Leadership Books: May 2008

Here's a look of some of the best leadership books to be released in May.

  It's Our Ship: The No-Nonsense Guide to Leadership by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff
  Good Guys and Bad Guys: Behind the Scenes with the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business (and Everything in Between) by Joe Nocera
  Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke--the Big Idea That's Already Transforming the Way We Work by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson
  The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price
  A Global Life: My Journey among Rich and Poor, from Wall Street to the World Bank by James D. Wolfensohn

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:58 AM
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How To Have Just Enough Anxiety

Robert Rosen has written an excellent book on an issue we all deal with—anxiety. It’s not a bad thing, but “if you let it overwhelm you, it will turn to panic. If you deny or run from it, you will become complacent.” Rosen believes that our problem in dealing with anxiety stems from faulty thinking. In Just Enough Anxiety, he writes, “It goes something like this: Change and uncertainty make me anxious. Anxiety is bad, a sign of weakness. Therefore, I have to avoid change and uncertainty. I have to do whatever I can to avoid anxiety.”

Balance comes from a right attitude and a proper perspective. Dealing with anxiety is no different.

The success of great leaders is all about creating the right level of anxiety for growth and performance. It is their uncommon ability to create just enough tension—within themselves and their organizations—that unleashes the human energy that drives powerful leadership, accelerated growth, and winning companies.

What’s wrong with having too much or too little anxiety?

RR: Too much anxiety comes from negative thinking. When we feel too much anxiety, we attack change. We become combative or controlling as we try to ease the pain we feel. Too little anxiety is grounded in contentment. When we feel too little anxiety, we avoid change. We value the status quo and believe everything will be okay as long as everything stays the same. If your company is going through tough times like a bad economy or a merger, you definitely don’t want too little anxiety.

What exactly is “just enough anxiety”?

RR: The right level of anxiety gives individuals and organizations an emotional charge that helps us thrive in an uncertain world. As we allow ourselves to experience anxiety as our natural response to change, and learn to modulate it, we’re able to live in the world as it is instead of struggling to make it what we want it to be. And as we get better at living with just enough anxiety, it becomes the energy that drives us forward, stretches us, and challenges us to be better tomorrow than we are today.

How can leaders manage anxiety instead of letting it manage them?

RR: It starts with self awareness. Leaders who understand what makes them anxious are better able to increase or decrease their anxiety, as needed to create just enough. But, more than that, it has to do with how they relate to change and uncertainty. By admitting what they can and can’t control, they’re able to take charge of their lives while remaining open to the unexpected. They’re at home in uncharted territory. Instead of seeing anxiety as the enemy, they recognize it as their natural companion on the path of change.


Rosen has placed on his web site a questionnaire to help you determine if you are a Just Enough Anxiety Leader.
Download a PDF of chapter 1: It's Time To Evolve

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:30 AM
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Maxwell’s Lessons Learned From a Lifetime of Leading

In his latest book, Leadership Gold, John Maxwell looks back on 60 years and distills what he has learned about leadership to date. And he stresses that he is still learning. It contains 26 important lessons about leadership and human relationships that are well worth reviewing. It’s a mentoring-style book. He says that leadership can be learned by anyone but it’s not easy. Leadership is demanding and complex. He writes:

Leadership is the willingness to put oneself at risk.
Leadership is the passion to make a difference with others.
Leadership is being dissatisfied with the current reality.
Leadership is taking responsibility while others are making excuses.
Leadership is seeing the possibilities in a situation while others are seeing the limitations.
Leadership is the readiness to stand out in a crowd.
Leadership is an open mind and an open heart.
Leadership is the ability to submerge your ego for the sake of what is best.
Leadership is evoking in others the capacity to dream.
Leadership is inspiring others with a vision of what they can contribute.
Leadership is the power of one harnessing the power of many.
Leadership is your heart speaking to the hearts of others.
Leadership is the integration of heart, head, and soul.
Leadership is the capacity to care, and in caring, to liberate the ideas, energy, and capacities of others.
Leadership is the dream made reality.
Leadership is above all, courageous.

The list makes a good yardstick.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:35 AM
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Leadership Books: April 2008

  Leadership Gold: Lessons I've Learned from a Lifetime of Leading by John C. Maxwell
  The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan
  Leadership the Hard Way: Why Leadership Can't Be Taught - And How You Can Learn It Anyway by Dov Frohman with Robert Howard
  Relevance: Hitting Your Goals by Knowing What Matters by David Apgar
  Beyond Ego: Influential Leadership Starts Within by Art Horn

Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:04 AM
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Making the Impossible Possible

Samuel Johnson once wrote, “The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” This statement seems to define Bill Strickland’s life. Make the Impossible Possible is an engaging, inspirational book written with humility and passion.

