Leadership Blogs

In Tom Peters’ book, Talent, he talks about the power of powerlessness. Often times we believe we can’t do something because we don’t have the power. Tom reminds us that “getting things done is not about formal power or rank. It is ultimately about passion, imagination, and persistence.” To read more, click here.

There's a letter in today's FT concerning music and marketing.

 Attached below

 Peter

We are not all born natural and effective thinkers but to be good leaders we need to develop how to be effective thinkers. This site is worth a look. it is certainly worth registering and taking the first 10 lessons. Kate

http://www.schoolofthinking.org/

As an organisation, my team largely achieved all of their objectives in 2007.

So many projects that seek to drive quality initiatives and continuous improvement fail.   If you look back over the past decade or so there have been many great initiatives and systems launched from Quality Circles to more rigorous systems such as Demming’s approach and of more recent times Six Sigma.    Hundreds of companies have embarked on such projects only to see them ‘wither and die’.

A podcast from the London Business School that makes us step back and think about the meaning of leadership. Faculty from LBS throw up some challenging thoughts such as how our views of leadership are formed by archetypes, myths and legends, such as "The journey of the hero." "What does leadership mean or represent for you?" says the LBS faculty member here before delving into Ernest Shackleton to represent the hero's journey, and then looking at Shrek, Star Wars and Jerry Maguire!

Professor Gary Hamel says Maslow's well-known hierarchy of needs is not enough to analyse how we work anymore. In this podcast for the Times Online, strategist and author of The Future of Management, Professor Gary Hamel, explains how we need a hierarchy of human capability.

Here's the existing stack of human capability that Hamel says most management is based on:

Intellect

Diligence

Obedience

Well, I'm off to the workforce engagement exercise on Monday.  I've decided to just be as positive as possible.  I believe this will allow me to get something out of it and maybe open me up to understanding why they do the two groups (managers and everyone else) the way they do.  I've read through the materials that are supposed to prepare me for the experience and they were pretty interesting so I'm hoping I will learn a lot.  Hopefully stuff I can apply directly to my team and other teams around me.  If not, it's at a pretty nice hotel and the food and drink are f

My publisher Capstone likes making these little viral videos to promote their books. I quite like this one, for a new book on business talk by Kevin Duncan.  

Two stonecutters were asked what they were doing.
The first said, "I'm cutting this stone into blocks."
The second replied, "I'm on a team that's building a catherdral."
* Anonymous