http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/ 15 Experts and executives discuss leadership in the news. en Copyright 2011 Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:33:30 -0500 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=4.2-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Washington Post blogs have moved. If you are subscribing to the RSS feed for this blog, you may need to re-subscribe with the new feed URL. If you stop receiving updates from this feed, please visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/rss where you can see all of our feeds and re-subscribe to this feed or sign up for new ones. http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/03/the-rss-feed-for-this-blog-has-moved.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/03/the-rss-feed-for-this-blog-has-moved.html Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:33:30 -0500 George Bradt is managing director of PrimeGenesis, a consultancy focused on transition acceleration and executive onboarding. He is the author of The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan (Wiley, 2009). Even though 40 percent of executives fail in their first 18 months, few do it as publicly as Jack Griffin did after just six months as CEO of Time Inc. The advantage of this ouster being so public, though, is that it gives us a real-time case study in why so many senior executive transitions go wrong--and so fast. New leaders must choose how they engage their new organization's context and culture, thinking through whether they should assimilate, converge and evolve, or shock at the start. In this situation, it was necessary for Griffin to significantly change, or shock, the culture at Time, even though the company was not ready for it. http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/03/timeless-lessons-from-time-inc-how-griffin-set-the-stage-for-his-own-ouster.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/03/timeless-lessons-from-time-inc-how-griffin-set-the-stage-for-his-own-ouster.html Change management Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:57:03 -0500 Dr. Sasha Galbraith is a partner of Galbraith Management Consultants, an international consulting firm, and a former vice president of Wells Fargo. The world's biggest power schmooze fest begins Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland. But this year, something will be different. The press has made much of The World Economic Forum's (WEF) new quota system, whereby companies are being asked to include a woman among every five delegates. In fact, WEF organizers have downsized the number of coveted white badges that its "strategic partners" will get from the usual six to this year's four. But a number of those partners--companies like Chevron, Cisco and Aetna, who pay half a million bucks a year to join that club--protested. So the WEF said that they could include one more person as long as she is a woman with a decent title, like chair or CEO. Well, is that really a quota? http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/quota-this-white-badges-for-women-at-davos.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/quota-this-white-badges-for-women-at-davos.html Business Leadership Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:20:07 -0500 Henry Chesbrough is a professor at the Haas Business School, UC Berkeley, and author of Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era, released in January 2011 by Jossey-Bass. Follow him at @OpenInno or at www.openinnovation.net. The U.S. economy desperately needs to create more jobs. Payrolls were up 103,000 jobs in December, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. These numbers provide some encouragement that job growth may be returning to the U.S. economy. Not surprisingly, most of these new jobs were in services. The Department of Commerce estimates that--just like in most advanced economies around the world--more than 70 percent of employment in the U.S. comes from service firms, with the most recent growth in jobs led by leisure, hospitality and health-care workers. Services have long been a major piece of the employment puzzle, and the most recent data simply confirms that our http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/for-american-growth-learning-to-innovate-in-a-service-economy.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/for-american-growth-learning-to-innovate-in-a-service-economy.html Business Leadership Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:34:37 -0500 Daniel Patrick Forrester is the author of Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking In Your Organization. He is also a management consultant, and a director and executive within Sapient Government Services, a subsidiary of Sapient Corporation. The infamous founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, recently claimed that they would soon release damaging documents and proprietary communications from a major bank. Once we get past the revelations and isolated data points deduced from emails and documents, I wonder what good will come from this illegal open sourcing of the internal thinking of a company. Is it possible that dramatic revelations might actually help all organizations to take a big step back and reconsider the entire hierarchy of communications within the firm? The default hierarchy today has placed email and instant communications far above structured, human-driven dialogues. Critical thinking is relegated to the sidelines in an age where the problems we are http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/no-time-to-think-you-say.