Leadership Blogs

I like this old saying:

"We make a living out of what we get.

But we make a life out of what we give."

Perhaps the most valuable thing leaders can give people is time and attention.

As well as all those other things a leader can give without depleting our own resources: encouragement, support, inspiration (which means 'breathe in', like the breath of life, someone reminded me recently).

In Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed to Do, and What to Do About It, Ferdinand F. Fournies, explains one of reasons: They don’t know how to do it… and here’s why…

1) Managers assume they already know how to do it

Well, there's this button here at Hub Central that says 'Do Not Touch' and I've managed to resist it for months, but last night I thought "I wonder what happens if...." and suddenly all the lights went out and the deep continuous humming that comes from the depths of The Leadership Hub just shuddered to a halt. 'Server Error!' flashed the one remaining lit screen. Well, I've just crawled out from underneath, covered in oil and it seems to be humming again and all the lights are back on. Apologies if you tried The Hub last night and couldn't get in as the server was down.

Lifted from the Preface to this book, ' written to bridge the gap between the often simplistic popular approaches to leadershipand the more abstract theoretical approaches'. This book does that well. It is also a good general primer for those who have read one or two other books (this was my situation) and are now interested in finding out more about the bigger picture of leadership.

A slideshare summarising W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne's book Blue Ocean Strategy, including the strategy tools, assumptions and frameworks that it uses. This slideshare only references the authors right at the end and should really have done so right at the front as well. Also, attached (see below), is another slideshare from the same source that dives into (ahem, 'dives' - sorry; unintentional) more detail in showing the tools and templates you might want to use to put Blue Ocean Strategy into practice.

Is there a way, in the hub, to add a discussion thread to a list of favourites? There are a couple of posts that I would like to be able to check up on every so often, or which I am going to come back to in the future, but at the moment, I guess the only way to do this is to add them to my browser favourites.

Would also be nice to get a visual indicator if those comments had been replied to as well. 

This would count as a 'nice to have'.

Colin.

According to Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad’s book Competing For The Future, there are eight questions your senior management team should sit down with a pad and pencil and ask themselves. Actually, GH and CK cheated, as some of these questions contain more than one question. So, it’s more like ten or eleven questions in the end.

I recently wrote an update to my blog, and when I looked at the trimmed version, it was too short. It seemed that the first break would come at what would be the first paragraph marker if I was writing in Word. I tried to use the <!--break--> in the blog, but, if you take a look at the blog entry, it didn't do anything. Did I do something wrong?

Colin.

Colin's log, supplemental. 1st, an update. The recruitment group is going well, actions set out, a couple of sub groups emerging. We had some participation from outside the original group this week, it was a lot for them to take in, and indeed needed to be explained again in Czech afterwards, but the overall impression was positive. <!--break-->There are a couple of members who have very traditional views, and seem rather entrenched in their positions. We shall have to try to get them out of those trenches by showing that what we want to do is going to work.