Weekend Leadership Reading: 4/27/18

  |   Weekend Leadership Reading Print Friendly and PDF

Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about the traits of a transformative CEO, the Silicon Valley Myth, Steven Pinker on counter-Enlightenment convictions, making strategy work, and fixing wrong-headed leadership.

From Lars Faseste: The Five Traits of Transformative CEOs

“Transformation is an imperative for most companies today. In a fast-moving environment characterized by digitization, organizations face threats that emerge more rapidly—and from a wider range of competitors—than ever before. In this setting, some companies need to transform their organizations to stay on top, while others face a decline in performance and require dramatic measures to turn themselves around. In either case, transformations are extremely tough to pull off. Only about 30% of large-scale efforts succeed. No wonder the CEO job is more demanding than ever.”

Book Suggestion: The CEO Next Door: The 4 Behaviors that Transform Ordinary People into World-Class Leaders by Elena L. Botelho and Kim R. Powell

From Greg Satell: The Silicon Valley Myth

“Over the past few decades, Silicon Valley has been such a powerful engine for entrepreneurship in technology that, all too often, it is considered to be some kind of panacea. Corporate executives seek to inject ‘Silicon Valley DNA’ into their cultures and policymakers point to venture-funded entrepreneurship as a solution for all manner of problems. This is a dangerous mindset. The Silicon Valley model, for all of its charms, was developed for a specific industry, at a specific time, which was developing a specific set of technologies. While it can offer valuable lessons for other industries and other problems, it is not universally applicable.”

Book Suggestion: Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell

From Quillette Magazine: Steven Pinker: Counter-Enlightenment Convictions are ‘Surprisingly Resilient’

“Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist and is the author of several books including Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress published by Viking Press earlier this year. Editors at Quillette contacted Professor Pinker for a Q&A: what follows is a transcript of our Q&A, conducted via email.”

Thanks to Stephen Landry for pointing me to this post.

Book Suggestion: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

From Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit: Eight shifts that will take your strategy into high gear

“Developing a great strategy starts with changing the dynamics in your strategy room. Here’s how.”

Book Suggestion: Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt

From Bill Barnett: Wrong-headed Leadership

“I see wrong-headed leadership in business all the time. Like Stalin, business leaders routinely believe that ideas are true because they want the ideas to be true.”

Book Suggestion: Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute

Join The Conversation

What People Are Saying

There are no comments yet, why not be the first to leave a comment?