One aspect of leadership that is often overlooked in the rush to achieve quarterly or year-end results is succession. The myopia that can affect even the most experienced leaders can have a significant impact not only on personal, divisional or even company-wide performance — I believe it has the potential to affect entire industries.
Now, when [...]

Bad sight
Originally uploaded by rore
Are we, as business leaders, being driven to make decisions we might not otherwise make? What I mean by this is, are businesses, especially those that participate in the capital markets, making decisions that address short-term financial performance at the expense of looking at the long-term best interests of the company?
With [...]

My post on Comfortable Misery seems to have struck a chord with a number of people. Chris Young connects the impact that comfortable misery has not only on the individual but also on the company that they work for. Chas points out that it pays to do work that you love and Gattosan asks us [...]

mirror, mirror
Originally uploaded by Emu stardust
Tom Davenport writes a blog over at Harvard Business Online, called The Next Big Thing. His latest post talks about the Wall Street Journal’s Top 50 Business Gurus that I wrote about here, and responds to the criticism around the lack of women represented in the list. And while this [...]

I read an interesting quote today that highlights just how much progress we have made in our collective thinking about women in leadership positions. The quote, from a rather interesting source was in regard to the consideration of the appointment of a woman to the Supreme Court of the United States. The respondent, our 37th [...]

misery at work
Originally uploaded by milktummy
When it comes to jobs, far too many people are in a state of comfortable misery. This is the state wherein, according to Daniel Johnston’s book Lessons for Living, “you are miserable, but you have gotten used to it.”
We all know the feeling of sticking with something beyond its productive [...]

Tom Davenport recently published a list of the Top 50 business gurus for the Wall Street Journal. The Top 5, measured in terms of Google hits, media mentions and academic citations were:

Gary Hamel – leading strategy guru and author of Leading the Revolution
Thomas L Friedman – New York Times columnist and author of The World [...]

Let the bidding begin. . .
Originally uploaded by MarSea
According to the Department of Labor, women represent 46% of the labor force. Forty percent of women work in management, and interestingly, women accounted for 51% of all workers in the high-paying management, professional, and related occupations. However, at senior and executive levels the situation does [...]

This past week, I had the good fortune to attend the 19th Annual Conference of The Professional BusinessWomen of California conference. According to the organization, “The annual conference is PBWC’s main forum for women leaders to mentor and role model, foster upward career mobility and gain instant access to a large network of other [...]