Articles
Some executives believe that if they set aside a few hours each week for uninterrupted thinking, they will have more and better strategic ideas. This is not only wishful thinking, it’s backward thinking.
Many top business schools — Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, Kellogg, to cite a few — have overhauled their MBA curricula in recent years. Among the most popular changes is increasing ‘leadership’ learning. What’s driving this trend?
On a scale of one to five, how important is having a good network to your ability to accomplish your goals? When I ask my executive students this question, most of them answer in the fours and fives. Even the most naive of them agree that, like it or not, relationships hold the key to both their current capacity and future success.
In this age of authentic leadership, originality is at a premium, and people perceive imitation as more fakery than flattery. The thing is, authenticity itself has become a performance — and an exercise in conformity.
Novices emulate favorite bosses and colleagues in an effort to look and talk as if they know what they are doing — even when they have no clue. But this natural — and efficient — learning process tends to break down as people gain experience and stature.
Herminia on Arnaud Montebourg’s business school reinvention and other comebacks.
Why feeling like a fake can be a sign of growth.
The pendulum seems to be swinging away from egocentric, inspirational stagecraft. It used to be that calling someone a ‘good manager’ was to damn with faint praise. But we may have had a surfeit of charisma and be ready for some nuts-and-bolts leadership.