CorpU Weekly Digest: Leadership Development (2012-Mar-05)

Topics: Leadership

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

• (1) Creating value outside of the zero-sum game: leadership development lessons from the life of Steve Jobs ; 
• (2) Helping leaders understand motivation ; 
• (3) An INSEAD professor offers a few comments on what makes great entrepreneurial leaders ; 
• Books: The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World and HR at Your Service: Lessons from Benchmark Service Organizations ; 
• Webinars ; and 
• Conferences .

 Creating value outside of the zero-sum game: leadership development lessons from the life of Steve Jobs
The publication of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs in October 2011, and its impressive sales and discussions has led to quite a few observations about the specific elements and order of Steve Jobs's hagiography. Perhaps the most critical has been the understanding that as Jobs once said in an NY Times Magazine article on the iPod, "[Design] is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." Running as a touchpoint through the biography, however, is, as Susan Cramm notes in this great article, "Steve Jobs, Reconsidered", a man who:

• Trained him to intimidate others by honing a "trick of using stares and silences to master other people."
• Denied IPO stock options to a colleague who "joined Apple when it was headquartered in Jobs' garage."
• Possessed "an uncanny capacity to know" other individuals' weak points and make them "feel small."
• Took credit for ideas that were not his. "When told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it" and, if it is a good one, "he will soon be telling people about it as though it was his own."

It's an important message in this article about the company being successful in spite of the leader's efforts. And it's an important reminder for developing the company's next generation of leaders: make sure to connect core corporate values into the work of running the business. Read Susan Cramm's article, "Steve Jobs, Reconsidered"

 Helping leaders understand motivation
Many leaders see motivation as a game of punishment and rewards, carrots and sticks, as though the business were a sort of Skinner box. Forget the threats. Forget the cash. To engage your people, you need to find out what it is that moves them — a search that costs you nothing. In a whipsaw economy, that's the only way to get (as Thomas Edison put it) the "10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration" that make up innovation. The best leaders find and channel what it is their employees, by nature, already want to do. If as a leader you can tap this internal motivation, you will have reached the source of engagement and innovation. It is human nature to want to grow our abilities, connect with co-workers and control our work lives. As psychologist Abraham Maslow has shown, people share three basic psychological needs, regardless of their gender, age, ethnicity, culture or life experiences: everyone has a need for competence, relatedness, and autonomy. Read article "What Is the Secret to Motivating People in Tough Times?”

 An INSEAD professor offers a few comments on what makes great entrepreneurial leaders
With consumers on the move, companies need leaders who are not only socially aware, but are prepared to keep innovating and adapting their products to meet changing demands. "I've always been fascinated by transformational leaders because they change the way things are," says Hal Gregersen, INSEAD's senior affiliate professor of leadership. According to Gregersen great entrepreneurial leaders, like Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs, question everything, scrutinize everyone and experiment with new ideas. "They get great ideas which disrupt entire industries and create lots of jobs." Waleed Al Somali, administrator of personal development at Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s US$8 trillion oil producer (and the largest in the world), told Knowledge that great leaders were able to transform a company through their charisma and spark. Read the INSEAD article "What makes a good leader in today’s world?"

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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

As a contributing editor at Booz & Co's Strategy + Business journal, professor at the University of Regina's Graduate School of Business (associated with the Center for Creative Leadership, CCL), and business advisor, David Hurst has been distilling his wisdom into excellent books for some time. On April 17, he will release the companion piece to Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change. Instead of weaving together insights from science, sociology, anthropology, history, and personal business experience into a coherent picture of organizational growth, decay, and renewal, David Hurst in this forthcoming book “The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia Business School Publishing)”, focuses more on the individual manager and leader rather than the collective organization. The focus of the book is how individual business leaders to make and communicate meaning from their own management experience and education and thus improve their judgment, decision making, and wisdom. Hurst's core argument is that the human mind is not rational in a logical sense but in an ecological way. In other words, it has evolved to extract cues to action from the specific situations in which it finds itself. Therefore contexts matter, and Hurst shows how passion, reason, and power deployed as tools and embedded in settings can be used to change and sustain organizations for good and ill. The result is an inspirational synthesis of management theory and practice that will resonate with every reader's experience. Buy now

Professors Gary P. Latham (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) and Robert C. Ford (College of Business Administration of the University of Central Florida) are both well-respected as authors and thought leaders, and their forthcoming book HR at Your Service: Lessons from Benchmark Service Organizations offers a practical guide to help ensure that your team develops a strong appreciation for the power of anticipating and attending to the needs, wants, and expectations of managers and their employees first and foremost. As it provides practical tools and guidance on building world-class HR departments, this guide aids HR leaders to plan for future client needs, conduct internal audits, and hire as well as reward customer-centric individuals.  Lessons learned from thriving businesses, such as Walt Disney Co., Marriott International Inc., and Darden’s restaurants, are also applied and explained in the HR context. Buy now

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 Webinars 

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

The Power Of Feedback
Date: Tuesday, March 6, 2012, 10:00am - 11:00am PT (US)
Presenter: Carole Robin, Stanford Graduate School of Business Register now

Get Started with HTML5 using Raptivity Interactions
Date: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 11:00am - 12:00noon PT (US)
Presenter: Raptivity Register now 

The Power of Analytics: Moving from Data to Action
Date: Wednesday, March 7, 2012, 12:00noon - 1:00pm ET (US)
Presenter: Mollie Lombardi, Research Director of Aberdeen's Human Capital Management practice and Janet Manzullo, Vice President, Talent Acquisition, of Time Warner Cable Register now

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 Conferences

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, VA, United States Register now

Trends and Trendsetters in HR Shared Services
Date: March 28, 2012
Location: New York, NY, US 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: April 16-17, 2012
Location: Washington DC, US Register now

OnBoarding Talent
Date: April 16-18, 2012
Location: Sydney, Australia Register now

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

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