Bill Strickland’s life changed, when as a boy in a Pittsburgh ghetto, a teacher took the time to show him that he mattered and allowed him to see himself in a new way. (An integral part of any leader’s job.) As a result, he became open to opportunities and created at 19 what became the Manchester-Bidwell Center, the now famous arts-education and job-training center for disadvantaged kids and adults. This extraordinary school was built on Strickland’s belief that “all of us have the potential to make our dreams come true, and that one of the greatest obstacles blocking us from realizing that potential is that we believe, or are told, that things we want most passionately are impractical, unrealistic, or somehow beyond our reach.” He convincingly demonstrates his belief that:

Each one of us, no matter who our parents are, where we live, how much education we have, or what kinds of connections, abilities, and opportunities life may have offered us, has the potential to shape our lives in ways that will bring us the meaning, purpose, and success we long for….I want everyone who comes to this book, no matter what their age or accomplishments or the circumstances of their lives, to rethink their assumptions about what is and isn’t possible in their lives, and to convince themselves that they have not only the right but also the responsibility, and the capacity, to dream big and to make those dreams come true.

Strickland narrates his successes and failures, obstacles and opportunities, his thinking and rethinking, as he went about to create the success he has achieved. It’s a fascinating story. While he has dedicated his life to helping other people, he denies the do-gooder label. He writes, “I didn’t do any of it out of selflessness. I did it to be myself. I did it to enrich my own life, to deepen the quality and meaning of my own experience. I did it because it was a part of what I had to do if I genuinely wanted to be me.”

How often have we been burdened by self-defeating assumptions? Strickland writes that “once we accept the idea that poverty is, essentially, the acceptance of meager possibility, we can’t deny that all of us are in some fashion poor. We all suffer some form of poverty—poverty of imagination, or courage, or vision, or will. We allow ourselves to be limited by our fears—fear of failure, fear of change, fear of being criticized or of looking like a fool.”

This isn’t another see-what-I-did self-help book. It’s a book that invites introspection. Read it and learn from his experience and thinking.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:41 PM
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In Leadership, Context Is Everything

In leadership, context is everything. As we have said before, leadership hasn’t changed—the context we operate in has changed. Russell Palmer’s book Ultimate Leadership is on target. He believes that “the principles of leadership can be effective in a wide variety of situations, but often they need to be applied in a very different manner depending on the circumstances and the constituent groups involved.”

This of course, makes perfect sense, but what makes no sense is how often it isn’t applied. We tend to plow along the way we have always done things without regard to our current situation. Palmer writes, “Success or failure can often depend on modifying leadership styles to suit a different context.”

While there is no single style of leadership that works in every situation, there are basic principles of leadership that apply universally. Palmer explains some of those principles such as integrity, execution, good judgment, innovation, communication and people skills among others.

The core of the book provides practical, well-heeled advice on applying basic leadership principles in a variety of contexts. He discusses execution and the pros and cons of specific contexts such as top down, crisis leadership, partnership of peers, academic, entrepreneurial organizations, non-profits, government, and the military.

He includes a great deal of his personal experience and interviews with thoughtful people in each of these areas. When leading “partners and peers who have relatively narrow specializations,” Palmer points out, “leaders need a broad view. In other words, they must be generalists who know a good deal about many things. One of the problems in today’s society is that we develop more and more people with narrowly specialized knowledge…. The best subject from an educational standpoint for a leader is the study of history. Reading biographies is also particularly helpful…. The best education, for instance, for a businessperson is a strong liberal arts undergraduate program and then a graduate business program.”

In the end, he concludes, it’s all about people.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:12 PM
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Good Followers Make the Best Leaders

In case you didn’t know it by now, let me just say, followership is the crucible of leadership. There is no better way to learn leadership than by being under someone else—leading from the second chair. As ironic as that may sound, it’s true. Learning to lead under someone else provides you with the opportunity (the necessity) to learn to lead without coercion. You learn to let your leadership speak for itself—authentically.

Yet we still, as Barbara Kellerman states in her important new book, Followership, overestimate the importance of leadership and underestimate the importance of followership. She argues that, “thinking leadership without thinking followership is not merely misleading, it is mistaken.” Why? The context of leadership has changed.

First, leaders have been demystified, in part by modern media, which demands grist for its mill 24/7; and in part by the modern culture, in which figures of authority are no longer exalted or even so much respected. Second, because the line between the leader and the led has been blurred, the led have been emboldened.

