Four longtime Yahoo board members, including the chairman, are leaving the company. In this one move, Yahoo is trying to make a clean break from the past — signaling that they are primed to reboot. It’s a much-needed and long-overdue step on the path to shifting trajectories. The Pattern of Failing Organizations Larger organizations follow [...]
Archive | Culture & Leadership
Collaboration — the ability to co-labor — towards a shared goal is a purposeful way of engaging many people and their ideas to achieve a shared vision.
What Barack Obama Could Learn from Vivek Wadhwa
Ever since the presidential election of 2008, I’ve been getting progressively mad about something. I got enthralled with an administration that wanted to connect with people in the social era to create change. Perhaps unrealistically, I had this hope it would carry beyond the election cycle. I knew it wouldn’t be easy but I thought [...]
8 Dangers of Collaboration
Most of what is written about collaboration is positive. Even hip. Collaboration is championed enthusiastically by the Enterprise 2.0 experts, as well as leading thinkers like Don Tapscott as the crucial approach for the 21st century. Collaboration creates once-elusive “buy-in, or “empowerment”, improves problem solving, increases creativity, is key to innovation at companies like Legos, [...]
Feedback
Veins popping. Breathing shallow. Challenges ahead. Lots of opposition. No easy paths to score. You so want to win. But nothing is breaking your way. If this were a game, you would know there’s a time to regroup coming soon. At half-time, you’ll have some breathing room, get a little respite, your coach will possibly [...]
Who You Are Is What You Make
Sharing another talk I’ve recently done on innovation and igniting performance inside our firms. Innovations like pyramids, paper, gunpowder and silicon are the direct result of the cultures that introduced them — empire, nation-state, kingdom, democracy, theocracy, technocracy, etc. Innovation happens when human beings have a series of ideas together that they manifest into something [...]
The Too Short Meeting
I’m about to head off to a meeting that I’m sure will be too short. Too short as in not enough time to actually discuss, deliberate, and resolve conflicts within the many ideas that could be generated. Too short to allow people to feel heard. Too-short to explore nuances. Too short for everyone to “get” [...]
Redesigning Leadership
This last year, I’ve felt burnt out on business books. I read enough of them and, frankly, I find myself less and less motivated to do so. I used to take 3-4 of them on every personal holiday and devour them. But I find myself less and less interested. Last weekend, as an example, I [...]
Must-Read Weekend Reading
It’s Only A Crisis If You’re A King. A lot of people keeping using the word “crisis” to describe our macro economic, social, political changes. This essayist, Anand Giridharadas, whom I’ve written of before, has written a piece around this that captures an interpretation I believe in. ” [What we’re experiencing is a] shift in [...]
Must Read Weekend Reading
Seems like most of the content we find online starts with a list as in 6 ways to do X, or 5 ways to improve Y. Curating the more thoughtful pieces worth reading in full is what this post theme of must-read work is all about. This week’s assortment has a very corporate theme. Must [...]
Is Sharing a Good Idea?
A good friend of mine, Terri Griffith, lives in these two divergent worlds: First, she’s an expert and enthusiast in the enterprise 2.0 / collaboration workspace. Second, she’s a professor (she has a Ph.D.), yet no one has ever called educational institutions the hotbed of collaboration… She’s got a new book coming out this week: [...]