Leadership Articles

Public statues falling everywhere. Robert E. Lee, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and more—memorialized leaders yanked to the ground, no longer heroes to angry crowds demonstrating this summer for racial justice. So which bronze effigies dese…

Friday, 9:30 pm, another humiliating workday. Boss mocked your client presentation—then four-letter insulted you in front of colleagues. Come 4:30 pm, he threw you a “little weekend project,” due Monday morning. Back home, ready to scream, you head t…

Who are your bosses from Hell? Maybe the supervisors so full of themselves you just want to scream—leaders who live large in their own egos, who demand credit for everything, proud and arrogant because, as long as they’re winning, leadership is all a…

As an emerging leader, you’re growing your skills and behaviors through learn-by-doing—seizing opportunities for more responsibility, and then using the crucible of experience to keep honing your performance. But you also know that active pract…

It’s almost midnight, the band plays, and the waiter pours. The bubbling foam atop your fluted glass previews what lies below—lovely champagne to cheer your heart and soul. But what if your friendly waiter simply served you the froth on top? No way t…

Look back upon the Three Mile Island accident that flooded suburban Pennsylvania with toxic nuclear waste—and then imagine the panic of the  generating plant managers that March morning in 1979. Some routine maintenance in the facility suddenly …

Holiday travel—navigating aging airports, over rusting and pot-holed bridges—reminds us all of a national infrastructure desperate for repair. But an inspiring new book, Engine of Impact: Essentials of Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector (Stanford Uni…

Last week’s World Series is now history. But before you turn the page on that baseball story, take one more look, in the context of a bigger conceptual map. The tale has some interesting strategic lessons about a paradigm broader than our national pa…

President Trump has once again hired a new chief of staff, to bring needed order to a White House rocked by infighting and missed opportunities. Many people hope that John Kelly, a veteran Marine general known for his organizational rigor, will now p…

Do you find leading your organization to be a constant balancing act? Sometimes you’re giving people flexibility to link up and learn, to “be their best”— but then you’re pushing them to the limit, demanding results. You want …

Are there too many “alternate facts” and “decisions-by-Twitter” in your company? Do you need more people who can pick apart a specious argument? Weigh the pros and cons of a vendor’s pitch? Analyze constructively assumptions behind next y…

To: Mr. Donald Trump Dear  Sir: I didn’t vote for you, and like many others, I was surprised by your electoral victory. But now that you’re about to become my president, I hope you’ll succeed. I’ll be the first to agree that Washington has…

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off Wednesday (October 19) for their final presidential debate. What should we expect? No, I don’t mean, in despair, what do we expect to happen? I’m asking, in aspiration, what should we expect of the two would-…

If you’ve triumphed by building a revolutionary networked organization in the theater of war, can you help leaders do the same in the corporate arena? Can “business commanders” take advantage of organizational lessons of fighting terrorists– to…

Saul Perlmutter, the Nobel-prize-winning astrophysicist spends most days thinking about supernovas and the expanding universe. Yet, at his recent college reunion, as his classmate Amy Edmondson told me, “he shared that he’s now worried by a more eart…

By prophesy, the kingship of ancient Asia was promised to the solver of a legendary dilemma. In the city of Gordium a nobleman’s chariot was lashed to a pole with a devilishly intricate knot: who, pray tell, would undo it?  The tangled str…

If you cut your finger, reach for a Band-Aid. Wake up with a headache, grab two Aspirins. But quick remedies aren’t a regime for managing overall health. Nor for managing a career. You can power pose like Wonder Woman to boost your self-confidence, o…

I recently profiled the talented theatrical director Ethan McSweeny, as a case example of Creative Economy leadership. Three insights from that post can apply to any leader pursuing innovation: design your product in a contemporary competitive contex…

As my colleague Steve Denning writes, we all now work in a Creative Economy. Creative is surpassing traditional business and financial economies, with its innovation-seeking “ethos of imagination, exploration, experiment, discovery, and collaboration…

In olden days, when you started a career, nobody told you to “follow your passion.” You joined the family business or found another job. If you liked it, you did what your boss asked, and maybe more, to earn a raise and get promoted. If you didn’t li…

The question might give you pause, but political pundits are confident and clear: “No, no, no!” Our chattering class scolds the fibs of every Oval Office candidate, usually with ideological fervor. On the right: “Who can trust Hillary Clinton to be P…

Steve Jobs is a flawed movie about a flawed leader. But go see it. The price of admission is well worth the two hour exploration of the moral ambiguity of leadership. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have created an engaging but une…

Have you ever been challenged for “not connecting the dots?” It’s shorthand for leaders who fail to grasp a pattern of some looming risk. Not connecting the dots is how we explain human failure that could have been averted. OK, how about a more…

3 a.m., somewhere in Iraq, 2005. Two soldiers knock at Stanley McChrystal’s door, seeking permission to launch a risky attack, hundreds of miles away. The four-star commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) sits up, and gives his OK. T…

Platform strategies, open source, internet of things: we’re all looking for new business models of  the networked world. What about leadership in today’s hyperconnected environment? What are the new models for that? We can vision for the f…