She points out that much of this is cyclical. I would agree. It’s hard for human beings to find balance. Consequently, we continually find ourselves reacting to someone else’s excessive behavior.

While we have spent a great deal of time distinguishing between types of leaders, we have not done the same with followers. Kellerman spends a good portion of the book explaining followers. She describes four types: Bystanders, Participants, Activists, and Diehards. She writes: “Followers are us. This does not, of course, mean that all of us follow all of the time—sometimes we lead. But all of us follow some of the time. It’s the human condition.”

She advocates that followers not try to become something else, but more importantly that they change their response to their rank, their response to their superiors and to the situation at hand. She emphasizes:

• Followers constitute a group that, although amorphous, nevertheless has members with interests in common.
• While followers by definition lack authority, at least in relation to their superiors, they do not by definition lack power and influence.
• Followers can be agents of change.
• Followers ought to support good leadership and thwart bad leadership.
• Followers who do something are nearly always preferred to followers who do nothing.
• Followers can create change by circumventing their leaders and joining with other followers instead.

What we need now is a Followership Part 2, where it is explained to followers just how one should follow. We do a disservice to followers – as we have with leaders – by requiring no character development and self-discipline. When we learn to develop better followers, we will get better leaders.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:06 AM
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Leadership Books: March 2008

Here's a look of some of the best leadership books to be released in March.

  Five Future Strategies You Need Right Now (Memo to the CEO) by George Stalk with John Butman
  Outsmart! How to Do What Your Competitors Can't: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by James Champy
  The Breakthrough Imperative: How the Best Managers Get Outstanding Results by Mark Gottfredson and Steve Schaubert
  The Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable by Robert H. Thompson
  Rocking the Boat: How to Effect Change Without Making Trouble by Debra E. Meyerson

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:57 PM
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Leadership Books: February 2008

Here's a look of some of the best leadership books to be released in February.

  Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders by Barbara Kellerman
  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
  Myself and Other More Important Matters by Charles B. Handy
  The Powers to Lead: Soft, Hard, and Smart by Joseph S. Nye
  Why Should the Boss Listen to You? The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor by James E. Lukaszewski

Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:05 AM
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Leadership Books: January 2008

Here's a look of some of the best leadership books to be released in January.

  Bounce! Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success by Barry J. Moltz
  Ultimate Leadership: Winning Execution Strategies for Your Situation by Russell E. Palmer
  Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds
  Leadership Lessons: 10 Keys to Success in Life and Business by Greg J. Swartz
  It Starts With One: Changing Individuals Changes Organizations by J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen

Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:22 AM
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Best Leadership Books of 2007

Our selection for the best leadership books published in 2007 are listed below.

Learning for the successful person, is a lifelong journey. No book or conference is an end in itself. They should encourage you to dig deeper and more often.

These titles do not necessarily represent popularity in terms of numbers of books sold. In a few cases they did not get the recognition they deserved. But all of the titles selected will contain ideas relevant and compelling to leaders at all levels and contexts.

The authors all addressed the question, “How can I create the environment and perform in a way that leads to consistently successful outcomes?” But more than that, they deal with the real success of a leader: the creating of a leadership economy if you will—a place where leaders are developed at all levels and in all areas of life. These books will help you on your journey.

True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership by Bill George and Peter Sims

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter

How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business (and in Life) by Dov L. Seidman

Measure of a Leader by Aubrey C. Daniels and James E. Daniels

Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls by Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis

The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow by Michael Maccoby

The Future of Management by Gary Hamel

egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability) by David Marcum and Steven Smith

Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner

Leaders at All Levels: Deepening Your Talent Pool to Solve the Succession Crisis by Ram Charan

Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time by Kevin Eikenberry

The Halo Effect ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers by Phil Rosenzweig



Again, we have selected a few biographies. As a category, they shape minds and ideas in ways that no other type of business book can. It's a good idea to always be working through a biography of some kind. It gives motivation for much needed self-reflection. To learn vicariously, is perhaps the best way to learn most things.

The Education of an Accidental CEO: Lessons Learned from the Trailer Park to the Corner Office by David Novak with John Boswell

Bo's Lasting Lessons: The Legendary Coach Teaches the Timeless Fundamentals of Leadership by Bo Schembechler and John U. Bacon

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:19 AM
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Paul Johnson’s Heroes: Lessons for Today's Leaders

Paul Johnson’s Heroes is a pleasure to read. With his knack for illuminative details and command of the language, he has produced a series of short biographical essays that draw you through the book and leave you with a lot to think about. He notes that heroes have not always been appreciated and the status accorded them can be fleeting and arbitrary. By way of example he writes:

In the troubled times which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, caused by lower wages, unemployment and higher food prices, the term became abusive. When ever the Duke of Wellington made his appearance, a certain kind of London mob (there were many different kinds) would shout: “No heroes! We want no heroes!” For the self-conscious proletariat, the “Man on Horseback” was a political enemy. They threw stones through the windows of Apsley House, the duke’s London residence. He had the windows boarded up but refused to replace the glass, as a reminder to people of how volatile was popularity an dhow fickle the crowd, applauding him as a hero one moment, detesting him the next.

