manedge

Music composer Elliot Carter celebrated his 100th birthday last week with a concert at Carnegie Hall. It featured a 17-minute piece for piano and orchestra that Carter wrote when he was 98. Carter has already lived three times as long as Schubert and 65 years more than Mozart. Yet his first opera premiered in 1999 and he produced seven works in 2007 and six more this year. Since he turned 90, the composer who many critics rank among the greatest ever, has churned out more than 40 pieces and he shows no signs of slowing down. Aficionados say he’s still writing at the top of his form and every piece has new ideas that he’s trying out along with subtle refinements of those presented earlier. At an individual level, Carter’s life offers a heroic example of unwavering faith married to unstinting effort. This can be particularly inspiring to younger contenders who fear loss of heart and burn-out. If he can be that productive at 100, just imagine how much you could do even if you make a fresh...

Randel S Carlock, the first Berghmans Lhoist chaired professor in entrepreneurial leadership and director of the Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise, has reviewed Oliver Stone's latest film W in INSEAD KNOWLEDGE. The review has useful tips for parents. And as Carlock observes, had George W Bush been groomed differently by his parents, the world would have been a different place altogether. The new Oliver Stone film W explores an important concern for business and wealthy families – how parent-child relationships shape a child's personality development and, specifically, individual drives and motivations. The coming of age drama could be many family businesses where a feckless son struggles to redeem himself by overtaking his preferred younger sibling to succeed his father as head of the family dynasty. The Oedipal conflict between father and son, an ever present mother-father-son triangle, an oldest son's birth order expectations and a dose of sibling riv...

Mike Brearley is a qualified psychoanalyst. He is also among the game’s legendary captains. Brearley’s strategic skills and leadership qualities transformed England into a formidable force from the mid to late 70s. Captaincy was always his strongest attribute whether leading Cambridge, Middlesex or England. The 66-year-old Brearley retains his passion for the game. A part of the English media covering the India-England series, he shared his thoughts with 'The Hindu' in an interview. Q. What is captaincy? How would you define it? A. You cannot really define captaincy. Can you define female beauty? I think captaincy is a lot about having a passion for tactics…getting the best out of people. Each cricketer is different and you first need to understand a player, his strengths and his weaknesses. I don’t like the word man-management, which is more about sitting in a chair and sending out instructions. Captaining a cricket team has several more dimensions to it. A captain has to reac...

In chimpanzee groups, there is a strict pecking order, with apes lower down the order striving to move further up and eventually reach the top. Political assassinations, where two juniors form an alliance and kill the chimp at the top are not uncommon. We see human parallels to this in assassinations, wars and the jockeying for positions within organisations. Source: The Inner Ape by Frans de Waal Condensed from: Our place in creation , SPiritual Link magazine, November 2008, Science of the Soul Research Centre, Vol. 4, Issue 11

Book Excerpt A Sense of Urgency By John P. Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School . The problem with using crises to reduce complacency and create urgency is that the tactic is a potential diamond sitting on a rock surrounded by quicksand and very nasty beasts. Any naiveté about the downside risks can cause disaster. Big Mistake Number 1: Assuming that crises inevitably will create the sense of urgency needed to perform better. At a major European retailer, margins were shrinking year after year because fashionable boutiques were taking its top-of-the-line business, and discounters were taking away its low-end business. Then the European edition of the Wall Street Journal published an explosive article spelling out many of the firm's problems. The CEO had two weeks' warning, but instead of alerting others or working to kill the story, he deliberately chose to do nothing. Not only did he not warn others, except o...

This article was written by Laura Villacrusis-Weaver, a leadership consultant with The Refinery Leadership Partners, an international consulting company, in co-operation with Refinery co-principal Rosie Steeves (rosie@refineryleadership.com). For more ideas about leadership development, visit www.refineryleadership.com. This article was previously published in Business in Vancouver in July 2008. A leader I used to work with amazed me once when he showed me his personal leadership journal. His journaling wasn’t what amazed me--many leaders try this simple, yet powerful development activity--but that the journal itself was so thick and well-worn. He’d been writing in it at least once a week, he told me, for six years. Many leaders start journaling with the best of intentions. They get into it for a while, at least until “real work” gets in the way and their journal is relegated to a desk drawer, mostly blank and completely forgotten. But my old co-worker would neve...

