Leaders Must be Spriritual

Spirituality is about inner engineering, transforming oneself from inside. Global financial crisis has exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of many corporate executives.

There is excessive focus on personal financial gains and not enough concern for making a difference to the society.

Spiritually rooted leaders do not see a conflict between the profit mission and the social mission.

Vijay Govindrajan
Professor
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and
Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric

Author of Ten Rules of Strategic Innovators

In an article "A Whole New Phase", in Corporate Dossier, The Economic Times, 9 January 2009, Page 2

High-commitment, High-performance leadership

The Uncompromising Leader. By: Eisenstat, Russell A., Beer, Michael, Foote, Nathaniel, Fredberg, Tobias, Norrgren, Flemming, Harvard Business Review, 00178012, Jul-Aug2008, Vol. 86, Issue 7/8


Leaders of high-commitment, high-performance organizations refuse to choose between people and profits


CEOs who take the commitment of their employees for granted risk destroying the social fabric of their organizations: While they move in one direction, the rest of the organization stays stuck or, worse, heads the opposite way.

HCHP leaders, however -- through intense, focused, and dogged day-to-day involvement with their people and operations -- manage to hold the center. They almost personally create the link between the people who do the work and the performance they must deliver.

The CEOs we studied did so by combining four strategies.

First, they earned the trust of their organizations through their openness to the unvarnished truth.

Second, they were deeply engaged with their people, and their exchanges were direct and personal; employees in the companies we studied had a particularly close connection with the CEO and were seldom surprised to meet him or her.

Third, having earned legitimacy and trust, these CEOs were able to mobilize their people around a focused agenda.

Finally, while they were all strong individuals, these senior leaders realized that they could succeed only as part of a committed leadership team, and they devoted considerable efforts to building their firm's collective leadership capabilities.



Russell A. Eisenstat (reisenstat@truepoint.com) is a former faculty member at Harvard Business School in Boston. Michael Beer (mbeer@hbs.edu) is a professor of business administration emeritus at Harvard Business School and chairman of the TruePoint Center for High Commitment and High Performance. Nathaniel Foote (nfoote@truepoint.com) is a former partner with McKinsey & Company. Tobias Fredberg (tobias.fredberg@chalmers.se) and Flemming Norrgren (flemming.norrgren@chalmers.se) are on the faculty of the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Eisenstat, Foote, Fredberg, and Norrgren are all fellows of the TruePoint Center as well as consultants at TruePoint Partners, whose mission is to help leaders build high-commitment, high-performance institutions.

Leadership - HBR Articles - 2006

Leadership

Are Leaders Portable?
Boris Groysberg, Andrew N.
McLean, and Nitin Nohria
May
Reprint R0605E ♦ OnPoint 429X;
OnPoint collection "Hiring the
Right Leaders" 4397

The Five Messages Leaders
Must Manage
John Hamm
May
Reprint R0605G ♦ OnPoint 432X

HBR Case Study: The CEO Who Couldn't Keep His Foot out of His Mouth
Lisa Burrell
With commentary by Roger Brown,
Torie Clarke, Ron Heifetz, and
John Biggs
December
Reprint R0612A, Reprint Case
only R0612X, Reprint
Commentary only R0612Z

HBR Case Study: Indispensable
John Beeson
With commentary by John W. Rowe,
Edward Reilly, Jay A. Conger,
Douglas A. Ready, and Michael Jordan
September
Reprint R0609A, Reprint Case
only R0609X, Reprint
Commentary only R0609Z

Leadership in Literature
A conversation with business ethicist
Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.
Diane Coutu
March
Reprint R0603B

Leadership Under Fire
Dov Frohman
December
Reprint R0612H

Lessons in Power: Lyndon Johnson Revealed
A conversation with historian
Robert A. Caro
Diane Coutu
April
Reprint R0604B

Responsibility Junkie
A conversation with Keith Lockhart
Glenn Mangurian
Forethought, October
Reprint F0610G

The Seasoned Executive's Decision-Making Style
Kenneth R. Brousseau, Michael J.
Driver, Gary Hourihan, and
Rikard Larsson
February
Reprint R0602F

Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer
Nathan Bennett and
Stephen A. Miles
May
Reprint R0605C

The Ultimately Accountable Job: Leading Today's Sales Organization
Jerome A. Colletti and
Mary S. Fiss
July–August
Reprint R0607K

When Should a Leader Apologize - and When Not?
Barbara Kellerman
April
Reprint R0604D

Lessons for Leaders in a Crisis

Leadership Under Fire.
By: Frohman, Dov,
Harvard Business Review,
December 2006, Vol. 84, Issue 12

Lessons for Leaders in a Crisis

Focus on long-term survival.
Go against the current.
Trust your instincts.

