Between our coaching calls, Naveen, an Indian vice president of a technology company based in Bangalore, diligently read the handful of articles I had asked him to look over. In our next call, he seemed perplexed by the term “authentic leadership” that he had seen in a couple of the readings. What does it mean […]
When President Trump was asked, before his recent meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, how he would tell whether Mr. Un was serious about denuclearization, he responded, “I think within the first minute, I’ll know.” How, a reporter asked? “I just, my touch, my feel, that’s what, that’s what I do,” the president […]
As the Wall Street Journal and other news media reported recently, Tesla’s 46-year-old founder Elon Musk is waging a war on middle managers. In a memo to employees, he has vowed to flatten the management hierarchy in an effort to improve communication. As he put it in his memo, “… people are forced to talk […]
We know from research that: there are two types of empathy – cognitive empathy and emotional or affective empathy, different parts of our brain are activated when we are using one versus the other, and each has a different impact on our behavior. For example, Gilin et al. conducted some studies to determine the specific […]
Taking Advantage of Those “Leadership Moments” After the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed eleven men, BP CEO Tony Hayward infamously said, “I’d like my life back.” This was the beginning of the end for Mr. Hayward, who was fired from his position a couple of months later. We have all seen this before – how […]
Paul was a successful executive whom I met a few times, and over the course of several conversations, learned his life story. Abandoned by his drug-afflicted mother, he grew up in an orphanage until he was adopted by a couple when he was five. Paul was sexually abused, and at thirteen he left home and […]
Johan de Nysschen (previously the successful head of Audi of America) was appointed to lead the Cadillac division of General Motors in 2014. When he joined GM, one of his first decisions was to place physical and psychological distance between Cadillac and Detroit, moving Cadillac’s headquarters from Motown to Manhattan in 2015. In New York, […]
The headline in one of the New York Times’ sections recently read: San Francisco Lands a Disrupter. Who was the Times referring to another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, perhaps? No, this was the well-regarded conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who will be taking over the San Francisco Symphony and is referred to by the paper as one of […]
In one of my recent conversations with my twenty-something daughter, she asked me, as a management professor and consultant, why I thought so many CEOs were jerks. (Note that although my daughter is well-informed, she does not work in the corporate world and certainly does not know any CEOs personally.) I proceeded to explain to […]