The creation of The Living Organization™ model

During my 35 plus years of leading organizations and helping other CEOs lead their organizations I have been seeking to understand and then explain what is required to successfully create sustainable growth.  The Living Organization™ model is the culmination of that journey. I have chosen to name my upcoming book “The Living Organization ™: the [...]

Do we manage the system or the measurement system?

Today I was listening to the on-going debate of Executive Compensation and the struggle companies are having in this economy.  There is so much talk these days about setting up pay for performance systems that reward growth and punish failure.  In equal proportion there is talk about executives should be aligned with investors and hence [...]

Do Bonus Plans Motivate?

The whole issue of Executive compensation is coming under increasing scrutiny by just about everyone these days and rightfully so.  Here is an interesting question – Do Bonuses actually incent behavior to perform better?   This is a foundational question as much of the compensation plans are based on the strongly held belief by most [...]

The real problem with Executive Compensation

There is a lot of talk lately about CEO pay, how much they get and how we have elevated them to superstars.  As I posted on my FastCompany.com blog, I was recently listening to a speaker on this topic and realized that of course we have a problem with CEO pay, we as a society [...]

What is the real purpose of Business?

We have seen much abuse over the last decade which has given business a bad rap.  First we start with the run up of “easy success” with the dot.com craze and its bust, followed by the corruption of Enron, Tyco and the like.  And now we have the financial crisis that is not only impacting [...]

Why the profit motif may have too many “unintended consequences”

I was just reading a New Your Time article titled “When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder” (Click on the title to read the article).  It speaks eloquently about the problem of unintended consequences, the difficulty of being able to accurately predict all the results of our actions.  Hence many of our very well intended [...]

CEO succession and Leadership

In my recent entry I spoke of the challenge of selecting a leader and what we can learn from the current presidential candidates.  In a recent post by Idris Mootee “Visionary Leaders with Purposes Are Not Easy to Replace” he raises the example of Steve Jobs, the visionary leader of Apple Computer.  I loved his [...]

The importance of Leadership style As President or as CEO

In a recent New Your Times article on the role Carolyn Kennedy played in the Democratic Vice President search team, she made an interesting comment that I thought merited commenting on.  “I’ve campaigned with him and seen him in large settings,” Ms. Kennedy said, “but to see the way he asked questions, listened, brought people [...]

The importance of empathy for leaders

Empathy and compassion are two traits that are truly hard to come by.  And for most of us it comes out of an experience where we suffer the same fate of another.  Walk a mile in my shoes and then you will know what my life is like, is a famous saying we have all [...]

Change isn’t all that much fun

The other day I spent a half a day with a client going through a lessons learned session.  We had just finished the first phase of pilot implantation for a new way of managing project implementations.  By some measures the pilot was a “failure”, that is it did not achieve the desired outcome at the [...]

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