A former general manager of Intel Israel, now retired, and one of the pioneers of Israel's high-tech economy, Dov Frohman is also the inventor of the EPROM, the first reprogrammable computer chip. His book Leadership the Hard Way (written with Robert Howard) will be published by Jossey-Bass in 2008.

Leadership Journey

1. First show up: Be present at all times. Listening deeply to others and considering their perspective is important. If you have to be a leader others have to join you.

2.Second, speak up: Speak from your heart and create a vision story that offers a script of positive future as well as everyone's potential role in it.

3. Third step up: be an action hero. Don't get frightened by fear of failure. Not getting the result you thought you would get from an action is tolerable. But the action might be best learning tool on the planet. Remember it's okay to fail, but always fail forward (fail in going forward).

4. Finally, Serve up: Be of service at all times. Honor everyone's individuality.

Robert H Thompson

Author of Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable

Article Published in Corporate Dossier, 11th July 2008, "Never Ending Story"

Leading Change

Leading Change.
By: Kotter, John P.,
Harvard Business Review,
Jan 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 1

This article, originally published in the spring of 1995, previewed Kotter's 1996 book Leading Change. It outlines eight critical success factors -- from establishing a sense of extraordinary urgency, to creating short-term wins, to changing the culture ("the way we do things around here" ).

EIGHT STEPS TO TRANSFORMING YOUR ORGANIZATION

1. Establishing a Sense of Urgency

• Examine market and competitive realities


• Identify and discuss crises, potential crises, or major opportunities

↓

2. Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition

• Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort


• Encourage the group to work together as a team

↓

3. Creating a Vision

• Create a vision to help direct the change effort


• Develope strategies for achieving that vision

↓

4. Communicating the Vision

• Use every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies


• Teach new behaviors by the example of the guiding coalition

↓

5. Empowering Others to Act on the Vision

• Get rid of obstacles to change


• Change systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision


• Encourage risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions

↓

6. Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins

• Plan for visible performance improvements


• Create those improvements


• Recognize and reward employees involved in the improvements

↓

7. Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change

• Use increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don't fit the vision


• Hiring, promoting, and developing employees who can implement the vision


• Reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes, and change agents

↓

8. Institutionalizing New Approaches

• Articulate the connections between the new behaviors and corporate success


• Develop the means to ensure leadership development and succession

Now retired, John P. Kotter was the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School in Boston.

Ability to Transcend Life's Adversity

FIRING BACK. By: Sonnenfeld, Jeffrey A., Ward, Andrew J.,
Harvard Business Review,
Jan 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 1

In every culture, the ability to transcend life's adversity is an essential feature of becoming a great leader.

In his influential 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, anthropologist Joseph Campbell showed us that the various stories of great leaders around the world, in every culture and every era, are all essentially the same story -- the "hero myth." This myth is embodied in the life stages of such universal archetypes as Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Aeneas, Odysseus, and the Aztecs' Tezcatlipoca. Transformational leaders follow a path that entails a call to greatness, early successes (involving tough choices), ongoing trials, profound setbacks, and, ultimately, triumph as they reintegrate into society.


The first decision you will face in responding to a career disaster is the question of whether to confront the situation that brought you down -- with an exhausting, expensive, and perhaps embarrassing battle -- or to try to put it behind you as quickly as possible, in the hope that no one will notice or remember for long. In some cases, it's best to avoid direct and immediate confrontation.

The great leader has a heroic persona that confers a larger-than-life presence. You can achieve this status by developing a personal dream that you offer as a public possession. If your dream is accepted, you achieve renown. If for whatever reason your public vision is ultimately discarded, you suffer the loss of both your private dream and your public identity. After a career disaster, you can rebound only if you are able to rebuild your heroic stature -- that is, the public reputation with which you were previously perceived. An intrinsic part of recovering this heroic status involves getting your story out. This calls for a public campaign to educate and inform.

Authors

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld (jeffrey.sonnenfeld@yale.edu) is the senior associate dean for executive programs, the Lester Crown Professor of Management Practice at the Yale School of Management, and the president of the Executive Leadership Institute at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Andrew J. Ward (ajward@terry.uga.edu) is an assistant professor of management at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. This article is drawn from their book of the same title, forthcoming from Harvard Business School Press in February 2007.

When to exhibit Courage to Succeed?