Consider too, Genghis Khan was “reviled for nearly a millennium as the archetypal mass murderer and rapist, despoiler, arsonist and ravager” yet “since the collapse of the Soviet empire in Central Asia, has become there a state-sponsored hero, especially in Azerbaijan and Mongolia.”

“No people in history were more in need of heroes than the Hebrews.” And so Johnson begins his examples with the judges Deborah, Judith and Sampson leading to their greatest hero, King David. Continuing on, his survey of heroes spans almost 3000 years of Western history and ranges from, Alexander and Julius Caesar, to the unlikely Mae West and Marilyn Monroe, to Lincoln and Churchill, to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. Here are some of his comments from the book:

• Ronald Reagan: "I have never come across a person, certainly not in public life, who was so thoroughly and fundamentally at ease with himself."
• George Washington: "The United States of America has been fortunate in many ways, especially in the magnificent endowment of nature. But not the least of its blessings was the man who first led it to victory, then made the new nation that emerged law-abiding, stable and prosperous, as well as free. This double achievement is without parallel in history."
• Thomas More: "More has a lot to teach the twenty-first century. He had a curiously modern gift for words, and he articulated the culminating drama of his life -- the still, small voice of conscience defying an ideological despotism -- with stunning aptness, so that to us he resembles the hero of a contemporary morality play."
• Robert E. Lee: "Lee was a true hero. He insisted on making possible for others the freedom of thought and action he sought for himself."
• Abraham Lincoln: "He was a good man on a giant scale. He invariably did the right thing, however easily it might have been avoided. Of how many other great men might this be said?"
• Emily Dickinson: "The best [of her poetry] is sublime, moving, unforgettable, magic, and the woman who produced it is undeniably, in her obstinate, tiresome, brave, unflinching, desperate and triumphant way, heroic."
• Winston Churchill: "In the pursuit and enjoyment of power, he was always not merely careful but punctilious in observing the constitutional rules and respecting those persons and institutions charged with upholding them. This to my mind is the quality in Churchill which makes him so quintessentially the democratic hero."
• Margaret Thatcher: "Thatcher was a good, kind and gentle creature, wonderfully considerate to her staff, always thinking of other people and doing things for them, unasked, and never cross if she got no thanks."
• Pope John Paul II: "He had, it seemed to me, a strong sense of priorities, an unfailing ability to separate the essential from the peripheral, and to keep to the point, obliging others to do likewise. His intellect was burly, gripped hard and never relaxed until the job was done."
• Modern Leaders: "The great majority of heads of government, in my experience, are hardened egoists, corrupted by exercising power even if not already corrupted by getting there. The few exceptions, like Harold Wilson or Willy Brandt, tend to be weak men."
• Good government: "After nearly sixty years of writing history, and also of observing contemporary history makers in action, I am convinced that successful government depends less on intelligence and knowledge than on simplicity – that is, the ability to narrow aims to three or four important tasks which are possible, reasonable and communicable."

Johnson states that heroic behavior is to be found in every age and in all kinds of places. He asks, “How do we recognize the heroes and heroines of today?” He puts forth four principle identifiers we should take note of:

First, an absolute independence of mind, which springs from the ability to think everything through for yourself, and to treat whatever is the current consensus on any issue with skepticism.

Second, having made up your mind independently, the ability to act resolutely and consistently.

Third, to be able to ignore or reject everything the media throws at you, provided you remain convinced you are doing right.

And finally, to act with personal courage at all times, regardless of the consequences to yourself.

Who are your heroes?

Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:36 AM
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5 Leadership Lessons: Great Advice from Accidental CEO, David Novak

While Yum Brands chairman and CEO David Novak calls himself an accidental CEO, his rise to the top, while perhaps not planned, was no accident. His advancement speaks to the power of right choices made throughout life based on the knowledge gained from cultivating lessons from life and seeking out advice. His memoir, The Education of an Accidental CEO, is written in the first person and full of advice that we can all gain from reading. Nothing here is earth-shaking or new, but it is helpful to see the successful working of these principles in the life of someone who took them to heart. Here are a few of the lessons we can take away:

  I don’t think as a leader that you just go tell people to do something. I believe you plant the seeds and share with them what you know and let them draw their own conclusions—which may even be better than your own.

