Leadership
Patrick Lencioni’s classic fable, Death by Meetings, captures all the challenges of meetings and provides some very practical solutions. In the story’s big climax, the team conducts a highly engaging and productive meeting when the stakes are high. The result is choosing one option over another and moving towards an action plan. One of the complaints about meetings is that firm decisions are seldom reached and everyone leaves the meeting either frustrated or with unclear assumptions about what was decided.
In Lencioni’s example, the team conducted research and identified two attractive but opposing options….
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Leadership
Watching your favorite team‘s coach discuss their failures after a loss in a game they were expected to win is painful but also insightful. In sports, there is a clear start and finish as well as a declared winner. The losing coach cannot deny his team’s defeat. In most cases, losing coaches seem a bit surprised at their team’s less-than-desired performance. It is not uncommon to hear a coach say, “We had a really good practice the day before the game” or “I thought the team was mentally and emotionally prepared to compete.” Often, a particular aspect of the…
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Leadership
What if you discovered you had signed up to run a race with no finish line? Your questions about the length – “5K?”, “10k?”, “40 yards?” are all met with silence. You are simply told that once the whistle blows, you should just keep running. You also discover there is no explicit reward for winning or even finishing the race. Most likely, you would decide this is not what you signed up for, it sounds incredibly stupid, and decide to withdraw. Unfortunately, you discover that is not an option.
While this may sound like some version of The Hunger Games,…
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Leadership
Innovative technologies create new opportunities requiring different strategies. They often create divergent perspectives as people differ on how these breakthroughs should be applied. The pace or trajectory of the technology development also plays a critical role in how people view the rollout of new approaches. In the Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell chronicles how that debate played out with the introduction of military air power, especially leading up to and during World War II.
Gladwell explores the mindsets that emerged as military leaders considered how best to use the ability to drop bombs from the air, rather…
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Leadership
The title of Jonathan Freedland’s recent book, The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, holds out the promise of an uplifting ending. While its subject, Walter Rosenberg, did manage to escape from the Auschwitz extermination camp, what happened afterward serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when the truth is too terrible to believe.
Unable to escape to the West when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, Rosenberg was forced into almost two years of captivity where he saw thousands of Jews being marched off to gas chambers. When…
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