Earlier this week at the Palm Springs International Film Festival we watched a new film, “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.” The film, adapted from the 2007 novel of the same name by Paul Torday, tells the story of feckless British fisheries expert Dr. Andrew Jones [played by Ewan McGregor], who is approached by consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot [played […]
Category Archives: Leadership and Management Wisdom
Real Leaders
During the 2000 presidential campaign, David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” covered John McCain‘s unsuccessful bid to become the Republican Party’s nominee for President for Rolling Stone Magazine. He rode with McCain’s Straight Talk Express for a week in February of that year and wrote […]
Good Coach, Bad Coach
Except for those unfortunate few of us who, like moths attracted to a flame, find themselves drawn toward every new piece of reporting on the scandals at Penn State and Syracuse, most of us are sick and tired of hearing about so-called “coaches” who took advantage of their titles and positions to abuse young boys. […]
The Artful Nudge
[This post was co-authored with Alan Engelstad and Karl Moore, and was previously published in shorter form under the title Nudging Your Way to Real Change at Forbes.com. Alan is an adjunct professor at McGill’s Desaultel Faculty of Management where he teaches this approach at the International Masters for Health Leadership. Karl is a professor at the Desautels […]
A Belated Thank You
Twenty years ago I went to a leadership development program called LeaderLab at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. We spent a week in Greensboro, then worked on our leadership action plan back at the office for about three months, then reconvened in Greensboro for a week to revisit and revise our action […]
Trade-Offs
How often do you find yourself confronted by a situation where you have to make a choice, and none of the options under consideration seems to be a perfect fit for your current needs or desires? It happens all of the time. Examples abound, and we need look no further than the disturbing political three-ring […]
Teamwork – and All That Jazz
Of Castles and Cultures
A number of years ago I attended a seminar on Power and Influence delivered by Charles Dwyer, a long-time faculty member at the Wharton School. Dr. Dwyer argued that organizations don’t have any life force, so they can’t have missions, values, visions goals objectives or purposes. Only PEOPLE can have these things, because only people […]
Ten Commandments of Teamwork
A group of my students were working on a team project, and were experiencing some problems getting their act together. Nothing too serious, just the sort of symptomatic problems that seem to get in the way of top-notch performance from team efforts. Why do we seem to have problems working together on teams? Everybody knows […]
Leadership Wisdom of the Cheshire Cat
A student in one of my Leader Development Program sessions was grappling with his role as a leader in his organization. He felt that he had never sought out a leadership role, and wasn’t sure that it was something that he really wanted to do. He was fascinated by Nelson Mandela’s concept of “Lead from […]