The latest Business Resources (Articles, Book Reviews, Blog)
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Articles
Leadership - Part I
The situation for Leadership Emergence
By David S. Gjestland, Ph.D.
© Copyright 1982 - 2011, Reproduced with permission
I am honored and pleased to introduce David S. Gjestland to the Executive Leader Coach followers. I've known David for several years now and we've often discussed the state of "Leadership" in the world these days. David was kind enough to allow us access to his seminal work on Leadership and it is re-produced here with his permission. I know you will enjoy this foundational view on Leadership and how it can be used to understand some of what we are dealing with today. Here is Part I.
Leadership; What an enigma!
Introduction:
Leadership: what an enigma! The phenomenon has fascinated scholars and laymen alike for centuries. Indeed, what is a leader? What distinguishes leaders from others? What if anything do all manner of leaders have in common? These are but a few of the queries that arise concerning the ominous often threatening and intimidating but sometimes inspiring power of leadership.
The importance of understanding leadership hardly needs reiteration, particularly in view of its extended range of impact and its frequent potential for long-term consequences. Although a vast body of work has been written about the subject most of that literature has been provided by business or management specialists, by sociologists, social psychologists and other scholars. However, almost without exception these works have been marred by at least one overriding failing: the tendency to assume leadership only occurs after someone has ascended to a formal position of power/authority. Further, many of these studies have been chiefly concerned with matters pertaining to “efficiency” or “motivation of employees” and similar factors. It is hardly surprising therefore to find that misconceptions about the nature of leadership abound. While many other short-comings no doubt plague leadership studies, the concern here is not with these shortcomings: rather it is to discover what the barest minimum requirements for leadership might be.
Inevitabilities
By Bill Black
Owners begin thinking about the Exit Planning process when two streams of thought begin to converge. The first stream is a feeling that you want to do something besides go to work everyday-either you would like to be someplace else-doing something else-or you simply no longer get the same kick out of doing what you are doing.
The second stream is the general awareness that you are either approaching financial independence, or making significant strides toward reaching that goal, or can achieve financial independence by selling your business. When these two streams converge, thoughts flow inevitably towards exiting the business. Hopefully, when that happens, your Exit Plan is in place and you are actually able to leave the business when you want to. That, in a nutshell, is the purpose of Exit Planning-to leave your business on your terms and on your schedule.
What kind of "Exit Plan" allows a business owner to leave her business in style? And, just how is one created?
Of course, plans vary but, properly crafted, each Exit Plan has several common elements or is the result of a proven step-by-step process. Owners often best grasp these elements, or steps, when framed as questions.
Keeping Company Secrets
By Jeffrey Wertheimer and
Brandon Sylvia
Your company’s director of product development, top salesperson, or chief financial officer has just decided to accept a position with your biggest competitor. He just gave his four-week notice – leaving plenty of time to download the company’s customer lists, financial statements, and new product information before starting his new job. Much of this information is already loaded onto his company-owned laptop, but one early-morning trip to the office enables him to download the remaining data he wants to take to with him. For most small- and medium-sized businesses, the security systems in place are insufficient to prevent this sort of theft, making such actions almost inevitable. The good news is that with a few relatively inexpensive precautions, the company may be able to significantly limit the damage this employee can cause with the improperly obtained information.
The crux of the problem is that once an employee becomes an ex-employee, the company’s leverage over him is limited, and it becomes difficult to dissuade him from his course of action. At that point, the employer’s best recourse is often trade secret laws, which can provide powerful protection for properly protected proprietary information. However, in order for these trade secret laws to be effective, the company must have taken certain steps to protect the information it considers to be a trade secret. The purpose of this article is to explain, in general terms, what type of information may constitute a trade secret, and second, to detail steps that can be taken to protect that information.
Why Finding the Best Candidate Can Still Feel Like
Searching For a Needle in a Haystack
By Kira Bruno, President FORTIS Resource Partners, December 7, 2009
Where are all the good people? Despite the overwhelming number of unemployed applicants, finding the best candidate is still difficult for many companies.
Almost half of the managers surveyed by the 2009 Employment Dynamics and Growth Expectations report revealed that a shortage in top talent is their biggest hiring challenge.
