I got a good chuckle from the cartoon drawn by Leonid Schneider, participant at a recent EMBO Lab Management course run by Leadership Sculptor near Heidelberg, Germany. While the cartoon emphasises the strong involvement of participants, I have to add a disclaimer that no participant has been injured during a lab management course! When… Continue Reading
Author Archives: cj
“I only need a minute …”
Interruptions have always been the bane of a researcher’s life and at the same time researchers need interactions to thrive. Most operate an open door policy and are annoyed about the level and style of interruption that ensures their own time is not so effectively used. In many cases, it seems that staff or students… Continue Reading
5 Things to check before you start your project
Gero Lomnitz has an oft-copied saying, “show me how your project starts and I can tell you how it will finish”. Usually, the painful projects start out badly and never really recover, despite our best efforts. We seem to be playing catch-up. Here are five things to sort out before you start your next project… Continue Reading
A mathematician’s approach to leadership
Most of my clients are curious about how a mathematician ended up as a Leadership Sculptor. You can read the biographical answer on my About Me page. However, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Another aspect is how my life as a mathematician has influenced my approach to the art of leadership. In this article,… Continue Reading
Why you should eat your cake later
Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund organized their first lab management course in 2002. After the 2005 edition, they issued the book Making the Right Moves (which you can download by following the link). Thomas R. Cech, then president of HHMI gave the keynote to the 2002 course. He shared the lessons… Continue Reading
Observe first, judge later
I recently asked a group of research leaders how they would respond, when one of their people was trying to insist that a picture from a result was showing something that wasn’t in the data. The answers were varied. A few focused on the person’s need to please, a few talked about the person forgetting… Continue Reading
Characteristics of great leaders
One of my favourite exercises in leadership workshops with people from R&D is to ask them to take a few moments to recall the best leader with whom or for whom they ever worked and think about what it is that makes this person special. For those who have no such candidate, I suggest they… Continue Reading
How leadership complements management
I’m often asked about the difference between leadership and management. While it is helpful to be clear about the differences, you need to be able to both lead and manage, if you want to produce top results and people. Field Marshal Lord Slim, responsible for the British campaign in Burma in WWII and a great… Continue Reading
What is leadership
Leadership is another of those things that people find hard to define, but can recognise it when they see it. I recently googled “leadership definition” and got 151 million hits, an indication that there are many definitions out there. A dictionary is usually a good starting point to understand a term. Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines… Continue Reading
Building the team that built “Watson”
When I was an undergraduate, artificial intelligence seemed to be a discipline long on promise and short on results. (Everthing was about “10 years away”, even 20 years later, it was still “10 years away”.) Therefore, I was pleasantly impressed when IBM’s Watson machine won an episode of the US quiz show Jeopardy in early… Continue Reading