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/no-time-to-think-you-say.html Bad leadership Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:38:36 -0500 Kathleen Brush has been a CEO, president and chief marketing officer for several global companies over the last 20 years. She is currently a global management consultant and the recent author of Leadership: Get Ready for the Latest Global Challenges. Shareholders don't need to grumble anymore about over-paid, underperforming executives. Effective Friday, the "say-on-pay" provisions in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act start giving shareholders a vote on pay. Yet the grousing isn't over. It has now shifted to board members, who say they are concerned about armchair-quarterback shareholders second guessing their informed expertise. The protests of board members--whose selection often has more to do with connections and camaraderie than managerial credentials--may have less to do with ill-informed or inexperienced shareholders and more to do with boards' embarrassment. The government is essentially stepping in because such boards failed to self-regulate their responsibility to maximize the value of http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/say-on-pay-takes-effect-now-what.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/say-on-pay-takes-effect-now-what.html Business Leadership Fri, 21 Jan 2011 14:35:28 -0500 Jaroslav Valuch is cofounder and one of the coordinators of the Standby Task Force, an online volunteer community for live mapping that aims to provide a reliable interface between the online volunteer community and local and international humanitarian responders. When tragedy hit Haiti a year ago, the professional search-and-rescue teams and humanitarian NGOs activated their standard operating procedures for emergency situations. They struggled to push their staff through congested Port-au-Prince airport, and then set up their base among the hundreds of tents of other volunteers and disaster cowboys who swarmed the country. Meanwhile, there was another network also stepping in to help--but these volunteers from around the world never left their schools, offices, Internet cafes and living rooms. Instead they made up the volunteer tech and crisis mapping community, and they used technology to mobilize crowds of individuals hoping to assist and fill the gaps in traditional humanitarian response. http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/viral-volunteers-for-haiti-how-social-media-is-changing-the-face-of-crisis-response.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2011/01/viral-volunteers-for-haiti-how-social-media-is-changing-the-face-of-crisis-response.html Change management Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:15:07 -0500 Geoffrey Heal is a professor at the Columbia University Business School. Howard Kunreuther is a professor and co-director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. They have jointly written extensively on issues of interdependent security. You're only as strong as your weakest link. It's an old saying, but one that bears a new gravitas in today's interconnected world. The recent bomb scares with FedEx and UPS are a case in point--and in this case, the weakest link took the form of deficient security at an obscure airport in Ana'a in Yemen, where the bombs were loaded. This near miss, almost the cause of thousands of deaths, had striking similarities to the tragic Pan Am 103 crash over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. In that instance the weak link was another obscure airport, Gozo in Malta, where terrorists checked a bomb on Malta airlines http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/12/in-a-networked-world-no-longer-controlling-our-own-destinies.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/12/in-a-networked-world-no-longer-controlling-our-own-destinies.html Crisis leadership Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:26:29 -0500 Inder Sidhu is the senior vice president of strategy and planning for worldwide operations at Cisco. He is also the author of Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profits and Drives Tomorrow's Growth. Follow Inder on Twitter at @indersidhu. Here's a blast from the past that might rock your world next year: Rock-and-roll hall-of-famers Van Halen are reportedly reuniting in 2011 with former front-man David Lee Roth for a new tour and album. The last time the band recorded with Roth was 1984. Their collaboration produced the band's only chart-topping single, "Jump." A year after its release, however, Roth told brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen that he was ready to do just that. http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/12/van-halen-effect-inder-sidhu.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/12/van-halen-effect-inder-sidhu.html Business Leadership Mon, 13 Dec 2010 10:46:04 -0500 Dr. Aubrey C. Daniels is founder of Aubrey Daniels International and has spent more than 30 years working with organizations to apply the science of human behavior to the workplace. He is the author of Safe By Accident: Take the Luck Out of Safety - Leadership Practices That Build A Sustainable High Performance Safety Culture (November 2010) and blogs about workplace safety and management issues. The only way to ensure food safety is to make sure that everyone in the food industry who touches plant, animal, or food--from the field to the dinner table--does so in a safe manner. Unfortunately, the latest version of the Food Safety and Modernization Act, which the Senate passed this Tuesday, does not address this issue at all. The designers of the act think it does, but it doesn't. The government seems to think it can require, inspect and educate safe behaviors into the food http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/11/why-we-cant-just-inspect-our-way-to-safer-food.