Courage as a Skill.
By: Reardon, Kathleen K., Harvard Business Review,
Jan 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 1

In business, courageous action is really a special kind of calculated risk taking. People who become good leaders have a greater than average willingness to make bold moves, but they strengthen their chances of success -- and avoid career suicide -- through careful deliberation and preparation. Business courage is not so much a visionary leader's inborn characteristic as a skill acquired through decision-making processes that improve with practice. In other words, most great business leaders teach themselves to make high-risk decisions. They learn to do this well over a period of time, often decades.

Learning to take an intelligent gamble requires an understanding of what I call the "courage calculation" : a method of making success more likely while avoiding rash, unproductive, or irrational behavior. Six discrete processes make up the courage calculation: setting primary and secondary goals; determining the importance of achieving them; tipping the power balance in your favor; weighing risks against benefits; selecting the proper time for action; and developing contingency plans.


Faced with having to take a risk, most people make only one attempt: They ring the doorbell, and if a response is not forthcoming, they give up and go away. Those who accomplish their primary and secondary goals try knocking at the back door, tapping at a window, or even returning a second time.

Courageous managers prepare themselves for any eventuality, including worst-case scenarios.

Author

Kathleen K. Reardon (docreardon@aol.com) is a professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. Her latest book is It's All Politics: Winning in a World Where Hard Work and Talent Aren't Enough (Doubleday, 2005).

Successful leaders have a knack for knowing whom to tap to get things done

How Leaders Create and Use Networks.
By: Ibarra, Herminia, Hunter, Mark,
Harvard Business Review,
Jan 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 1

Successful leaders have a nose for opportunity and a knack for knowing whom to tap to get things done. These qualities depend on a set of strategic networking skills that nonleaders rarely possess.

Strategic networking plugs the aspiring leader into a set of relationships and information sources that collectively embody the power to achieve personal and organizational goals.


The key to a good strategic network is leverage: the ability to marshal information, support, and resources from one sector of a network to achieve results in another. Strategic networkers use indirect influence, convincing one person in the network to get someone else, who is not in the network, to take a needed action. Moreover, strategic networkers don't just influence their relational environment; they shape it in their own image by moving and hiring subordinates, changing suppliers and sources of financing, lobbying to place allies in peer positions, and even restructuring their boards to create networks favorable to their business goals.

Authors

Herminia Ibarra (herminia.ibarra@insead.edu) is the Insead Chaired Professor of Organizational Behavior at Insead in Fontainebleau, France, where she also directs the Leadership Transition, an executive program for managers moving into broader leadership roles. Her most recent book is Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). Mark Hunter (mark.hunter@insead.edu) is an investigative journalist and an adjunct professor of communications at Insead. He is the author of The Passions of Men: Work and Love in the Age of Stress (Putnam, 1988).

Work hard at understanding and developing yourself as a leader

Discovering Your Authentic Leadership.
By: George, Bill, Sims, Peter, McLean, Andrew N., Mayer, Diana,
Harvard Business Review,
Feb 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 2


The largest in-depth study ever undertaken on how people can become and remain authentic leaders shows that an individual does not have to be born with any universal characteristics or traits of a leader.

Authentic leaders work hard at understanding and developing themselves. They use formal and informal support networks to get honest feedback and help ground themselves. They temper their need for public acclaim and financial reward with strong intrinsic motivations.

Discovering your authentic leadership requires a commitment to developing yourself. Like musicians and athletes, you must devote yourself to a lifetime of realizing your potential. Most people Kroger CEO David Dillon has seen become good leaders were self-taught. Dillon said, "The advice I give to individuals in our company is not to expect the company to hand you a development plan. You need to take responsibility for developing yourself."

While the life stories of authentic leaders cover the full spectrum of experiences--including the positive impact of parents, athletic coaches, teachers, and mentors--many leaders reported that their motivation came from a difficult experience in their lives. They described the transformative effects of the loss of a job; personal illness; the untimely death of a close friend or relative; and feelings of being excluded, discriminated against, and rejected by peers. Rather than seeing themselves as victims, though, authentic leaders used these formative experiences to give meaning to their lives. They reframed these events to rise above their challenges and to discover their passion to lead.

Accept Limits to Your Knowledge and Lead

IN PRAISE OF THE INCOMPLETE LEADER.
By: Ancona, Deborah, Malone, Thomas W., Orlikowski, Wanda J., Senge, Peter M., Harvard Business Review,
February 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 2


No one person could possibly stay on top of everything. But the myth of the complete leader (and the attendant fear of appearing incompetent) makes many executives try to do just that, exhausting themselves and damaging their organizations in the process. The incomplete leader, by contrast, knows when to let go: when to let those who know the local market do the advertising plan or when to let the engineering team run with its idea of what the customer needs. The incomplete leader also knows that leadership exists throughout the organizational hierarchy--wherever expertise, vision, new ideas, and commitment are found.


