The Thrill of Creative Effort - BusinessWeek

Sometimes it’s easy to forget what it is that really motivates people. Whether you lead a business or a project team, it is important to foster an environment in which people are empowered to create and feel satisfaction in achievement. With that in mind, here are five traits that successful business leaders share: 1. A collaborative management style. Engaging the team and stakeholders in problem-solving and decisionmaking is critical for management success. I’m not advocating anarchy or a lack of leadership, but I am suggesting that those closest to the work probably know it best and should be invited to collaborate on how it is done.

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Must-See Movies for Entrepreneurs - Harvard Business Review

After the Oscars last weekend, I started to think about which movies have really inspired me as an entrepreneur. Here are three films I believe that you should not only see, but also share with your teams. Each ties to an important entrepreneurial and leadership lesson. Man on Wire A story of the fanatical pursuit of a dream. Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker, was consumed by the idea of walking a wire between New York's former World Trade twin towers. To do so, he would need years of planning and would have to do it as a covert mission. When I first watched this film, I did not know if it was based on a true story or not. The narrative and grainy black-and-white shots made me constantly question whether I was wishing for this to be true or if it was just brilliant story-telling.

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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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The Recognition Microscope: Fuel for Human Acceleration

Adrian Gostick & Chester Elton “Can recognition be analyzed under a microscope?

Categorized here as a business manifesto, you might assume that recognition ROI—what we call the return on 'Carrots'—would be the first order of conversation. In other words, how purpose-based recognition can boost your bottom line, motivate employees to achieve, and create high-performance teams. And, because most readers here are searching for quick, easy to execute applications, you may even assume that a prescriptive “how-to” focus should warrant an initial discussion. Or, maybe even more to the point, scientific research should be presented to qualify the case for the most effective human performance accelerant in existence—recognition. The ROI is astounding. The application is easily trainable. And, now there’s global research proving that recognition accelerates human performance to a level beyond comparison in every culture studied—the impact has no boundaries, and the way humans respond to recognition reveals an outstanding driver of performance. All that said, the most revealing analysis under the microscope must begin within ourselves—the results of which we can all qualify, quantify, and measure.”

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Source: Change This