CorpU Weekly Digest: Leadership Development (2012-Feb-27)

Topics: Leadership

Here are this past week's headlines in leadership development: 

• (1) What's more important, culture or strategy when considering leadership development efforts? It's a trick: making them work together is most important ; 
• (2) Attributes of a CEO: IESE Research ; 
• (3) A deeper look at leadership development practices at one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For: Boston Consulting Group ; 
• Books: Growth Champions and The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business ; 
• Webinars ; and 
• Conferences .

 What's more important, culture or strategy when considering leadership development efforts? It's a trick: making them work together is most important
The last couple of weeks have seen a flurry of articles, postings, and memes of the culture-eats-strategy variety, suggesting the importance of employee engagement, alignment, motivation, focus, brand, institutional incentives, and communication channels. Shawn Parr in Fast Company initiated a new wave of it recently with his Jan 24 posting, "Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch". Bob Frisch responded to the echo chamber of the read-write web with his own posting against the position in his posting on Feb 20, "Culture Vs. Strategy Is A False Choice. At the end of the day, the challenge is not to get too hung up on either one or the other, but to consider culture when designing strategy and to consider larger strategy when addressing culture. Culture is (generally) a centripetal force, trying to keep people and groups together and somehow united. Strategy is a vector — representing an impulse toward an objective. Read Bob Frisch's article on Fast Company, "Culture Vs. Strategy Is A False Choice".

 Attributes of a CEO: IESE Research
Reaching the top level of company management requires hard work, perseverance, business vision, political savvy, and integrity. There are many obstacles to overcome, and any aspiring CEO must be prepared to make sacrifices at the personal, professional, and family levels. Throughout the process, there are alternating stages of stability and crisis, which require dealing with high levels of uncertainty. Such crisis phases should be viewed as opportunities to learn how to handle sensitive issues under pressure. To deliver results during periods of crisis, the CEO must: 1) delegate and take personal responsibility for everyone else's work, by hiring the right people and putting them where they will be most effective; 2) remove any members from teams who are not suitable for the new tasks; 3) balance a demanding professional life with family and personal responsibilities; 4) create an extensive, solid network of relationships inside and outside the organization; 5) be persistent and work under adversity to rebound after possible setbacks; and 6) possess a variety of management styles and use them effectively according to the situation at hand. Read IESE professors José Ramón Pin's and Guido Stein's technical note on managing CEO talent “Wanted: CEO With Integrity

 A deeper look at leadership development practices at one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For: Boston Consulting Group
Several companies consistently rank high on Fortune's  100 Best Companies to Work For® list, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 2012's #2 Best Company, is a great example. BCG's leadership development process is deeply ingrained in their workplace culture and has been described as best-in-class in a Harvard Business School case study ("George Martin at The Boston Consulting Group" April 2010).  It’s not hard to understand why.  BCG believes there is always room for improvement and provides employees every tool imaginable to see their potential realized. Employees have access to workshops, online training tools, mentoring and apprenticeship programs, career development programs, a clear career path and support system for professional development, and more. Read "Best Practices from Best Workplaces, Leadership Development"

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 The Business of Learning: New Major Products, Mergers, Acquisitions, and Partnerships

No major news in mergers, acquisitions, or product releases.

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 Books To Read

Growth is a priority for most businesses, but one that's elusive and difficult to achieve. Some companies do it well, delivering sustainable growth year after year. What makes those companies so special? And what can you and your business learn from them? The book Growth Champions looks at 20 leading global organizations and identifies the key elements that drive their success. These growth champions include such companies as PepsiCo, Apple, Rolls-Royce, Google, Audi, and P&G. While many share some common traits, they all take different paths to growth using different formulas to achieve it. The book, to be released on April 3, 2012, is a collection of insights from The Growth Agenda, which is a group of experts on organizational grwoth and innovation. What makes it interesting for a learning and development group is that among the chapters on formulating and executing strategies, are a whole series of topics that suggest strategic talent development is critical for growth and innovation by finding ways to motivate and engage people in order to build a growth culture and hone distinctive competencies to stay ahead of the pack. Buy now

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In book The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business, Patrick Lencioni delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni's first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health — complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way — one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles. Buy now

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 Webinars 

Creating and Using Human Capital Financial Statements
Date: Wednesday, Feburary 29, 2012, 2pm ET (US)
Presenters: Jeff Higgins  Register now

Culture on Purpose: Developing a High Performance Corporate Culture
Date: Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 2 pm ET  (US) / 11 am PT (US)
Presenter: Todd Gentzel Register now

Taking Talent Management from the Backroom to the Boardroom
Date: Tuesday, March 6, 2012, 14:15 GMT / 9:15 am ET (US)
Presenters: Raymond Waal, Michael Boedewig and Daniela Porr Register now

People Insights 2.0: Opportunity at the Confluence of Workforce Intelligence and Social Analytics
Date: Thursday, March 1, 2012, 11 am ET (US)
Presenters: Yvette Cameron, Principal Analyst (Constellation Research) Register now

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 Conferences

Global Mindset Development in Leadership and Management Conference
Date: March 2-3, 2012 
Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA Register now

International Research Conference on Management, Engineering and Technology
Date: March 2-5, 2012
Location: Bangkok, Thailand Register now

Heartland eLearning Conference
Date: March 5-6, 2012 
Location: Edmond, OK, USA Register now

HR 2012
Date: March 13-16, 2012
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA Register now

Enterprise Learning! Summit 2012
Date: March 20-21, 2012
Location: Alexandria, Virginia, United States Register now

The Six Disciplines of Learning Transfer: Presented by ASTD in Partnership with Fort Hill Company
Date: April 4-5, 2012
Location: Atlanta, GA, United States Register now 

Talent Management Summit
Date April 10-12, 2012
Location: São Paulo, Brazil Register now

Assessing & Developing High Potentials
Date 16 - 17 April, 2012
Location: Washington DC, US Register now

Learning TECH 2012
Date: April 23 - 25, 2012
Location: Chicago, IL, USA Register now 

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