Mike Bell's Leadership Wisdom

Lasting Leadership

A new book, Lasting Leadership, interviews 25 business leaders including

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com;
Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group;
Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway;
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers;
Peter Drucker, the educator and author;
William (Bill?) Gates, chairman of Microsoft;
Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM;
and more of the usual suspects.

The book identifies eight attributes of leadership, each of which has its own chapter, that are evident to varying degrees in these individuals.


1. They are able to build a strong corporate culture.

2. They are truth-tellers.

3. They are able to find and cater to under-served markets.

Seven Levels of Organisational Consciousness

This is taken from an excellent book called Liberating the Corporate Soul by Richard Barrett.

Where does your organisation stand? It probably spans two or three levels.

1. Survival Consciousness

· The first need of an organisation is financial survival

· The danger is that by becoming entrenched in SC organisations develop a preoccupation with the bottom line

· This results in excessive control and territorial behaviour

· Takeovers to plunder assets rather than strategic alliance

· People and Earth as resources to be exploited

· Highest levels of fear at SC

The Support Economy

This is a great book by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxim

The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism.

Read the blurb below for a summary of why our current stage of capitalism is on the way out.

Shoshana Zuboff also brings a valuable female perspective to our industrial history and shares some surprising and illuminating illustrations of the role that women have played in our economic development over the last 300 years.

Irresponsible Followership

I thought this was a great concept. Keith Grint, "an authority on leadership from Oxford University's Said Business School" uses the term to describe the senior executives of companies like Marconi, Enron and Worldcom who he says must have known that trouble was boiling up but said nothing.

In an article in Sunday Times, 28th Sept 2003, he goes on to say "we are inclined to assume a capacity for infallability in our leaders that seldom exists - a heroic model of leadership that is both dangerous and dangerously naive."

Sunday Times and search on Keith Grint. You have to register to read the full article - Why business is no place for yes men

By the way, I searched google and found that Keith Grint has written a book called The Art of Leadership which costs $97 in hardback and $20 in paperback. How does that work?

The ART of Coaching

I attended a local ‘Growing Business’ conference yesterday to meet old friends, network and keep in touch with what’s going on in the region. One of the presentations I sat in on was The ART of Coaching by Matt Somers

I would not be surprised if a large part of his audience were coaches – I met another three – and there was a great climate of openness and exchange.

Matt had a simple but powerful message that we are all coaches or at least have the capability to be. And our capability as a coach was determined by three factors:

Awareness – our capability to bring high quality focus and attention

Responsibility – our capability to help the client ‘believe they can’ and take responsibility

Trust – our capability to build trust in our self, the process and for the client to trust themselves

This was not the whole story and you can read more is his short book Coaching in a Week

The ART of Coaching

I attended a local ‘Growing Business’ conference yesterday to meet old friends, network and keep in touch with what’s going on in the region. One of the presentations I sat in on was The ART of Coaching by Matt Somers

I would not be surprised if a large part of his audience were coaches – I met another three – and there was a great climate of openness and exchange.

Matt had a simple but powerful message that we are all coaches or at least have the capability to be. And our capability as a coach was determined by three factors:

Awareness – our capability to bring high quality focus and attention

Responsibility – our capability to help the client ‘believe they can’ and take responsibility

Trust – our capability to build trust in our self, the process and for the client to trust themselves

This was not the whole story and you can read more is his short book Coaching in a Week

Some Self-Development Books ...

I find it immensely rewarding when I find that I have contributed in some way to another persons awakening or questing. At one of our regular evening

Inquiries last night, an Inquiry into Happiness, a friend of a friend turned up because he was curious. Can’t think of a better reason.

He came straight from work and dressed in a pinstriped suit. I only share this image as an example of an increasing number of managers and executives I meet who are starting to realise that there is something missing from their life.

He left, I think, with many more questions that when he arrived. But also a new world had begun to open up for him in which logic and scientific rationale did not dominate.

He asked for ideas about books that he might begin reading. So I perused my bookshelves and came up with these for starters.

Leadership Dynamics

In his new book, 'Leadership Dynamics - some reflections in the fundamentals of business leadership', Gustaf Almenberg sets out to create new maps of the fundamentals of what successful leaders do, using an open systems approach.

Almenberg asks in his opening paragraph, why another book on leadership when there are so many already? This book, for me, give a map or a new lens through which I can view and assess my leadership behaviour. It gives me a skeleton of ‘what’ to which I can add the flesh of ‘how’.

I would recommend this book to all managers and leaders who are increasingly trying to make sense of what they need to be doing to be successful. The book can be bought direct from Gustaf - email him at gustaf.almenberg@mailbox.euromail.se for £25 inc. post and packing, or through MiL Publishers

Know Thy Self

Having raised the subject of self-knowledge yesterday, I felt it needed a bit more explanation. In Debbie Benstead and Storm Constantine's book The Inward Revolution, they say explain self-knowledge as:

* An awareness of what makes up the people we are
* A thorough knowledge of why we have certain beliefs, principles adn attitudes
* A way to understand what it is we are seaching for, in the belieft that we are not different as seekers from the things we seek
* A means to acquire and hold on to lasting happiness without the drive for gartification
* A means to attain permanence and security in an inconsistent and changing world.

Most of us tend to avoid looking at ourself in this way. Its easier to focus our attention elsewhere. Yet one source of our leadership capability is our own self-knowledge and our ability to lead ourselves. If we cannot lead ourselves, how can we expect to lead others?

I will return to this theme regularly.

To the Desert and Back

To the Desert and Back is a great story about business transformation at a division of Unilever.

Its a compelling read because it gets deep beneath the surface and you get a real sense of the impacts, positive and negative, that the change processes had on many of the players.

My hero is Tex Gunning, the new chairman of the division; a visionary and leader of the transformation. Here he is addressing a Young Leaders meeting in May 2002:

"When faced with our own humanity, we become aware of all the love and pain we carry. We reconnect to our souls, and we meet again our true selves. When we see authenticity or meet indigenous peoples, when we connect with nature, observe animals, play with children, and talk to the elderly, we can have such experiences. But how do you make such experiences meaningful? How do you capture those feelings and move on to a higher level of consciousness and make it part of your life?