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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

On the Lookout for Wisdom

I was trying to understand the popularity of websites like Yelp.com and Digg.com. These sites rely on the so-called Wisdom of Crowds to identify the best places to eat, shop, etc. [Yelp] and to determine what news is REALLY news [Digg].  Apparently,  when we somehow aggregate the knowledge and information of a large number of people, we come […]