The Leadership Think Tank group on Linked In has been discussing the difference between leadership and management for several months now. The discussion shows no signs of running out of steam. One fundamental difference between leadership and management revolves around (the need for) control. The tools of management benefit from control over the situation or…
Tag Archive: leadership
Leadership Lessons from a Presidential Campaign Manager
David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign, addressed the German Project Management Forum in Berlin yesterday via satellite. I was busy translating for colleagues who couldn’t keep up with his (for non-native speakers) slightly too fast delivery. I’d no time to take notes, so this is just a a rough summary. The speech…
What Type of Leader am I?
I came across an online Enneagram test today; it pegged me correctly as a 9w8. Looking around the site, I noticed a Famous Leader test, which comes in different sizes. When I took the nine question version of the test, my style came out to be Albert Einstein. What Famous Leader Are You? personality tests…
Expanding on “A Basic Equation of Leadership”
A blog post I wrote about six months ago, called A Basic Equation of Leadership, still attracts lots of traffic; it’s easily my most-read posting here. So, in the coming weeks I’ll be expanding on the ideas in the original post, which was a tad cryptic, with a series of entries. If you have questions…
The Best Advice I Ever Got
The current issue of Fortune contains mini-interviews with 22 well-known people from business and politics, including the usual suspects, e.g. Bill Gates (together with his father) and Warren Buffet. The interview with Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, caught my eye, since he describes how John Doerr recommended a coach to him in 2001….
Returning to The Corner Office
The New York Times, Sunday Edition, has been running a series The Corner Office over the past several weeks. In each, a senior manager is interviewed abou their take on leadership. Today’s interview, with Eduardo Castro-Wright, In a Word, He wants Simplicity points to the known short-comings in many MBA trainings: people skills. He makes…
He wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects
Nice interview with Richard Andersen, CEO of Delta Airlines, in today’s NY Times, “He wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects” . He talks about the importance of communication skills and the dangers of Powerpoint –people get used to talking in bullets and begin to lose the ability to formulate complete sentences. Another interesting snippet is about…
How much initiative do you want?
When discussing with clients how to lead subordinates, one question that arises often is, how much initiative should my people show? In their classic HBR article, Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? Oncken and Wass lay out a five-level scale of managerial initiative (1 – 5 in the figure). My clients’ staff are more resourceful…
No Agenda = No Meeting
Seth Godin recently distilled a great list about getting serious about your meeting problem. It highlights the problem that many people in companies face: being in meetings all day. If you’ve wondered when the work gets done, for some people the answer is that they have forgotten what work involves. The day is taken up…
When Gen-F meets the Cap’n
At the weekend, I worked with a group of military officers who are transitioning to civilian life. Two of the hot talking points were the workshop style and the differences between leadership style in the military and civilian spheres. Their core leadership style (as laid out in the manual) is strongly hierarchical – which makes…
