Richard Barrett’s Seven Levels of Consciousness model, founded on the principles of values-based leadership, is a guide to achieving exceptional performance in organizations. Barrett’s framework based on his extensive research across organizations and increasingly whole countries is an extension of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a well-explored, but frequently misrepresented, theory […]
Read More… from Using Values-Based Leadership to Drive Performance
Most people think of themselves as moral and ethical. And yet, major fraud and unethical behaviour is widespread. A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina, University of Washington and University of Arizona studied how people who are otherwise good allow themselves to become involved in increasingly unethical behaviour. “There are a number of […]
Read More… from Ethics and the Slippery Slope: Why Good People Do Bad Things
Organizational values can exemplify the old saying that “words are cheap.” Inspiring words about ethics, diversity or sustainability etched on a lobby wall mean nothing if they are not reflected in the performance of actual practices within the organization. While such practices might seem to be developed and formulated at the top management level and […]
Read More… from Corporate Values: Translating Platitudes into Sustainable Practices
The most basic business is product-based, involving the manufacturing, assembling and/or delivery of a product. A different type of business, once rare but becoming more and more common, is platform-based, involving creating the context for two or more third parties to interact. EBay and Match.com, for example, were created as platform-based businesses: using technological innovations, […]
Read More… from How to Turn a Product-Focused Company into a Platform Business
The true measure of integrity in a firm is not comforting slogans on the home page of the company website, but how employees feel about whether top management, through its actions and behaviours, is living up to the promise. A culture of integrity exists when employees perceive top managers as trustworthy and ethical. "The higher […]
Read More… from How a Culture of Integrity Boosts the Bottom Line
The declining level of trust in businesses and corporations, from both customers and employees, is well documented. As companies seek to maintain or rebuild the trust of their stakeholders, they must focus on issues of character, in terms of integrity as well as benevolence toward others, and competence, measured by such criteria as ability and […]
Read More… from Building Trust: The Role of Stakeholders’ Personal Values
Exploring the relation between information that is presented in corporate accountability reports and future financial performance three professors from the Kellogg School of Management’s Accounting Information and Management Department focused on CSR expenditure figures and the future performance of the disclosing firm. Thomas Lys, professor of accounting information and management at the Kellogg School of […]
The idea of character has been lost sight of. One reason could be that the educational system and organizations are completely competency focused, or perhaps because character seems an old-fashioned word. However, character is a vital part of leadership and it cannot be ignored. Character fundamentally shapes how we engage with the world around us, […]
Read More… from Character – The Unspoken Essence of Leadership
Responsible leadership is a concept that can help link corporate social responsibility (CSR) and performance to actions on the part of policy makers and leaders. In a world where public trust in leaders is low and reputations of firms are often called into question, RL can help bridge the gap between that negative perception and […]
Read More… from The Four Orientations of Responsible Leaders
Recently, faculty from Kenan-Flagler Business School and Robert H. Smith School of Business looked at the relationship between egotistic (or narcissistic) CEOs and firm performance by measuring ego by the size of signatures on yearly SEC filings. They looked at about 400 CEO signatures from the annual SEC filings from companies in the S&P 500, […]
Read More… from Narcissistic CEOs – A Signature for Poor Performance