  One thing I’ve learned over the years is that you never get promoted until most people in your company can already see you in the position. [Former chairman of PepsiCo, Wayne Calloway], took me aside and said to me, “David, I have no doubt that one day you are going to end up running something. So why don’t you just focus on what you need to do today in order to be ready when you get there.”

  I can’t stress enough the essential nature of really hearing what someone has to say even if it is totally contradictory to your own beliefs….It’s something that I have to constantly remind myself of, and others, to do to this day. [Coach Wooden told him], “Most leaders have enough ego as it is, so you don’t need anyone around to inflate it any further. Have strong, opinionated people working for you.”

  One of the greatest failures to execute is the lack of follow-up. This seems obvious, yet very few companies place as much emphasis on accountability as they do on figuring out what they want to get done.

  Self discovery is the key to learning, whether it’s learning how to do something new or better or learning something about yourself. You can tell the same thing to people a thousand times, but they don’t really own it until they discover it for themselves.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:55 AM
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Leadership Books: December 2007

Here's a look of some of the best leadership books to be released in December.

  Leaders at All Levels: Deepening Your Talent Pool to Solve the Succession Crisis by Ram Charan
  The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin
  Big Think Strategy: How to Leverage Bold Ideas and Leave Small Thinking Behind by Bernd H. Schmitt
  EPIC Change: How to Lead Change in the Global Age by Timothy R. Clark
  Jacked Up: Inside Welch's Communication Revolution at GE by Bill Lane

Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:01 AM
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Integrative Thinking: The Opposable Mind

Not one to put the cart before the horse, Roger Martin understands the importance of doing but he prefers “to swim upstream to the antecedent of doing: thinking.” He writes in The Opposable Mind, “My critical question is not what various leaders did, but how their cognitive processes produced their actions.”

In examining how exemplary leaders think, he found an approach that was common to many, that he has termed integrative thinking. Integrative thinking is:

The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.

In other words, integrative thinking examines problems as a whole, taking note of the complexities that exist and embrace the tension between opposing ideas to create new alternatives that take advantage of many possible solutions.

Is integrative thinking necessary for all problems? No. For some problems there is an easy solution. Some problems benefit from breaking them down to a single manageable issue and nailing the solution. These are generally simple, linear cause and effect problems. But there are those problems that stem from multiple avenues of causation and nonlinear relationships between cause and effect. For example, when you find yourself faced with win/lose solutions, problems to which there is no apparent solution or issues for which all of the solutions are choices between bad alternatives, then integrative thinking becomes necessary.

It’s easy to get into the destructive rut of thinking that money is the solution to most problems. School boards are notorious for claiming that their hands are tied because they lack the money they want. They cripple themselves. What they really need are creative solutions. Education is a complex issue and has for too long been subject to tunnel-vision problem solving. They need integrative thinking.

Einstein opined that we should make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. Too often we try to make complex issues too simple and leave ourselves with too few options based on our limited point-of-view. If we instead embrace complexity and learn to deal with it, we might find more and better solutions. Martin writes, “More salient features make for a messier problem. But integrative thinkers don’t mind the mess. In fact they welcome it, because the mess assures them that they haven’t edited out features necessary to the contemplation of the problem as a whole. They welcome complexity because they know the best answers arise from complexity.”

In The Opposable Mind, Martin clearly illustrates this thinking process in action by dissecting varied examples from both business and interpersonal situations. Martin claims that we are all born with an opposable mind—the ability to hold two conflicting ideas or models in constructive tension. “We can use that tension to think our way through to a new and superior idea….Opposing models, in fact, are the richest source of new insight into a problem. We learn nothing from someone who sees the problem exactly as we do.”

Related Posts:
Roger Martin on Assertive Inquiry
How to Develop Integrative Thinking

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:45 AM
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How to Change Anything

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

The authors of Influencer: The Power to Change Anything claim that they can show you how to change anything. Well, nearly everything. They suggest that most of the time we cop out. We comfort ourselves with the Serenity Prayer and move on. Maybe it’s not the courage we lack but the skills to change the things we can.

The authors set about to do just that. “If you want to change the world, you eventually have to change how people behave. And if you want to change how they behave, you have to first change how they think.” The key idea is this: “A few behaviors change drive a lot of change.”

