2011

Leading Blog

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3 Ways to Be a Positive Leader

Leading Blog

This is a guest post by best-selling author and speaker, Jon Gordon about the value of developing positive relationships with the people you lead. In a world filled with busyness and stress, I find that too often leaders can act like hard-charging, fast-driving bus drivers that have a vision and goal within their sights and they’ll run over anyone – even their own employees – to reach their destination.

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Innovation Creates Uncertainty

Leading Blog

We don’t like uncertainty. It’s not comfortable. We want innovation. We like creativity. It’s engaging. But innovation creates uncertainty. So while we say we want creativity and innovation we often reject it because it is new, different and risky. It takes us to places that we are not familiar with and places where we don’t have all the answers. The irony is that while we say we like innovation we develop a deep bias against it.

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Best Leadership Books of 2011

Leading Blog

W E HAVE more recorded information about leadership now than at any other time in history. Most of it deals with the surface turbulence, which is important but not complete. In all of this information there is the sense too, that perhaps we have lost the wisdom we need and that maybe some new thing will help us to avoid what we already know and don’t want to do.

Books 284
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Maxwell's 5 Levels of Leadership

Leading Blog

Over 30 years ago, John Maxwell began developing the 5 Levels of Leadership. It has been presented before but never to this depth and completeness. The 5 Levels express a way to understand and organize your leadership growth. Each of the levels build on the previous one and you can only progress to the next level once you have mastered the previous level.

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The Four Hallmarks of Bad Strategy

Leading Blog

Strategy expert and author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy , Richard Rumelt says that bad strategy “grows out of specific misconceptions and leadership dysfunctions.” In short it is goals and not action. “It assumes that goals are all you need. It puts forward strategic objectives that are incoherent and, sometimes, totally impracticable. It uses high-sounding words and phrases to hide these failings.

Strategy 285
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5 Leadership Lessons: What if You Could Take Control of Your Life with One Decision?

Leading Blog

Great leaders know they cannot let others determine their moods and behaviors. The decision is ours. David Pollay wrote The Law of the Garbage Truck to remind us that “it is not our duty to absorb the frustrations, anxieties, and disappointments of other people. We were not put on earth to carry other people’s negative energy, nor were we created to burden others with ours.

Energy 284
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7 Essential Attributes for Picking Good Leaders

Leading Blog

We complain about our leaders. So we eventually get rid of them and we move on to the next one with the hope that it will be different this time. But it’s not. And we’re back where we started. Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran ask Why Are We Bad at Picking Good Leaders? “For starters,” they write, “because selecting the right people can be very, very, hard.