Thought leaders across the web

In the wake of his recent retirement, much has been written about Steve Job’s peerless leadership and how he transformed not just his company, Apple, but the way we interact and live with media and technology. However long Apple manages to stay on top, there is no doubt that Jobs, with his angular genius, relentless [...]

Sales leaders: Why it is so darn difficult to capture, leverage, and pass on the success methodology of your sales superstars? Imagine if you could help your top performers see actual, measurable benefits from their investment in a culture of collaboration. Imagine their reaction if they knew that sharing their knowledge with the rest of [...]

Getting a venture underway is often easier than keeping it going and growing. At each major stage from start-up to sustainable success, entrepreneurs face tough questions about shifting gears, making major changes, and letting go of people, partners, and products. For new businesses, inability or unwillingness to change can land them in the statistics about [...]

At the e-G8 Forum in Paris this week, the Internet was venerated as a revolutionary force changing everything. French President Sarkozy, who commissioned the forum to provide recommendations to the G8 heads of state, was extravagant in his praise, calling it a new world and the eighth continent. Internet moguls from Facebook, Google, and Groupon [...]

I can’t believe that I missed this study reported by BPS research last January.  Way cool.  It compared the performance of men working in pairs to women working pairs.  The researchers placed them under performance pressure, and varied whether they drank caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.   The “caffeinated” men performed worse, while the women performed better.  [...]

The news that Cisco is dismantling its unique structure of councils and boards to reduce bureaucracy presents a cautionary tale and an insight into the true meaning of teamwork and collaboration in organizations. Cisco’s councils and boards — a language that already suggests committees rather than goal-oriented projects — were supposed to speed things up [...]

What will it take for men to get it? In the last five years, women and minorities actually lost ground in U.S. corporate boardroom representation, despite solid evidence that greater women’s representation in corporate leadership correlates directly with improved business performance. A 2010 McKinsey study finds that across all industry sectors, companies with the most [...]

How do leaders maintain morale and momentum when members of their team are close to collapsing in frustration over the obstacles they face? Perhaps the issue is angry customers whose questions are hard to answer, or uncooperative peers from other groups who cause logjams and delay decisions. Team members might grumble and complain, or they [...]

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of the power of small wins, and following Karl Weick’s classic article, have argued in Good Boss, Bad Boss and here at HBR that big hairy goals cause people to freak-out and freeze-up if they aren’t broken down into smaller stepping stones. Small [...]

About 11,000 business books a year are published. Most of them aren’t worth reading, either because you’ve heard it all before, they are badly written, not especially useful, and — perhaps the most common flaw — they are just no fun to read.  But, even though they are business books, there are always a few [...]