Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms, to start off your work week. I’m pointing you to articles about leadership, strategy, industries, innovation, women and work, and work and learning now and in the future. Highlights include why leaders should create meaningful environments, what the auto industry can learn from cloud computing, why innovation requires experimentation, challenges women in tech face and how to overcome them, and how office design today embraces flexible workspaces.

Be sure to look for dots that you can connect.

Note: Some links require you to register or are to publications that have some form of limited paywall.

Thinking about Leadership and Strategy

From Eric J. McNulty: Thinking Like a Leader: Three Big Shifts

“Leadership development often focuses on doing — the mastering and use of certain desirable skills and behaviors that concretely show someone to be leading. Competency-based models can provide lists of such skills, as well as attributes of their practice. But where leadership effectiveness really starts is with thinking — adopting a mental model that makes it possible to acquire those skills and demonstrate those behaviors in the first place.”

From Henrik Bresman: Why Leaders Should Create Meaningful Environments

“Organisations that empower and give meaning to their members are not only more dignified but also more innovative.”

From Boris Ewenstein, Wesley Smith, and Ashvin Sologar: Changing change management

“Research tells us that most change efforts fail. Yet change methodologies are stuck in a predigital era. It’s high time to start catching up.”

Industries and Analysis

From Maxwell Wessel: What the Auto Industry Can Learn from Cloud Computing

“Few other industries with such a pervasive and tangible impact on each of our lives have gone through recent periods of similar upheaval. Information technology, however, is one of those industries. We all interact with computers on a near daily basis, and like cars today, the IT industry has been undergoing its own transformation over the past 15 years.”

From Adheer Bahulkar and Manik Aryapadi: Fulfilling the Availability Promise

“Enabling an Omnichannel Inventory Management Strategy.”

From the Economist: Life is suite

“The hotel industry ought to be in a worse state than a hung-over guest who has drained the minibar. The financial crisis caused commercial-property prices to collapse and rooms to remain vacant. Hotels have suffered relentless disruption from the internet. Online travel agents, such as Expedia, take hefty commissions for bookings and sharing-economy upstarts such as Airbnb offer a cheap alternative. Yet the large American and European hotel firms are thriving.”

Innovations and Technology

From Singapore Management University: The business of innovation

“The ability to solve business problems creatively is admirable…and sometimes a matter of necessity.”

From Matt LaWell: The Big Problem With Big Data

“Why hoard your data like decades of newspapers and soup cans? Do something with it, and make it work for you and your company.”

From Janet Sernack: Innovation Requires Experimentation

“Whilst the average manager and leader may not fully appreciate the role of experimentation in innovation, it is widely accepted in innovation management circles, that there is no innovation without experimentation. This is because experimentation unlocks, through understanding the role of cause and effect, trial and error and field trials, the capacity for innovation.”

Women and the Workplace

From David Gelles: Salesforce Makes Strides Toward Gender Equality in Silicon Valley

“The company’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, started the Women’s Surge program to achieve gender equality in pay and promotion and to get more diversity at meetings.”

From Pam Belluck: Chilly at Work? A Decades-Old Formula May Be to Blame

“A study by Dutch scientists says most office buildings set temperatures based on a model developed in the 1960s that uses the metabolic rates of men.”

From Jane Lansing: Challenges Women in Tech Face — and how to Overcome them

“Sometimes it’s the small stuff that gets you. When I was a young software engineer over 35 years ago, I had no problem with overt sexual harassment. I knew how to shut that down in a nanosecond. But how many women in tech fields have the mechanisms to defend against the more-common minor outrages? It still pains me to remember the time my project manager insisted that a male colleague review the code I’d written for a new project – even though the colleague happened to be notoriously incompetent.”

Work and Learning Now and in the Future

From Randall S Peterson: Trust us

“New research by Randall S Peterson sheds fresh light on how trust works in small groups.”

From Theresa Johnston: People Challenges Can Sink Startups

“As a general partner at XSeed Capital, an early-stage investment firm in Silicon Valley, Robert Siegel knows how quickly poor management of human resources can sink a fledging business.”

From John Gallagher: Office design today embraces flexible workspaces

“The millennial generation, those young folks mostly in their 20s, get the credit or blame for a lot of changes in our workplaces today just as the baby boomers did in their day. But the experts at Herman Miller, the legendary maker of office furniture based in western Michigan, offer a counter view: They say it’s the nature of our daily tasks that has changed our office designs, not the age of the people sitting at the desk.”

More Leadership Posts from Wally Bock

Minims for Bosses

They’re not super-important, like maxims, but minims will help you do a better job as a boss.

By and About Leaders: 8/4/15

Pointers to pieces by and about John Stumpf, Joel S. Marcus, Neil Berman, Mike Sicoli, and Rich Kinder.

From the Independent Business Blogs: 8/5/15

Pointers to posts by Dan Rockwell, Nina Simosko, Susan Mazza, Mary Jo Asmus, and Scott Eblin.

Stories and Strategies from Real Life: 8/7/15

Pointers to stories about Perdue, Microsoft, Got Laundry, Converse, and Cisco.

Writing well gives you the edge in business and in life. If you want to get a book done, improve your blog posts, or make your web copy more productive, please check out my blog about business writing. My coaching calendar for authors and blog writers currently has time open. Please contact me if you’re interested.