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Gen. Stan McChrystal: The Leader as Gardener
How do you view your role of leader or manager? Is it as a chess master or a gardener?
The…
Leadership
Most of the widely disseminated information on leadership is just plain fluff or borderline useless, disconnected from the reality of what practicing managers and leaders face on a daily basis.
I try to cut through the noise and uncover actionable, proven frameworks that lie further upstream.
104 posts
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James MacGregor Burns on Self-Actualization, Self-Esteem and Effective Leadership
Can you teach leadership? What is the link between self-esteem, or the lack thereof, and effective leadership? What about Maslow&…
Creative Leaders vs Controlling Leaders
In his classic The Adult Learner, Malcolm Knowles makes the distinction between creative leaders and controlling ones. By understanding teams…
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Barbara Kellerman on the Blindspots of Leadership Courses and Programs
The leadership industry and its proponents (including yours truly) can almost come across as religious fanatics and preachers spreading the…
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The Case for Naive Leaders over Clever, Sophisticated Ones
Being naive has a default negative connotation —ignorant, uninformed, incredulous, or even incompetent. One class of people who exclusively avoid…
Peter Drucker’s Memo to Elon Musk on Managing Knowledge Work
The ongoing turbulence at Twitter under the mercurial and coercive leadership of Elon Musk is perhaps one of the biggest…
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Carl Rogers On Why Teaching is Overrated
Carl Rogers, one of the most pre-eminent psychologists of the twentieth century, delivered a speech at Harvard in 1952 that…
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Mintzberg on Managing the Flow of Information and Influence
Managerial effectiveness often hinges on how well their unit interacts not just internally but externally as well. In one definition,…
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What is Implicit Leadership Theory and How it Affects Careers
What makes someone “leadership material”? We would like to think there’s an objective answer to that question. But often…
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How Bezos Thinks - All his Frameworks and Mental Models
In 1994 Amazon was just an idea in someone’s head, that of Jeff Bezos. Today it's a…
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Leadership can be learned but cannot be taught — the role of coaching
Leadership as with any skill is something we can learn. Paradoxically though, it cannot be taught. How do we navigate…
Using Deliberate Practice to Increase Leadership Effectiveness
Deliberate practice is one of the few proven research-backed frameworks to improve performance. But it's not used enough…