The way people buy has gone through a massive revolution in recent years: thanks to blogs, review sites and chat rooms, we no longer have to rely on what a company says about its products and services — we can read what our fellow consumers think about what they’ve bought, and make our own decisions bearing those views in minds. The result? Empowered customers who know exactly what they want and who can now explore many ways to get it. Many companies, however, just won’t accept that things have changed and haven’t adjusted their marketing efforts to match. In Crowd Surfing , David Brain and Martin Thomas explain what marketers, advertisers and brand specialists need to do to communicate with today’s savvier consumers. They include case studies of successes and failures from the business world and beyond, and interview leaders such as Michael Dell and Sebastian Coe to help illustrate their points. About the book - Crowd Surfing Surviving and thriving in the age of consumer empowerme...

Abraham Zaleznik wrote about "The Dynamics of Subordinacy" more than four decades ago. Fifteen years ago, Jack Gabarro and John Kotter published a piece called "Managing Your Boss," in which they advocated: (1) understanding your boss and his or her "goals and objectives, pressures, strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, and preferred work styles"; (2) understanding yourself and your needs, including "strengths and weaknesses, personal style, and predisposition toward dependence on authority figures"; and (3) developing and maintaining a relationship that is centered around such things as frequent communication, an understanding of mutual expectations, dependability and honesty, and selective use of "your boss's time and resources." Now Barbara Kellerman in her new book, Followership , asks where leaders would be without good followers. This question may be particularly significant in an age when followers find it easier to organize,...

Writing in the Spring 2008 issue of MIT - Sloan Management Review , George S. Day and Paul J. H. Schoemaker talk of vigilant leaders. Vigilant leaders are those who make a practice of being abundantly alert and deeply curious so that they can detect, and act on, the earliest signs of threat or opportunity. They seek to nurture equally vigilant employees by modeling such behavior and by providing incentives for managers to look for — and interpret — weak signals. While such icons as Andy Grove and Jack Welch exemplify vigilant CEOs, the trait remains in short supply. That is a conclusion the coauthors reached after surveying 119 global companies about their overall capacity for diligence. Among their findings: Just 23% of the businesses were run by CEOs who tried to pick up weak signals from the periphery. Most leaders, they theorize, rise to the top by demonstrating superior operational skills. To help leaders recognize and develop the habit of vigilance, the researchers examine in det...

If you’ve found yourself putting off important tasks over and over again, it’s time you consult a psychologist. Going by a new study, you may be suffering from a condition that can require therapy. A team of international researchers has found that procrastinators are impatient people. In fact, they have traced a clear link between the two opposite traits which are “actually different aspects of the same condition.” “Procrastination seriously affects our productivity at work and can cost people considerable amounts of money as they postpone work indefinitely. “People don’t want to procrastinate — it is just that their impatience gets in the way, researcher Ernesto Reuben of the Kellogg School of Management told The Daily Telegraph . — PTI Ref: http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/11/stories/2008021156502000.htm For the full paper, send a mail to manedge@gmail.com

It’s critical to distribute information quickly and reliably throughout an organization. Today, e-mail is the primary means of information dispersal, but is it the most efficient? In their paper titled Productivity Effects of Information Diffusion in Networks, t he authors – Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson and Marshall W Van Alstyne – analyzed 10 months’ worth of e-mail (more than 125,000 messages in total), as well as five years of revenue data and employee interactions at a mid-sized executive recruiting firm. They identified two types of information that employees shared with one another. The first was “event news”: simple, declarative messages, about such news as forthcoming layoffs or a significant change in top management, that were spread both vertically and laterally throughout the organization in a rapid and pervasive manner. The information moved quickly among employees with little regard to reporting relationships. The second type was labeled “discussion topics”: more specific...