Mike Bell's Leadership Wisdom

The Leader's New Work - Case Study

An Inspiring Case Study of Leadership, Personal Mastery and Culture Change

"In 1998, Intuit Customer Support embarked on a change program that would transform our technical support operation into a fully profitable strategic business unit for Intuit, Inc. The program we are using to deal with the involvement and innovation issues this complex rapid change requires is called CS2000.

As we developed the curriculum for 'The Leader's New Work'; we knew and believed certain things:

We believe excellent leaders, are so, because of a level of mindful, self-awareness, the quality of attention, and the discipline of innerwork, the degree of balance in their lives, and their commitment to their own vision, values and truths.

Pride Building

How did:

Mary Cadagin, manager at Fannie Mae, the US mortgage lender, motivate 550 employees to do their ‘day jobs’ all week and also work 13 consecutive weekends, including all-night Friday, with no extra pay, to move a data centre involving 300 business applications, 577 servers, 1.8 million feet of cable and 35 miles of fibre, to a new location 25 miles away without a single interruption to the companies business?

Ralph Harding, Plant Manager at a GM plant that was due for closure, turn the factory into the lowest-cost producer in GM, with the lowest warranty costs as well?

Read How to Lead Now – Getting Extraordinary Performance When You Can’t Pay For It in FastCompany magazine to learn about other similar stories and how they did it.

The Leadership Inquiry

Our first public Leadership Inquiry last week proved to be a great success.

The Leadership Inquiry is designed to explore leadership challenges. It is a learning community of leaders dedicated to improving the quality of their leadership by insightful dialogue and grounded discourse to ensure breakthrough ideas and concrete action.

The Inquiry provides a rare opportunity for leaders to share stories, learn from one another and explore the latest thinking, frameworks and case studies. Each Inquiry is stimulated by a compelling leadership issue. The innovative design allows dialogue on the whole issue and, in smaller groups, focus on a topic within the issue.

The Metro Experiment

Read about how J Sandifur, CEO and visionary leader of Metropolitan Mortgage and Securities tried a bold experiment:The Metro Experiment

"Sandifur and his Senior Leadership Team decided to undertake something virtually unheard of in American business: turn their company into a classroom/laboratory/opportunity for human development.

"It would appear that Sandifur and Metro's commitment to nurture the minds, bodies and spirits of its employees is working, for them and for the organization. They are harbingers of what must happen throughout the world's workplaces: a shift in consciousness from concern about the numbers only to an equally-intense concern about hearts and souls."