Avoiding the pitfalls of the Hiring Process
Jeff Wertheimer and Brandon Sylvia are labor attorneys at Rutan & Tucker. The have graciously provided the following article. "The hiring of employees is an exciting stage in the growth of any business. Unfortunately, this process is fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. Various state and federal laws regulate the inquiries an employer may make of an applicant during the application process, the interview, and after a job offer has been made (such as background checks or medical exams). The complexity of these laws is compounded by the fact that some questions can only be properly asked at certain stages of the hiring process. Additionally, California allows employers to be held liable for negligent hiring – i.e., hiring an individual who the employer knew or should have known posed a danger to others."
An Economy Driven Sales Reset
By Dave Kinnear
It is my opinion that the present economic situation is best described as a “reset in values” rather than arguing over whether or not it is a “recession” or “depression.” We may well see a generation of people whose values are redefined by their experiences during these times much as we have seen the depression generation’s values. Read More . . .
Great Business Partnerships and How to Create Them
by Barri Carian
“It has become increasingly difficult to achieve great success in today’s complex business environment by forging ahead on your own.” When I wrote that sentence in 1999, partnerships and strategic alliances were starting to gain traction as viable business models. Very little was written on the subject other than the legal and tax aspects. It was extremely difficult to find data showing how many business enterprises were partnerships, what the success rate was, and the factors contributing to success and failure of these collaborations. Today, ten years later, it still is. Read More . . .
Book Reviews
What was 2011's reading list like?
Several of my colleagues have asked what I've been reading this past year. Well, a whole bunch of stuff. Some of the books have reviews here and on Amazon, some only on Amazon, some only a mention on LinkedIn. In order to answer the question though, here is a link to most of the books I read in 2011. Enjoy!
The Next Convergence, by Michael Spence
The future of economic growth in a multispeed world. By Michael Spence One of the small joys I have in life is to attend seminars and lectures that not only inform but allow me to meet the people doing the research and forming the theories. Michael Spence, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, spoke at a Drucker Forum recently and I was able to attend. He definitely has his mind wrapped around the very complex issue of global economics and the roles played by the developed versus the developing economies. They are interdependent roles to be sure.
His presentation (a question and answer format where he was interviewed by James Flanigan, business columnist for the New York Times) was riveting and insightful. As he made clear at the presentation and again in his book, "The huge asymmetries between advanced and developing countries have not disappeared, but they are declining, and the pattern for the first time in 250 years is convergence rather than divergence." This of course has equally huge consequences for the developed countries. We will have to continue to adjust and find our way in the global economy.
The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer
We cannot separate human behavior from human biology. That much seems clear even to the lay person. Michael Shermer manages to shed even more light on that view of how things come to be accepted by individuals as "truth." The brain, as Shermer demonstrates, "is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning."
We see this time and time again in business. Executives get then largely ignore data including product life cycle data that might greatly influence how your brand is affected. Many of us have also experienced the way some folks might look at the same data, document and/or specification and draw exactly the opposite conclusion. "Thus," says Shermer, "smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons." Our brains are belief engines, evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature, "hard" data and anecdotal data we gather from the physical world. Shermer goes so far as to state that "There is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science."
Brain Rules by John Medina, M.D.
John Medina has pulled together all the verified scientific data (repeatable experimentation, trials, etc.) on how our brains “work” to process our sensory inputs and remember what we’ve experienced. He readily admits that this is an on-going study that will be augmented as we discover new ways the brain works and evolves.
Medina has organized the pertinent findings into what he calls “12 Brain Rules.” The hard cover version of the book (available in Kindle and paperback as well) comes with a DVD comprising videos of the meat of the brain rules. There is also a very robust website that provides support data. Briefly, Medina’s rules (or Principles) are . . .
Getting Naked by Patrick Lencioni
Lencioni breaks the topic of building customer loyalty for those of us in the consulting/mentoring business into shedding the three fears. The first fear is losing the business, the second is being embarrassed and the third fear is of feeling inferior. Almost any entrepreneur can relate to these fears and I think that consultants, coaches, mentors and advisors even more so. Since Lencioni is telling the story of his own consulting business, this fable rings true to my experience as a consultant and business advisor.
Accelerate: High Leverage Leadersip for Today's World by Suzanne Mayo Frindt & Dwight Frindt
I have the honor and privilege of knowing and working with the authors of Accelerate. They dedicate their passion and their lives to developing strong leaders throughout the world. They have written a leadership manual that will, I’m sure, find its way onto every true leader’s bookshelf.
