Weekend Leadership Reading: 5/18/18

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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 mental models, how current ideas of ambition need a re-work, the CEO as Chief Enablement Officer, the risks of ‘Data Capitalism,’ and how crowdfunding is losing its luster.

From Greg Satell: How Mental Models Drive Strategy, Often For The Worse

“Ideas fuel business. They drive how we respond to customer problems and leverage market opportunities. The right idea can make a business work and, over time, our successes become ingrained in our mental models. The opposite is also true. If we begin with the wrong mental model, important problems become impossible to solve.”

Bonus: Shane Parrish has a great post titled “Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (113 Models Explained)

From Dorothy Dalton: Why business leaders need to redefine ambition

“Current perceptions of ambition are out of step with cultural shifts.”

From Stanislav Shekshnia, Kirill Kravchenko, and Elin Williams: CEOs Should Be Chief Enablement Officers

“Richard Rushton, CEO of Distell from South Africa, told us with conviction, ‘The days of the CEO who knows everything, makes every decision, exercises absolute control of the whole organisation are over.’ The contemporary CEO cannot pretend he or she knows more than other members of the organisation, has access to data and information they don’t and sees further ahead than anyone else. Today’s knowledge workers have superior technical skills, and technology has made information accessible to all. In management, as in other fields, collaboration has long since replaced individual genius as the principal source of creativity. Trying to apply the old model of determining strategy in the corner office and issuing orders is simply ineffective and inefficient today. From ‘Commander-in-Chief’, the CEO has become ‘Chief Enabler of the Organisation.’ His or her role is to enable other employees to perform.”

Book Suggestion: The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works by Ricardo Semler

From Yale Insights: Three Questions: Prof. Jack Balkin on Facebook and the Risks of ‘Data Capitalism’

“What does the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal say about the risks of trusting Facebook and other tech companies with our data? We talked with Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School and founder and director of the Information Society Project, whose proposal for making online companies ‘information fiduciaries’ has received new attention in the wake of the scandal.”

From Joyce M. Rosenberg: Crowdfunding loses luster as investment strategy for small businesses

“Begun two years ago with some big hopes, the option for small businesses to court investors through crowdfunding hasn’t turned into the windfall its supporters predicted.”

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