Just imagine if those you managed were more self-acting and self-directed, had greater levels of creativity and had (really) good interpersonal skills. Wouldn’t this make for a higher performing team enhancing organizational performance, not to mention having a positive influence on your effectiveness? Obviously, for many, the next questions are do such people exist and how do I get them to be my team? Continue reading
Creativity
Business Management Education—Think Again
In an HBR Blog Network article Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Director of the Management Acceleration Programme at INSEAD, spoke to the question are business schools clueless or evil? Professor Petriglieri’s answer is “business schools are neither clueless nor evil. They are—like most students that flock to their classrooms—in transition. Overtly working to improve their competence and image and covertly wrestling with questions about identity and purpose.” Continue reading
Redesign for Capability Not Flatness
In an HBR Blog Network essay by Ron Ashkenas titled “More direct reports make life easier”, the case is made for increasing the span of control so that it becomes “possible to compress the number of hierarchical layers or levels.” Why do this? Continue reading
Challenging The Chain of Command
If management can control things then management can be effective and efficient in realizing the desired results and sustaining the business. You will find very few who would disagree with this if-then thinking. This thinking is so common that it is rarely, if ever challenged—until now. Continue reading
A Reframing
When I say the word leader, quite understandably most associate it with the ‘one-in-charge’, the top person. Furthermore, since leader is synonymous with the one-in-charge, then leadership must be the actions of the one-in-change. That is when the term leadership is the focus—be it in academic journals or the popular press—its use is most often referring to people in positions of authority such as top executives or c-level managers in organizations or officials of rank in government. We could just as well talk about top management since the terms connote the same thing. Even so, everyone would prefer to be a leader than a manager—it just sounds better. Continue reading
Which Energy Fields Do You Use
There is little doubt that life requires energy and in life we each are free to canalize our energy as we choose. As the saying goes it is not what happens in life so much as what you do with what happens that makes all the difference. Continue reading
Enfold and Unfold
All people throughout the world are human beings: We each are human beings having a human experience. However while, at base, we are very much the same we are also very different. Between individual to individual we can observe differences, as well as identify similarities. Moreover, individuals living within the same society are more alike—perceiving and experiencing life in a similar way—than those living in very different societies. Continue reading
