Patrick Lencioni has got it right in his guest column in Business Week recently: There's no substitute for taking an active interest in the lives of your employees. The MBWO - "managment by walking around" theory has always been popular in these pages as a simple, no-cost tool to stay…
I mentioned here before about the regular Sunday NY Times feature called the Corner Office, which summarizes conversations with various CEO’s about leadership, lessons learned, interviewing techniques, etc.
Here are 4 key lessons.
Sunday’s column interviewed Lawrence Kellner, CEO of Continental Airlines, who reaffirmed several points emphasized on this blog.
First, it IS critical that you have the right people on the bus and in the right seats. Leaders are dependent upon many others to fulfill their responsibilities, so if you haven’t focused on strengthening your leadership team to the maximum extent possible, you’re simply extending your INability to get things done.
Kellner also emphasizes how critical it is to provide regular, unbiased feedback to your people all along the way. (more…)
Thoughtful readers of this blog will see that Alan Mullaly's interview in the NY Times Corner Office column sounds like it's taken directly from work published by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of P&G, and Peter Drucker, on The Role of the CEO. It's a solid summary, though, about the critical…
The NY Times runs a regular feature on Sundays entitled The Corner Office, which summarizes conversations with various CEO's on the topic of Leadership.There is a consistent theme relating to hiring philosophy, feedback experiences and other "lessons learned" in this series of articles.In this week's interview with Deborah Dunsire, M.D.,…
You've heard much of it here before ... Take Action, Plan Carefully ... so take a minute to reinforce that mantra by reading a short article from the Harvard Business web site from Jeff Stibel, brain scientist and entrepreneur.As we know, small businesses employ more than half of our private…
The New York Times feature, The Corner Office, generally provides practical advice from CEO’s. This week’s interview with Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Air Lines, stresses the value of communication and his belief … correctly, I would say … that communication skills are more important than ever with the advent of the Internet and the myriad ways that communication takes place with our professional constituents. Not a PowerPoint slide deck either. Complete sentences.
He also offers his insights about recruiting and interviewing techniques (more…)
Business Week summarized a book entitled Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. It's a practical guide to challenging conversations in which you're required to deliver bad news, major screw-ups and other sensitive matters.
John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, was interviewed in the NY Times and mentioned the laminated card he keeps in his wallet. It comes from a speech John W. Gardner delivered to the Hawaii Executive Conference in Kona, Hawaii, in April 1993 and published in Stanford, an independent publication of…
Business Week carries a fresh look at The Peter Principle, the seminal work that coined the phrase about people being promoted to their "level of incompetence". Still a worthy concept for evaluating talent and making sure that your greatest salesman doesn't become a big failure as a sales manager.