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/11/why-we-cant-just-inspect-our-way-to-safer-food.html Bad leadership Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:07:02 -0500 Mansoor Ijaz, an American of Pakistani origin, negotiated Sudan's offer of counterterrorism assistance to the Clinton administration in 1996 and 1997 and jointly authored the blueprint for a ceasefire of hostilities between Indian security forces and militant Islamists in Kashmir in July and August 2000. If new US National Security Adviser Thomas E. Donilon needs a reminder of how stark the enemy threat is, he need look no further than today's discovery of printer cartridges rigged like explosive devices aboard UPS airliner cargo holds that left Yemen bound for Jewish Synagogues in the United States. A dry run? You bet. And not just to test the holes in air cargo security systems, but to test the reaction time and responsiveness of our national security apparatus. The backroom maneuvering that led to Donilon's ascent and the departure of his predecessor, Gen. James L. Jones (USMC Ret), is a dangerous reminder of http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/10/the-threat-of-politicized-intelligence.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/10/the-threat-of-politicized-intelligence.html Bad leadership Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:47:07 -0500 Seth Kahan is the author of the Washington Post bestseller, Getting Change Right: How Leaders Transform Organizations from the Inside Out, published by Jossey-Bass 2010. What a difference two years makes. Here we are in the midst of incredibly complex change along with large-scale exacerbating circumstances. But, where is the engagement we felt so keenly in the months before November 2008? Mr. President, if you're reading, here are six things you can do to rectify the situation and build the kind of participatory support you enjoyed before we elected you to the highest office in the land: 1. Communicate so people get it and spread it. The "it" is not a precooked, hard-boiled message, not an elevator speech, not an answer. "It" is a verb, it is a conversation that cascades, a dialogue that arouses passion and creates its own social network. 2. Identify and energize your most valuable players. http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/10/mr-president-time-to-revamp-your-communications-strategy.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/10/mr-president-time-to-revamp-your-communications-strategy.html Leadership advice Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:03:43 -0500 James R. Bailey is the Tucker Professor of Leadership and chair of the Department of Management at the School of Business, George Washington University. The FBI recently reported a precipitous decline in 2009 crime rates. Last year's 5 percent drop extends a trend that corresponds almost exactly with the current recession. Criminologists and sociologists are mystified; this just shouldn't happen. Why not? Much of social science has embraced the same assumption that economists make--that bad times make for bad conduct. But this assumption is as flawed when interpreting crime patterns as it is broader social ones, especially when it comes to the corporate world. Conventional wisdom holds that during tough stretches such as the feeble, disheartening economic climate that's gripping the nation, the lines between right and wrong blur. Reliably decent people, whether on the street or in the boardroom, find the compromising conditions in which they live sufficient justification http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/10/how-bad-times-make-for-good-conduct.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/10/how-bad-times-make-for-good-conduct.html Crisis leadership Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:07:20 -0500 Mary C. Gentile, PhD is author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right and Senior Research Scholar for Curriculum & Case development at Babson College. Hardly a day goes by that we don't read about another corporate or government calamity - whether it's outright corruption or self-serving ethical neglect. And it's no wonder consumers, investors, potential employees and voters may be feeling a kind of angry despair when it comes to the fabric of institutions that support our lives. The press, the blogosphere and the water cooler all reflect back this unhappy cocktail of emotions every day. But what about the leaders out there who would like to build, maintain and lead ethical organizations? What about those leaders who not only see their own professional roles tarnished, painted with the same brush as so many others who have made it to the http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/09/the-antidote-to-cynicism.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/09/the-antidote-to-cynicism.html Culture Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:54:44 -0500 Debora L. Spar is president of Barnard College. Spar is the author of numerous books, including Ruling the Waves and The Baby Business. Prior to coming to Barnard, Spar was the Spangler Family Professor at Harvard Business School and Senior Associate Dean, Director of Research. In her recent piece, Selena Rezvani makes an intriguing observation about the state of women's colleges today. They shouldn't make sense any more, she notes, but they do. They shouldn't be thriving, but they are. Today - more than thirty years after the pill, Roe v. Wade, and Title IX - women outnumber men at nearly every college in the country. High school girls dominate boys in grades, as valedictorians, and in the legion of extracurricular activities in which both sexes now frenetically engage. We have one woman running Congress, another heading the State Department, and three serving as justices of the Supreme Court. Why http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/09/at-womens-colleges-and-after-girls-rule.html?wprss=leadershipguestinsights http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/09/at-womens-colleges-and-after-girls-rule.html Women in leadership Tue, 07 Sep 2010 10:45:27 -0500