would in today's dollars ($66 billion) put it behind Archer Daniels Midland, 2009's 27th placed company, way below number one Exxon Mobil with $442 billion. In fact, only ten companies in 1960 were bigger than regional power utility Pacific Gas and Electric (#176) in 2009.

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Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy | Derek Sivers

I don' think I have ever seen a better visualization of leadership. This is genuinely worth offering as an introduction to any leadership workshop you might want to run.It is funny, memorable, down right inspiring and humbling.

How to be an Innovative, not just Business, Leader - David Magellan Horth

David Magellin Horth is one of the most highly experienced and knowledgeable creativity and innovation facilitators I know and have had the pleasure to work with.He is a global leader in the field of innovation thinking and his experimentation and design work around creativity and innovation processes and tools reaches back some 30 odd years. He is currently the President of the US Creative Education Foundation and his book The Leaders Edge is a standard text for all our programmes. So when he has an article published in Forbes, it would be remiss of me not to reproduce it fully for the Creative Leadership Forum readers.

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The 7 Key Components for Managing Creativity

I found this Fast Company article from 1997 quite fascinating. Click through and there is an even better article on the how to of designing creativity workshops. The MGTaylor mantra on managing for creativity goes something like this: All employees are inherently creative. That creativity is typically blocked by structural elements within a company. Eliminate the blockages, and you enable "group genius." In other words, you don't manage people; you manage the world in which they work, a world the Taylor's divide into seven key components, or domains.

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A Framework for Unblocking Organisational Creativity

Our research "Is Australian management creative and innovative?" clearly confirmed the statement in this FastCompany article which showed all employees are inherently creative and that creativity is typically blocked by structural elements within a company. So if you can eliminate the blockages, you enable "group genius." In other words, you don't manage people; you manage the world in which they work. Matt Taylor, a creativity consultant suggest their a seven key components, or domains to unblocking thse impediments,

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