Failing to Believe When It Matters Most
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…
Read more.Taming the Whirlwind
Organizational Transformation
In the 4 Disciplines of Execution, Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey address one of the biggest challenges in organizational life: spending too much of our time keeping the plates spinning and not having time to produce significant improvements and outcomes. They call keeping all the daily operations afloat the “whirlwind.” The term doesn’t sound like a very desirable way to spend our time. They argue the whirlwind is both necessary and keeps us from making the breakthroughs every organization desires. If the authors are correct, they raise an important question of how jobs get structured, how leaders…
Read more.Create Trust by Seeing What is Unique in the People You Lead
Leadership
Marcus Buckingham is consistent and persistent. His latest book, Love + Work, continues his core message of the last thirty years that we are unique and possess strengths that too often don’t get fully utilized in our work and our lives. He depicts an institutional approach to management that is at war with how nature operates. He argues that our brains develop through establishing trillions of connections resulting in one-of-a-kind individuals. That individuality means we will only flourish in environments that allow us to express our passions and consistently use our strengths.
Institutions and…
Read more.A Requirement for High Performance and a Time Management Trap
Leadership
The prediction that artificial intelligence will radically alter the way work gets done is the latest in the decades-spanning conversation of computers reducing workloads. However, the research so far shows technological advances have not resulted in fewer work hours. Instead, increased accessibility to information and the opportunity to be connected to colleagues and clients 24/7 have raised expectations of productivity and availability. The reason workloads remain high may have other causes than just technology.
Peter Drucker, often called the father of management, started writing about management in the 1930s and continued until his death…
Read more.I Would Love to Hear Your Story
Leadership
In almost every workshop on effective presentations, participants are encouraged to tell more stories. Of course, the stories need to be engaging; if possible both humorous and emotionally touching, and make a relevant point to the speaker’s topic. We all know that after hearing a presentation, we are likely to forget or misremember most of the stated facts but that well-told story remains. After we hear it, we find ourselves retelling the story and giving it additional life.
Less commonly do we talk about the importance of helping other people tell their own stories….
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