Leadership Reading to Start Your Week: 9/18/17

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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 a true measure of leadership success, six essential skills of shared leadership, how to make innovation strategy work, innovation is never one thing, how women and men experience work differently, what makes a great workplace for women, and how to create psychological safety for a high performing team.

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 Alec Pendleton: The Right Job for the Tool

“The challenge is to be sure that every job is undertaken by the appropriate tool — and the first step should be to make sure that we understand exactly what job needs to be done.”

From Kevin Cashman: A True Measure Of Leadership Success: Seven Guiding Principles

“Taking a true measure of our leadership success is no easy task. Do we measure net profit? Gross revenue? Customer satisfaction and loyalty? EBITDA? Quarterly results? Stock price? Social responsibility? While all these yardsticks are crucial, do they really get to the essence of what sustains leadership for the long run?”

From Daniel Goldman: Six Essential Skills of Shared Leadership

“Sharing leadership demands emotional intelligence. Leaders who are strong in several of these six emotional intelligence competencies will be more effective when leading collaboratively”

Book Suggestion: Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson

Industries and Analysis

From Chief Executive: The Secret Ingredient of American Manufacturing: Some Japanese Flavor

“If you’ve heard that American manufacturing is in decline, consider this: The real output of U.S. manufacturers has nearly doubled in the past 30 years. Automation can claim only part of the credit. The gains should also be attributed to the introduction of new management practices, many of which first took hold in Japan.”

From Marie Driscoll: Startups with Big Retail Impacts

“The Robin Report has written extensively about the many retail business models that are rooted in the 80s, mostly oblivious to the technological advances that could streamline inefficiencies, better allocate capital while also increasing customer satisfaction. Today, most retail C-suite executives are inundated with a steady stream of new technology vendors that promise the moon and the stars. These retailers know technology will support omnichannel customer-centric initiatives; the question is, how to choose?”

From Ben Thompson: Disney’s Choice

“Cable TV created a world where differentiated content could profit from everyone; that is why it will be hard for Disney to make the choices streaming will force on them.”

Book Suggestion: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

Innovation and Technology

From Tom Puthiyamadam: How to Make Innovation Strategy Work

“Remember the time — like, a year or two ago — when moving to the cloud, developing a mobile strategy, and analyzing big data represented the cutting edge of business technology? Well, even as many companies are still waiting to see the results of these transformations, a new wave of technologies — artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and augmented reality, to name a few — is already shaping the present and future of business.”

From Greg Satell: Innovation Is Never 1 Thing (Actually It’s 3 Things)

“Every entrepreneur dreams of having that single moment of epiphany where everything falls into place. Many search for their entire careers for that one big idea that will make the difference between incredible success and frustrating mediocrity. Few ever find it and many that do end up crashing and burning along the way.”

From MIT Sloan Executive Education: A third way of innovating: The Power of Little Ideas

“There is no shortage of innovation advice—you have surely heard the persistent drumbeat, ‘disrupt or be disrupted,’ for example. Conventional wisdom says that there are two types of innovation: incremental or radical. But this is a false dichotomy.”

Book Suggestion: The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation by David Robertson and Kent Lineback

Women and the Workplace

From London Business School: No contest

“Men and women respond differently to competition. It’s vital your organization knows why, says Selin Kesebir.”

From Katie Kuehner-Hebert: How do women and men experience work differently?

“Women have more issues around trust in the workplace than men, and they also feel less empowered and have greater concerns over pay, according to Aon’s report, ‘The Gender: Gap Why Men and Women Experience Work Differently.’”

From Jessica Rohman and Tabitha Russell: What Makes a Great Workplace for Women? (Not What Most Companies Think)

“In researching the 2017 Best Workplaces for Women, Great Place to Work uncovered important gaps in how women and men feel about their careers, as well as encouraging factors that can improve the wellbeing of all employees.”

Book Suggestion: The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Women by Glynnis MacNicol and Rachel Sklar

Work and Learning Now and in the Future

From the London School of Economics: Companies should promote online knowledge exchange among employees

“They should invest not only in technology, but also in activities that promote psychological connection, writes Katsuhiko Yoshikawa.”

From Andrew Weaver: The myth of the skills gap

“The idea that American workers are being left in the dust because they lack technological savvy does not stand up to scrutiny. Our focus should be on coordination and communication between workers and employers.”

From Laura Delizonna: High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It

“‘There’s no team without trust,’ says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. He knows the results of the tech giant’s massive two-year study on team performance, which revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.”

Book Suggestion: How to Be Happy at Work: The Power of Purpose, Hope, and Friendship by Annie McKee

More Leadership Posts from Wally Bock

Boss’s Tip of the Week: Care for the people

One of your jobs is caring for your teammates. Here are three ways. One of 347 tips from Become a Better Boss One Tip at a Time.

Leadership: Stamp Out Assholes Now!

If you’ve got an awful boss, Bob Sutton’s Asshole Survival Guide will help. But we need to stop the flow of assholes into positions of power.

How to get the most value from a business book

The Intentional Reading Panel suggests ways you can get more from the business books you read.

Writing a book: Why I love beta readers

Beta readers can give you the kind of feedback that will turn your good business book into a great one. Don’t skip this important step.

Leaders and Strategies in Real Life: 9/12/17

This week it’s articles about Sameer Dholakia, Matthew Prince, Nely Galan, Niels B. Christiansen, and Jamie Dimon.

From the Independent Business Blogs: 9/13/17

Pointers to posts by Suzi McAlpine, Kevin Eikenberry, Lolly Daskal, Rebecca Elvy, and Mary Jo Asmus.

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.

The 347 tips in my ebook can help you Become a Better Boss One Tip at a Time.

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