Tag Archives: leadership

Why great leaders focus on mastering relationships – Douglas A. Ready

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Doug Ready

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Douglas A. Ready

From MIT Sloan Management Review

Great leaders are distinguished by their ability to master personal relationships.

“Without mastering collaborative relationships, both inside and outside the company, we won’t produce the outcomes needed to win our customers’ business.”

— Lori Beer, chief information officer, JPMorgan Chase

Mastering personal relationships that build trust and create a collaborative work environment is central to leadership effectiveness in the digital economy. This skill set distinguishes great leaders from merely good ones, based on my interviews with C-suite executives in companies around the world.

In a digital business environment, great leaders are those who appreciate and understand the power of technology and analytics. But that alone is insufficient. They must also have the skills and mindsets to bring together people from diverse businesses and functions to deliver superior customer outcomes. As Lori Beer, CIO at JPMorgan Chase, says:

“We don’t need everybody to know how to write the perfect API, but we do need people with a passion for working together to create an understanding of how those APIs, a blockchain, the cloud, AI, and machine learning can change the way you think about delivering services to our customers.”

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Leadership lessons from your inner child – Douglas Ready

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Doug Ready

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Doug Ready

From the MIT Sloan Management Review.

By tapping into their inner child, leaders can blend the bold thinking and action of childhood while maintaining responsibility to the bottom line — an important balance in digital leadership.

When I turned five, I got a new bike. I didn’t know how to ride it, but I took it to a nearby hill anyway, a willing warrior, ready to ride. Was I prepared? Would I be brave enough to overcome the anxiety of facing the unknown? The truth is those questions never occurred to me at the time. Reflecting on this experience decades later, I realized I wasn’t just a willing warrior — I was an ecstatically enthusiastic one. Today, I can’t help but wonder why it seemed so much easier to take on significant new challenges as a five-year-old than it is for me now. As a child, did I have gifts that I somehow lost over the years? Was I foolish then and more responsible now? Upon further reflection, I have come to realize that I’ve been fighting a decades-long battle to not lose many of those gifts that made it relatively easy to learn new things when I was young.

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How to train your brain to make your dreams come true – Tara Swart

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer, Tara Swart

From the Daily Mail

As a successful doctor of psychiatry and neuroscience, it looked as if I had it all: I was married to a fellow psychiatrist and had a job working for the NHS. We were a carefree young couple, with a great social life and lots of opportunity to travel the world. Everyone assumed I was in complete control of my life.

But I was running on autopilot, and when I reached my mid-30s everything fell apart. I had become increasingly unhappy in my work, worn down by the long hours and workload and the sense of not being able to make a real difference to my patients.

I witnessed so much human suffering and saw how tough and cruel life was for the mentally vulnerable. I cared deeply about my patients, but I had a nagging sense that they deserved more than just medication and hospitalisation – that a healthier regime and a sense of wellbeing could do wonders to aid their recovery.

At the same time my marriage fell apart and it had a disastrous impact on my own sense of identity and confidence. I felt like I was drowning, with nothing to hold on to and no end in sight.

However, rock bottom gave me new clarity. It gave me a determination I had not known I possessed, and a feeling that I must progress on my own to fulfill my potential.

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How departing leaders can pass along their wisdom to employees – Hal Gregersen

Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center

Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center

From Harvard Business Review

Earlier this spring I had the chance to witness two of the “farewell talks” that Ed Catmull gave to the people of Pixar. Catmull, the company’s cofounder and long-time leader (and also president of Disney Animation Studios since the Disney acquisition of Pixar over a decade ago) had announced his retirement in late 2018. He chose to spend his last day on Pixar’s Emeryville campus not being celebrated by his colleagues but, instead, sharing thoughts about the challenges they would face in the years to come.

Each “farewell talk” was a separate, hour-long session with a different team in the company, but the content wasn’t tailored to specific departments. Catmull shared — over and over again — what he believed the whole company should be thinking about as it looks ahead.

Catmull has always been unusually reflective about the challenges of leading creative organizations, and generous in sharing the practices he finds effective. In his 2014 book Creativity, Inc. (which he’s now updating with new learnings), for example, he shares useful insights and learnings aimed at helping other leaders succeed. In his farewell talks, he showed the same level of thoughtfulness. He decided to:

Make the sessions inclusive. It’s not uncommon for departing CEOs to have transitional talks with their top teams. But how many consider it important to talk with every team in the company? Catmull talked to everyone, including hundreds of people who had never sat in meetings focused on high-level strategic issues — but whose efforts make Pixar films possible. As a result, his parting act was immensely unifying.

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Free Elon Musk! – Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer, Visiting Professor, Operations Management

From Forbes

No, it hasn’t gotten to this just yet, but we shouldn’t even be having this conversation.

The SEC’s decision to sue Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with the intention of barring him from serving as an executive or director not only of Tesla, but of any corporation under the jurisdiction of the SEC, was the height of folly. Do any of us, including the SEC commissioners involved, really believe that our society would have been better off with Elon Musk on the sidelines? Do they really think that anyone else could do the job of representing Tesla, or the future, better than Elon Musk?

Let’s be clear, there are a lot of smart people in Silicon Valley. But, most of them are not named “Elon Musk.” What we discovered over the weekend was that that name was worth at least $6 billion in value, and possibly a lot more, based on the fall in market capitalization on the day following the announcement of the SEC action. It’s hard to imagine very many other people whose suspension from work life would bring such a hit on the very next day. Yet, I suspect that very few of us are actually surprised. In our minds, Tesla is Musk, and without Musk, what is Tesla?

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