Mike Bell's Leadership Wisdom

Leaders Stumped by Innovation

A survey published Accenture shows that the biggest challenges facing businesses who need to innovate is not just releasing creativity, it is taking the ideas generated by the creative spirit and nurturing them until it can be successfully implemented.

This is not surprising when you think that the left-brain logic that dominates most leaders thinking in today's organisations has difficulty comprehending creativity and nurturing which required more right brain understanding.

We need to develop balanced leaders to meet todays challenges.

Serial Management Innovation

A recent HBR article, Gary Hamel suggests that to stay successful it is not enough for companies just to keep thinking up new ideas that competitors quickly copy, they need serial management innovation.

"The keys to serial management innovation? Tackle a big problem--as General Motors did by inventing the divisional structure to bring order to its sprawling family of companies. Search for radical management principles--as Visa's founders did when they envisioned self-organization--and created the first non-stock, for-profit membership enterprise. Challenge conventional management beliefs, which Toyota did by deciding that frontline employees--not top executives--make the best process innovators."

Mindfulness Meditation at Google

High flyers demand love and nurture

This interesting article from the Sunday Times suggests “the new generation expects a lot more support and personal development in their careers.”

The head of consulting at DDI says that bosses need to be “smart with heart” and “the new generation of high flyers will demand the kind of training with kid gloves used for the stars of the sports and entertainment worlds.”

To me this sounds neither smart or caring (heart). It sounds like a call to spoil high flyers and pander to their petty ego-based needs.

If they really want love (tough love?) and nurturing, would it not be better all around to help them develop the self authority, self responsibility and integrity and the full range of their potential that’s needed to be successful leaders in these complex times.

I would have thought the last thing we need in business is more prima-donnas. We need wisdom not celebrities.

Do Women Make Better Managers than Men?

"Women have for centuries been recognized as talented listeners, nurturers, motivators, excellent communicators. These very qualities that we once were told were unbusinesslike are precisely the qualities that business needs most to tap human potential." Mary Cunningham Agee

The new gender gap puts women in front of men, at least in school. So says Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize Winning economist, in a post on the blog he shares with Richard Posner. Ultimately, says Becker:

Whatever the explanation for the remarkable shift in college attendance rates of men and women during the past 40 years, this shift is likely to have major implications for future changes in the gender gap in average earnings, the fraction of heads of business that are women, and other measures of gender differences in achievement.

Here are four other reasons why the glass ceiling is breaking:

Where business meets jazz

“Born in a different time, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Miles Davis might have been known as the most successful corporate leaders in America instead of the most well-known jazz musicians. Why? Because of the incredible overlap between the worlds of jazz and business. The elements that make a jazz group phenomenal are similar to those that make companies great.” from CLO magazine

We think jazz is a great metaphor for jazz also - see jazzLEADERSHIP for information about our innovative leadership learning community.