Frances Hesselbein’s Merit Badge in Leadership

The former CEO of the Girl Scouts has spent decades bringing professional management to nonprofits.

Ken Favaro

Whereas making strategy about competitors can be highly destructive, making it about the customer encourages leaders to find ways to win without having to pay the price for their victories. Does this mean that competitors can be safely ignored when it comes to strategy? No. Understanding competitors’ value propositions is one effective way to generate new thinking on how to improve your own value propositions. … [ Read more ]

Zachary Shore

Reading others requires going deeper than their intentions and capabilities […] We need to get down to the level of drivers and constraints.Intentions are manifestations of a person’s underlying drivers. When you understand why people have certain intentions—what’s driving them—you can better anticipate what their future intentions will be. The same is true of capabilities. We often ask what a leader is able to do. … [ Read more ]

Forget the Vision, Make the Connections

An executive stepping into a new role tends to have two top priorities: how best to allocate financial resources and how best to allocate human resources. And while that may seem like a logical way for new leaders to make their mark, Mindy Hall says that mind-set is problematic.

Theodore Kinni

Asking how you can make better, faster, and cheaper widgets assumes that you should be making widgets.

Linda A. Hill on the Creative Power of the Many

The Harvard Business School professor explains how leaders can harness collective genius to achieve innovation success.

Douglas Stone

My opinions about other people feel like facts. My brain distinguishes very little between “2+2=4” and “you are annoying and lazy.” I feel certain that both are objectively true.

That’s a big problem. Being good at giving feedback requires us to know the difference between fact and opinion (even when it’s well reasoned), not because it changes the content of the feedback we give, but because … [ Read more ]

Douglas Stone

If there’s any leadership task that is harder than listening with an open mind even when you have a strong view, I haven’t encountered it. And surely, none is more important.

Pete Hamill

Assessments can say a lot more about us than about the thing that we believe we are describing.

Pete Hamill

As human beings we love nothing more than being right, and […] when we are right, we are generally making someone else wrong. True humility is, at least in part, being able to see one’s own assessments as assessments, rather than believing them to be truths.

Lisa Bodell

Innovation often comes from having an eclectic approach. It’s less about expertise and more about minds that can think through details while focusing on the bigger picture. It’s about having an aptitude for both the qualitative and the quantitative. It’s also about the ability to mesh a wild idea with reality, and the fortitude to bring it to market.

6 Ways to Challenge Your Leadership Assumptions

In a paper written almost two decades ago, Miles Bryant, a professor of education administration at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, compared Western leadership beliefs to those of Native Americans from six Plains tribes. Bryant and a group of graduate students sought to learn how culture figures in conceptions of leadership. The variances can be a catalyst for thinking more deeply about what makes an effective … [ Read more ]

Kristin Behfar on How We Fight, and Why It Matters

The Darden School of Business professor describes a new framework for predicting conflict outcomes.

Five Keys to Strategy in the Age of the Hack

How do you shape your strategy for the age of the inevitable hack?

Honesty (about Your Costs) Is the Best Policy

Being honest about the expenses that go into developing and distributing a product can increase sales and enhance a firm’s bond with consumers.

Five Ways to Reverse the Downward Spiral of Distrust

The best time to invest in relationships, alignment, and trust is in the early stages. But what can you do when the team is already stuck in withdrawal or gridlock? The precise moment when trust is most needed is often when it is hardest to get people to the table. In my experience working with teams, the following five strategies can help.

What Self-Made Billionaires Do Best

The experience of … entrepreneurs reflects an unfortunate reality: companies are set up to perform. They are not set up to produce. If they were more capable at producing, they would not have to worry about combating disruption from outside. They would already be skilled at redesigning, disrupting, and innovating from within.

As a rule, large organizations do a poor job of distinguishing between high-profile … [ Read more ]

The Quantified Self Goes Corporate

How to make data your source of sustained growth.

Nir Halevy on Motivating Your Workforce

The Stanford professor explains how social distance (construal-level theory) affects how people respond to feedback.

Best Business Books 2014

strategy+business presents their 14th annual best business books special section with picks from seven eminent reviewers.

Editor’s Note: As usual, these pieces offer more than just listings of recommended books. In particular, I recommend you read the entries on strategy and economics.