What that means is, if you want to effect change, then while casting a vision is important (that is, what you want people to achieve), what you need to focus on is behaviors—what you specifically want people to do. If you determine the foundational behaviors upon which everything you want changed stands, and change those things, then everything else changes with it.

Here are some points to consider:

• “People choose their behaviors based on what they think will happen to them as a result. If you want to change behavior, any behavior you have to change maps of cause and effect.”
• “When it comes to resistant problems, verbal persuasion rarely works. Verbal persuasion often comes across as an attack. People aren’t about to give up what gives them intense pleasure or what constitutes an important window into their view of self simply because of a well-turned phrase.” Instead, “come up with innovative ways to create personal experiences. Nothing changes a mind like the cold, hard world hitting it with actual real-life data.”
• “Stories can create touching moments that help people view he world in new ways.” Why? “Because stories help individuals transport themselves away from the role of listener who is rigorously applying rules of logic, analysis, and criticism and into the story itself.”

There is more than one way to influence and if you are only using one of them as a matter of habit, it may explain why you are having difficulty bringing complex and resistant problems to a solution. There are six sources of influence that drive our behavior divided between two domains—motivation and ability. They reason, “Virtually all forces that have impact on human behavior work on only two mental maps—not two thousand, just two. At the end of the day a person asks, ‘Can I do what’s required?’ and ‘Will it be worth it?’

Influencer presents a model that organizes influence in to 6 general strategies and clearly explains how to make use of these strategies in your own change issues.

They write, “Ineffective influencers compensate for their weak influence repertories by putting a megaphone to the one source they’ve already put into place.” If you feel you have to turn up the volume to get people to listen, it’s not them it’s you. Work on your strategy. This book will show you how.

Influencer is brought to you by the same group that produced such great books as Crucial Confrontations and Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:53 AM
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Reframing Conflict

Negotiation expert and Harvard Law School professor, Roger Fisher talks about how we communicate through conflict in Managing Conflict. Reframing the situation we find ourselves in to reflect a concern for he other person’s point of view can move us through a perceived impasse. Fisher’s rethinking process excerpted here, is helpful in this regard:

“So I come and try to put myself in your shoes: How do you see it? How can I help you see it in a way that will be helpful to you, where you can go forward? I’m not telling you what to do; I’m not fighting with you.”

“I have to get on your side, understand what you’re thinking about; what you’re worried about—your concerns, your interests—and how I can help you deal with your side.”

Fisher adds: “Negotiation is recognizing that it’s not just the other side that has the problem but that we have a problem together. When you negotiate, you want to understand each other’s perceptions. How do you see it? How do I see it? How do we change it from adversarial to side by side, so that we’re both working on this?”

Posted by Michael McKinney at 05:03 PM
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Optimizing Luck

In a world of rapidly changing conditions, luck often seems to be the determining factor in the success of the best organizations. According to authors Thomas Meylan and Terry Teays, luck is something that can be optimized and built into your culture. Their book, Optimizing Luck is a business profile of the highly successful, 18-plus year long International Ultraviolet Explorer astronomical project they were involved in for NASA.

While the chapter on leadership could have benefited from some more rigorous thought, they do outline six behaviors and procedures you can implement to amplify your natural abilities to succeed in any environment.

First, and most importantly, they stress the importance of hiring the right people. Look for people with sufficient skills and experience to do the job, aptitudes that will contribute positively to the organization and people with a passion for the kind of work you are hiring them for. (Seek staff reaction to the new person.) “If you don’t have the time to work through a hiring process that gets you the right people, how are you possibly going to have time to deal with all the misfits you end up with?”

Secondly, multiply your strengths through the power of delegation – or just let people do their job. If you have hired the right people with the right skill set, then you should be able to trust them to accomplish the task. “Without trust, delegation doesn’t happen. What you get instead is the making of assignments that you either micromanage or snatch back to do yourself.”

Third, become adaptable through the “master process of continuous habit management.” This consists of being alert to changes, continuously trying new things until you get the results you want, converting successful behaviors into personal habits and organizational procedures, and discarding obsolete habits when you realize it’s time to create new ones.

Fourth, know how to operate in a lean environment before it is forced upon you. “If you have hired self-renewing employees, and you have given them the opportunity and resources to learn new skills, then they are well prepared to adapt to changes in your enterprise’s needs….Don’t think in terms of malnourished drudges. Think of slender gymnasts, flexible and agile and capable of an entire repertoire of tricks.”

Fifth, promote prompt and accessible communication to all who need it. Knowledge is the raw material you use to drive a business, it must reach everyone, whether it is good or bad news. “Without good communication habits, your organization may be too slow to take advantage of a surprise opportunity and end up not getting there first.”