Sensemaking, relating, visioning, and inventing are leadership capabilities. They are interdependent. Without sensemaking, there's no common view of reality from which to start. Without relating, people work in isolation or, worse, strive toward different aims. Without visioning, there's no shared direction. And without inventing, a vision remains illusory. No one leader, however, will excel at all four capabilities in equal measure.

Typically, leaders are strong in one or two capabilities.

Once leaders diagnose their own capabilities, identifying their unique set of strengths and weaknesses, they must search for others who can provide the things they're missing.

About the authors

Deborah Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the faculty director of the MIT Leadership Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also the coauthor (with Henrik Bresman) of X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate, and Succeed, forthcoming from Harvard Business School Press in June 2007. Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School and the director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Wanda J. Orlikowski is the Eaton-Peabody Professor of Communication Science and a professor of information technologies and organization studies at the MIT Sloan School. Peter M. Senge is the founding chairperson of the Society for Organizational Learning and a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School.

The pervasiveness of complementary leadership

THE LEADERSHIP TEAM.
By: Miles, Stephen A., Watkins, Michael D.,
Harvard Business Review,
April 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 4

The limitations of people's information-processing capacity, which are well documented, make it impossible for one individual to manage a large and complex enterprise. Bruce Chizen, CEO of the software and technology company Adobe Systems, says of his own position, "The job is simply too big for any one person." Bringing together two or more people with complementary strengths not only compensates for the shortcomings of each but also results in a team in which the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.

Complementary leadership generally manifests itself in four ways.

One familiar split assigns one leader (usually the CEO) the job of managing the external environment, while her counterpart (often the COO) concentrates on internal management issues.

A second fairly clear-cut division of responsibilities is expertise complementarity. For example, Chizen, Adobe's CEO, has a background in sales and marketing, and Shantanu Narayen, the company's president and COO, came up through the engineering and product ranks.


A third, less sharply delineated type of synergy –what we call cognitive complementarity – involves differences in how individuals process information.

Finally, leaders often play discrete and complementary social roles in organizations – a phenomenon we call role complementarity. One person can rarely assume more than one social role; it is difficult, for example, for a leader to be both feared and loved.

Stephen A. Miles (smiles@heidrick.com) is an Atlanta-based managing partner in the Leadership Consulting Practice of the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles and a coauthor of "Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer" (HBR May 2006).

Michael D. Watkins (mwatkins@genesisadvisers.com), based in Newton, Massachusetts, is a partner in the leadership development consultancy Genesis Advisers and the author of The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels (Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

Leadership is Having a Point of View

Preparing for the Perfect Product Launch.
By: Hackett, James P.,
Harvard Business Review,
April 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 4



Point of view. Roger Enrico, former CEO of PepsiCo, once declared that "Leadership is having a point of view." To me, a point of view is a conviction and a concrete mission. The point of view is not only more believable after a thorough think phase, but the chosen option is less controversial. The point of view also assures critical closure of debate.

James P. Hackett (jhackett@steelcase.com) is the president and CEO of Steelcase, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Raising to Top - Obstacles for Women

Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership.
By: Eagly, Alice H., Carli, Linda L.,
Harvard Business Review,
Sep 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 9

When you put all the pieces together, a new picture emerges for why women don't make it into the C-suite. It's not the glass ceiling, but the sum of many obstacles along the way

Vestiges of prejudice

Resistance to women's leadership

Issues of leadership style

Demands of family life

Underinvestment in social capital

Alice H. Eagly (eagly@northwestern.edu) is a professor of psychology and holds the James Padilla Chair of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois; she is also a faculty fellow at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research.

Linda L. Carli (lcarli@wellesley.edu) is an associate professor of psychology at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts; her current research focus is on gender discrimination and other challenges faced by professional women. The two are coauthors of Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders (Harvard Business School Press, forthcoming in October), from which this article is adapted.

Judgments by Leaders

Making Judgment Calls.
By: Tichy, Noel M., Bennis, Warren G.,
Harvard Business Review,
Oct 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 10

In the end, it is a leader's judgment that determines an organization's success or failure. On a more personal level, it is the sum of a leader's judgment calls that will deliver the verdict on his or her career--and life.

Our first finding, which focused our thinking on the topic, was that most of a leader's important calls reside in one of three domains: people, strategy, or crisis.