Their first intention in writing the book is for the reader to come to understand how to sustainably expand his/her reach and impact. Perhaps more importantly, one learns how to enroll and enlist other leaders so that the teams they form reach levels of performance and impact not thought possible. Leaders who understand the principles outlined in this book will find whole new levels of self-expression, effectiveness and creativity.
Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King, & Halee Fischer-Wright
Tribal Leadership is perhaps the most significant leadership development book I’ve read this year. Logan, King and Fischer-Wright have written an outstanding book tracing the path of organizational and leadership excellence through an understanding of completion with past events and experiences. They explain the theory of Tribal Stages in the organization and how people move through them.
The authors break personal, organizational and leadership into five Tribal Stages, simply labeled 1 through 5. Organizations comprise small towns or Tribes. Like towns, the people in the tribe are all different, but they have more in common than not. Tribes help people survive the unknown. “Tribal Leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe—or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture.” That is how Tribal Leadership works: “the leader upgrades the tribe as the tribe embraces the leader. Tribes and leaders create each other.”
The Three Laws of Performance, by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan have written a book that changes the game when it comes to taking your company to the next level. They have done so by pointing out how to clear the past from defining your future and instead allowing you to create the future you desire. Sounds a bit “over the top” and it is not. If we as business leaders can take our companies through this long and difficult process, then we have the opportunity to finally move beyond the normal company dysfunction and have everyone on the same page.
Slay the E-mail Monster, by Lynn Coffman and Michael Valentine
There is much said about productivity improvement these days. Some say that we are going through a false sense of productivity improvement because workers are afraid to not work extra hard when they observe their colleagues being let go, and friends who have been out of work for more than a year. So they knuckle down and do all that extra work at home, long hours at the office and are on 24/7/365 due to their smart phone connectivity.
How the Mighty Fall, by Jim Collins
The silent creep of impending doom is the title Collins chose for the first chapter in this excellent review of how companies go astray. As usual, Collins did an in depth research to discover why companies fail and how that failure is shaped. He determined that there are five stages of decline for an organization:
- Stage 1 is characterized by hubris born of success
- Stage 2 is marked by undisciplined pursuit of more
- Stage 3 is the peak of ascendancy and characterized by denial of risk and peril
- Stage 4 begins the precipitous decline with the organization grasping for salvation
- Stage 5 is the final capitulation to being irrelevant or accepting death
e-Riches 2.0 by Scott Fox
Normally, I don't win things when there are drawings for prizes. The day I attended the Technology Council of Southern California for a seminar on Internet Marketing was an exception. I thoroughly enjoyed the seminar given by Mr. Scott Fox, and threw my business card in the hat for a drawing. As luck would have it, I won an autographed copy of his latest book, e-Riches 2.0. That was definitely my lucky day.
Fox makes it abundantly clear that internet marketing is in our future if we expect to be in business. More importantly, he shares his experience in the field of Internet Marketing where he has been very successful. He give practical and clear advice for the layperson and avoids the “geek speak” to which we are often subjected by those who wish to impress us and separate us from some of our profits. Read the complete review . . .
Drive, by Daniel Pink
Daniel Pink has hit this one out of the park, again! Finally, someone has connected the dots on motivation, and why our system doesn't work. We’ve been starring at those dots for decades. Pink point out that, for all practical purposes, management hasn’t changed in a 100 years. Leaders and managers cannot motivate employees; not really. People motivate themselves, it’s internal. Leaders and managers can only inspire people and provide an environment that allows them the full range of intrinsic motivation wherever possible. Read More . . .
More reviews
The Imposter? by Kip Kreiling
First, Best or Different by John Bradley Jackson
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
Bounce by Keith McFarland
Reframing Change, by Jean Kantambu Latting and V. Jean Ramsey
Plunder, By Steven Greenhut
Friends With Benefits, By Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo
The Dream Manager, By Matthew Kelly
Creating Competitive Advantage, By Jaynie L. Smith
The Deciding Factor, By Larry Rosenberger and John Nash with Ann Graham
Cost Recovery, By Richard B. Lanza
Find Loss Revenue, By various authors
The Triple Bottom Line, By Anderw Savitz
Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs, By Berman and Knight
How to Measure Anything, By Douglas Hubbard
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, By Marshall Goldsmith