Finally, build a system for recognizing and rewarding people that perform beyond their job description. “Your method of rewarding employees should encourage the behavior you want your employees to show.”

The key passage is this:

Differences in levels of success often come down to differences in personal habits. People employ decades-old systems of habits to get through the day. However, most people put no special thought into developing these systems. They pick up a few tricks from mom and dad and a few teachers and a lot from their peers, while growing up and going through school. And that’s where their habit-developing effort stops.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:10 AM
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Finding the Difference Makers in Your Organization

Stories about people who have gone above and beyond inspire us to be better than we are now. These stories of people who make a difference can help others to see themselves and their work in new ways. Stories help people to disconnect from the moment and project themselves in to a new place where things are possible.

Quint Studer writes in Results that Last, “I think difference makers are the world’s real heroes, the people working to make things better. You know who they are: those men and women who give extra effort without thinking of themselves. They may not get a lot of glory, but they are deeply appreciated by the people whose lives they touch.”

He suggests that we make a conscious effort to look for and collect the stories of those people that go above and beyond and know when to break the rules in order to make a difference. Then retell them over and over to make them a part of the organization’s culture. The stories should have a behavior-oriented point and help people to connect their situation to that of the heroes in the story. “Finding your heroes and recognizing their behavior is key because recognized and rewarded behavior is repeated.” Here are several ways he suggests we go about finding heroes in our organizations:

• Harvest examples of extraordinary employee behavior, making sure to get the complete story and all the facts.
• Look at customer feedback
• Ask your customers about the level of service they receive at your organization
• Develop a consistent program for recognizing your organization’s heroes and their stories. Make sure no one gets overlooked!

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:43 AM
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You Are There: Peter Drucker's Classroom

"Everything you see here was as it happened that day, except, You Are There…. What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times—and you were there."

Reminiscent of Walter Cronkite’s CBS program You Are There, Bill Cohen takes us back into the classroom of Peter Drucker. In A Class With Drucker, he brings to life the energy and humor of one of the best thinker’s of our time. He illuminates some of Drucker’s most profound ideas live, in real time as it were. Subtitled as “the lost lessons of the world’s greatest management thinker,” it is, more to the point, “the lost context of the world’s greatest management thinker.” While many of the ideas are not new to those familiar with Drucker’s teachings, you will find Cohen’s presentation of Drucker’s thinking and classroom elaboration of his ideas, to be enlightening.

Drucker taught at Claremont University just a few miles from where I am here. I have had the opportunity to hear him talk and Cohen’s recollections bring back my own experiences. A Class With Drucker is an enjoyable read that shows a side of Drucker that you don’t get from his writings alone. Cohen was the first graduate of the world’s first executive Ph.D. program in management at Claremont University. He reconstructs the lectures that made the strongest impact on him when he was a student, in chapters devoted to 17 key lessons from the Drucker curriculum.

In one such chapter entitled, People Have No Limits, Even After Failure, he records Drucker’s problem with Lawrence Peter’s infamous Peter Principle from the 1968 book of the same name: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Cohen writes:

Peter [Drucker] said, We have no right to ask people to take on jobs that will defeat them, no right to break good people. We don’t have enough good young people to practice human sacrifice.” The selection of the right person for the right job was the manager’s responsibility. But even more importantly, the notion that people rise to their levels of incompetence was dangerous to the organization.

According to the Peter Principle, if an organization has arrived at his or her level of incompetence, logically the organization has little choice but to get rid of the incompetent employee before the entire organization becomes overloaded with incompetent managers who make more and more bad decisions. Yet, the concept and the recommended action has many downsides. The only antidote to “incompetence” under the Peter Principle is dismissal. However, before one should even consider dismissal, the basic question concerns the assumption that failure is due to incompetence.

Cohen ends each chapter with a useful Drucker Lesson Summary. Even Drucker aficionados will gain something new here.

  William Cohen also publishes the Journal of Leadership Application newsletter.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:19 PM
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Leadership Books: November 2007

Here's a look of some of the best leadership books to be released in November.

  Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls by Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis
  The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow by Michael Maccoby
  Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle by Paul Johnson
  Rapid Transformation: A 90-day Plan for Fast and Effective Change by Behnam Tabrizi
  A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher by William A. Cohen

Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:17 AM
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How To Get Great Ideas: Lessons for Brainstorming

In 1941, advertising man Alex Osborn (BBDO) came up with the idea of “Thinking Up” which was later changed to brainstorming by his “thinking-up” colleagues. In an excellent book about innovative and productive thinking simply titled, Thinking Better by Tim Hurson, he reviews Osborn’s list of four essential rules for effective brainstorming:

• Criticism is ruled out. Adverse judgment of ideas must be withheld until later.
• Freewheeling is welcomed. The wilder the idea, the better; it is easier to tame down than to think up.
• Quantity is wanted. The greater the number of ideas, the more the likelihood of useful ideas.
• Combination and improvement are sought. In addition to contributing ideas of their own, participants should suggest how the ideas of others can be turned into better ideas or how two or more ideas can be joined into still another idea.