People judgments--getting the right people on your team and developing up-and-comers who themselves demonstrate good judgment--are foundational. The people around you help you make good strategy judgment calls and the best decisions during the occasional but inevitable crisis. It's sometimes possible to repair the damage--to a company or a career--that results from misjudgments about strategy or crises, but it is almost impossible to recover from poor people judgment.

Judgment process: First is preparation, during which leaders sense and frame the issue that will demand a judgment call, and align their team members so that everyone understands why the call is important. Second is the call itself--the moment of decision. And third is execution--making it happen while learning and adjusting along the way. Leaders may not be able to change their calls, but they can almost always change course during execution if they are open to feedback and committed to follow-through.

Indeed, good leaders take advantage of "redo loops," which can occur throughout the process.

Noel M. Tichy (tichy@bus.umich.edu) is a professor of management and operations and the director of the Global Business Partnership at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor. Warren G. Bennis (w.g.bennis@gmail.com) is a university professor and a distinguished professor of business administration at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles. Their book Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls is forthcoming from Portfolio.

Linda A. Hill on Leadership

Where Will We Find Tomorrow's Leaders?
By: Hemp, Paul,
Harvard Business Review,
Jan 2008, Vol. 86, Issue 1

Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, has looked at leadership from many perspectives. In the early 1990s, she led the development of Harvard's required MBA course on leadership. Her research into the challenges faced by first-time managers resulted in the book Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership (Harvard Business School Press, second edition, 2003).

Leadership is about making emotional connections to motivate and inspire people, and our effectiveness at doing this has strong cultural overtones.


What other leadership approaches have you seen in emerging economies?

I've been especially interested in what I've seen at HCL Technologies, an Indian information technology company, which has been described as having the world's most modern management. The first tenet of HCL's change strategy is called, somewhat provocatively, Employee First, Customer Second. The aim is to attract the very best talent - a tall order in the competitive Indian labor market but crucial for the company's growth - and empower employees to take the lead in coming up with innovative ways to create value for customers. This distributed leadership model is based on communities of interest: tight-knit groups that pull together people from various functions and locations. Each community comes up with new ideas and then competes with the other groups for funding in HCL's internal market. According to HCL president Vineet Nayar, the strategy - which is supported by the savvy use of social-networking technology - will have succeeded when it "destroys the office of the president." That is, as the communities of interest evolve, the leaders of the groups will begin to share leadership of the company with Vineet.


"Leading from behind?"

I was reading Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. At the time, I was working on an article about leadership in the twenty-first century, and I came across a passage in which Mandela recalls how a leader of his tribe talked about leadership: "A leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind."

To me, this take on the shepherd image embodies the kind of leader we increasingly need: someone who understands how to create a context or culture in which other people are willing and able to lead. This image of the shepherd behind his flock is an acknowledgment that leadership is a collective activity in which different people at different times - depending on their strengths, or "nimbleness" - come forward to move the group in the direction it needs to go.

Could you say that the shepherd knows the ultimate destination but leaves it to individuals in the flock to determine how to get there?
That's one way to put it.

Why Mentoring Matters in Professional Service Firms?

Why Mentoring Matters in a Hypercompetitive World.
By: DeLong, Thomas J., Gabarro, John J., Lees, Robert J.,
Harvard Business Review,
Jan 2008, Vol. 86, Issue 1

Today's professional service firms (PSFs) are so busy making money that they've lost the art of making talent

our research reveals that 67% to 85% of all the professionals in PSFs have an extreme need to achieve.

The truth is that in today's PSFs, with their limited resources, associates can no longer just expect to be assigned a mentor; they also have to learn how to attract one.


One particularly interesting approach developed at McKinsey & Company is to encourage associates to "build [their] own McKinsey." members of the firm are counseled to seek out the subordinates, peers, and partners toward whom they naturally gravitate because of mutual chemistry, interests, and goals.

A wise leader told the group that only by supporting one another could they be competitive (in the market place). He created team metrics that encouraged them to work together not against one another.


More than any other type of organization, PSFs live and die by their intellectual capital. If you fail to nurture this talent, you will lose the heart and soul of your firm, as well as the very people you recruited to give you an edge in a hypercompetitive world.

Leadership in Times of Email

A reply given by jack and Suzy welch to a question - (NYT syndicate) Published in MINT, India dated 16 June 2008


Important point made

One aspect of leadership that the internet will not change in any measure, because it cannot.

Real leaders touch people. they get in their skin, fillng their hearts with inspiration, courage and hope. They share the pain at times of loss an are there to celebrate the wins.

A leader's touch will forever be essential. But the best leaders will combine touch with the ability to quickly sort, assess and seize the power of all ideas the Internet brings and the voices it unleashes. and that will change business for everyone.