CEOs are responsible for knowing what is going on in their companies. No matter how large, complex or global the organization, CEOs do not have the luxury of pleading ignorance; it is their job to keep abreast of all the important facts and developments: what their employees and competitors are doing, what big new ideas […]
Read More… from Ensure the CEO Gets the Right Information at the Right Time
In recent years, humility has become increasingly accepted as a central feature of great leadership. Bestselling business books such as Good to Great, which considered humility as one of the two core attributes of great ‘level-five’ leaders, speeches and memoirs by business and non-business leaders, and numerous academic papers all highlight the importance of humility […]
Read More… from How Leadership Humility Is Defined in the East and in the West
Every organization has finite resources, starting with compensation, budgets and expense accounts, as well as high quality assignments, accounts or customers and even office space. The people who control the allocation of these resources have a great deal of power — and research shows that they use this power to make decisions that are in […]
Read More… from Candid Feedback Keeps Power-holders Accountable
Both agency theory and stewardship theory help explain organizational dynamics, although starting from very different assumptions. Agency theory describes the relationship between the shareholders (called ‘principals’) and the company’s managers and executives (called ‘agents’) as a collaboration between parties with different interests: principals are focused on the success of the company while agents are focused […]
Read More… from A Symphony of Agency and Stewardship Values Ensures Family Business Success
More and more board of directors have the CEO as the only insider on the board. At first glance, this movement toward near unanimous outside directors would seem to meet the mandate of independent oversight and governance that have defined corporate boards since the corporate scandals of the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, new research […]
Read More… from Corporate Governance: The Power of Outside Directors on CEO-Only Boards
An investigation into the problems of the 1973 Ford Pinto, a car susceptible to catastrophic explosions when rear-ended, revealed that Ford’s engineers had calculated that the company could save $11 per car at a cost of 180 burn deaths. While perhaps an exaggerated case of numbers pushing aside moral and ethical considerations, there is a […]
Read More… from How a Numbers-Crunching Culture Can Increase Unethical Behaviour
With the dominant, almost overwhelming impact that social media has on just about any function of a business, it’s easy to forget that social media is barely a decade old. The vast majority of today’s leaders built most of their careers before anyone had even conceived of Facebook or Twitter. As a result, leaders must […]
Read More… from Six Skills for the Social Media-Literate Leader
Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (ZPMC), a company that specialized in the large-scale cranes used to load containers onto ships, burst on the heavy machinery landscape in 1992. At that time, the global market for large-scale container cranes was growing fast as ports were having to handle more and more super-sized container vessels. The industry was […]
Read More… from A Lesson from China: Growth Is Not Eternal So Be Prepared
Most leaders possess typical leadership qualities such as the ability to inspire and persuade, a grand vision, and a controlled fearlessness when taking risks. There is, however, a darker side to many leaders, manifested in character traits such as extreme pride and overconfidence, coupled with a complete contempt for others. These character traits, which can […]
Read More… from Beware of Hubris Syndrome! A Leadership Personality Disorder
Public sector organizations are multirational organizations. They do not fall under a single rationality archetype — for example, they are not uniquely political organizations or economic organizations or legal organizations, but rather all of the above. Two researchers from St. Gallen University, Ali Asker Guenduez and Kuno Schedler, build on the social systems theory of […]
Read More… from Public Sector Leadership: Managing ‘Multirational’ Organizations