Hurson notes that studies have shown that the last third of a brainstorming session usually results in the best ideas. He calls it the miracle of the third third. “You’ll have a greater chance of coming up with that one brilliant idea if you get all the way to the third third than you will if you stop at the first “right” idea.” He writes:

The first third of the session tends to produce mundane, every-one-has-thought-of-them-before ideas. These are the early thoughts that lie very close to the surface of our consciousness. They tend not to be new ideas at all but recollections of old ideas we’ve heard elsewhere. They are essentially reproductive thoughts.

Generally, the second third of a good brainstorming session produces ideas that begin to stretch boundaries….The third third is where the diamonds lie.

He says, “Brainstorming is like cholesterol—there’s good and bad, and most people have only experienced the bad.” We have all experienced brainstorming like this:

There’s no separation of the different ideas of thinking going on. Creative, idea-generating thinking is being stopped cold by critical, judgmental think. Ideas are being killed before they’re fully articulated.

The session isn’t about new ideas at all. It’s actually a version of a sad little business game called “Guess what the boss is thinking.” Everyone in the room knows it, and so as soon as someone says the boss’s secret word, the duck comes down and the meeting is over.

Perhaps the deadliest of all, the people participating in the braindrizzle stop as soon as they come up with “the first right answer.” They satisfice on the first reasonable idea they think will solve their problem and out them out of their misery.

He adds, that “Bad brainstorming is binary; ideas are either good or bad. Good brainstorming is full of maybes." The biggest issue we face in creative thinking is our own patterns of thought that keep us on the straight and narrow. We hold ourselves back because of personal notions of what is right and wrong and what will and won’t work. There’s no magic pill to conquer this. It takes a conscious effort. He suggests though that “Generating long lists of ideas flushes those early ideas out of your head so you can make room for new ones.”

Tim Hurson is a founding partner of think^x  intellectual capital. It is a global consultancy for productive thinking and innovation.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:53 AM
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Making Leadership Development Part of Organizational Strategy

Michael Maccoby states in his book The Leaders We Need, that “In any business, good leadership may be the most essential competitive advantage a company can have.” Linking leadership and strategy then, would seem to be an organizational imperative.

According to a recent study outlined in The Leadership Advantage by Robert Fulmer and Jared Bleak, leadership is the essential element in the success of any strategic change effort. “Indeed, no strategy is good enough to succeed without strong leadership.” They found that successful organizations built a strong link between business strategy and leadership-development strategy.

The link between business strategy and leadership-development strategy is not haphazard, but specific and deliberate and omnipresent. The link is part of the philosophy of the organization that “permeates all organizational levels and is applicable to all employees.” In this way, an organization can keep the leadership-development strategy relevant to each business unit and to the overall business strategy in general. For example:

PepsiCo’s leadership-development strategy is grounded in the belief that strong leaders are needed to be successful in the marketplace. This belief is fundamental to PepsiCo’s two-pronged HR approach, which includes a career-growth model and a talent-management model for leadership development. This two pronged approach aligns with corporate strategic initiatives, which in turn link with the organization’s sustainable competitive advantage.

Using senior executive to teach emerging leaders is an effective two-way street where both benefit.

One of the surprising findings of this project was the degree to which senior executives practice the concept of leading by teaching. At PepsiCo, Paul Russell, vice president of executive learning & development, speaks of “the magic of leaders developing leaders.” According to Russell, the missing adult-learning principle is that “people learn best when they get to learn from someone they really want to learn from.” Russell notes that “at PepsiCo, the ‘teachers’ our executives want to learn from are our own senior leaders. They are world class, widely respected, and have proven that they can do it here!”

At PepsiCo, senior executives are asked to share their personal perspectives, as well as build participant confidence and skills while demonstrating support for their growth. Of equal importance, senior leaders elicit greater teamwork from participants and get to know key young leaders while developing more loyalty, motivation, and productivity among employees and creating greater alignment around vision and key strategic initiatives. PepsiCo leaders are encouraged to think of learning as an important arrow in their quiver for helping to drive change. At PepsiCo, learning becomes something to live, not just another thing to endorse.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:26 AM
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