Tag Archives: leadership

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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How leaders can maximise their impact – Deborah Ancona, Henrik Bresman

MIT Sloan Prof. Deborah Ancona

From Insead Knowledge

Effective leaders need to know whether their ‘people hat’ or ‘P&L hat’ fits most comfortably.

A leading supermarket chain in an eastern European Union country feared an 8 percent drop in sales as discounting giant Lidl was about to enter its market. So, in collaboration with researchers, it decided to run a randomised controlled experiment. The goal was to reduce its costly personnel turnover problem, in a bid to improve quality and operational efficiency. Selected store managers received a letter from top management, encouraging them to do something about the 90 percent yearly staff turnover. It worked: Over the next three quarters, the monthly quit rate fell by 20 to 30 percent. However, surprisingly, this vast improvement led to no discernible effect on the predefined performance metrics (sales and value of perished food). In interviews, the researchers found the explanation. As store managers focused more on HR issues, they spent less time interacting with customers (to increase sales) and dealing with the flow of goods (to reduce food wastage).

Of course, the firm still benefitted through a reduction in hiring and training costs (estimated at a minimum of 400 euros per head). But at the store level, the data showed a remarkable truth: It is rather difficult – perhaps even impossible – for a single manager to wear all hats equally well. This confirms what we have been saying for years: Distributed leadership, which leverages expertise and vision wherever it sits in the organisation, is the way forward. Organisations with distributed leadership are more innovative and more adaptable. They are permeated by a greater sense of purpose and meaning.

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