Are Your Leaders Teaching the Next Generation of Leaders?
Once a year, I chair a future enterprise leader development program at a Fortune 500 firm. It includes elements on strategy, innovation, leadership, decision-making, corporate diplomacy, and executive presence. The most powerful element is a one-week module on enterprise perspective, the core of which is presentations by virtually all of company's senior executive team. It's all about leaders teaching leaders
Corporate Escape Story — From BP Exec to Renewable Energy Leader
This is a fascinating corporate escape story from Fast Company . Cynthia Warner was the head of global refining for British Petroleum and a 28-year oil industry veteran. She left BP in 2008 to become president of Sapphire Energy, a company working to produce renewable “green crude” from algae grown in open pools in the New Mexico desert
I Want To Live Like Common People: BP and the Great PR Divide
After his slicing, dicing, and grilling by Congress, BP's CEO Tony Hayward has been relieved of some of his duties, with responsibilities for managing the company's PR response shifting to chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg . This is just two days after BP's public relations debacle descended into class farce when Svanberg, a wealthy Swede, stated that, "We care about the small people
How To Punish Leadership Negligence
In any sensible system of institutional governance, negligence would be sanctioned.
The Gulf Oil Spill: A Classic Failure of Systems Leadership
There are two wonderful articles on the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill disaster in the May 11 Wall Street Journal that are required reading for everyone interested in systems failures and the need for systems leadership. The first is a case study in how to abrogate responsibility when thing go badly wrong . It describes the finger-pointing among BP, Transocean, and Halliburton over who is responsible for the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig
Why Business Leaders Should Act More like Artists
Stereotypes abound about artists: they range from the mild ("they have fuschia-colored hair"), to the absurd ("they starve,"), to the disturbed ("they do things like uncontrollably peeing in the fireplace as depicted in the popular movie Pollock."). Granted I know artists with wild-colored hair and others who are certainly struggling to make ends meet, but they all choose to use the restroom. I've also met artists who are quite plain-looking and plain-acting CEOs, lawyers, stockbrokers, and scientists. Even as someone who has worked to weaken some of the sillier stereotypes about creative types, I must admit that I've carried a few stereotypes around myself. In particular, I'd always believed that artists are much like the kind of geeks I grew up with at MIT — passionately focused on their work with little regard to their own physical or financial circumstance, and often more comfortable working as a lone constructor instead of as a collaborative player on a larger team.
