If Humble People Make the Best Leaders, Why Do We Fall for Charismatic Narcissists?

 

By Margarita Mayo (Harvard Business Review, hbr.org). The research is clear: when we choose humble, unassuming people as our leaders, the world around us becomes a better place.

Humble leaders improve the performance of a company in the long run because they create more collaborative environments. They have a balanced view of themselves – both their virtues and shortcomings – and a strong appreciation of others’ strengths and contributions, while being open to new ideas and feedback. These “unsung heroes” help their believers to build their self-esteem, go beyond their expectations, and create a community that channels individual efforts into an organized group that works for the good of the collective.

For example, one study examined 105 small-to-medium-sized companies in the computer software and hardware industry in the United Studies. The findings revealed that when a humble CEO is at the helm of a firm, its top management team is more likely to collaborate and share information, making the most of the firm’s talent.

Aligning Your Organization with an Agile Workforce

By Jon Younger and  Norm Smallwood (Harvard Business Review, hbr.org). Leaders recognize that lean and agile business strategies require new ways of accessing talent to fill critical gaps — without necessarily bringing on more full-time employees. But most organizations aren’t set up for getting the most out of non-traditional employment relationships. In this excerpt from their book, Agile Talent, Younger and Smallwood explain how to align your organization with the needs and expectations of a workforce that is increasingly external, project-based, and flexible.

Nearly all contemporary organizations are increasing their use of talent from the outside—by engaging individuals, teams, and even firms in non-traditional work relationships and alternate forms of employment. Google and Intel rely on experts in social science and biomechanics to develop transformative products by better understanding how people think about and use technology. McKesson, the US-based pharmaceutical and health-care giant, benefits from external expertise as a strategic extension of its resources in areas such as business strategy and logistics support. Managers in these companies understand that agile, fast, and lean strategies require that they think in new ways about accessing and leveraging key strategic talent and filling critical gaps in strategic capabilities.

The Best Managers Are Boring Managers

By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (Harvard Business Review, hbr.org).

What would the perfect robot manager be like? Looks aside, it would arguably be objective, transparent, unselfish, and apolitical. Because of this, it would assign the right task to every person and reward unselfish team behaviors, creating a culture of trust and keeping morale high. It would monitor individual and team performance with the precision of the best quantified-self app, and provide real-time feedback to boost everybody’s productivity. Undoubtedly, it would operate according to data rather than intuition and make only evidence-based recommendations. In short, the perfect robot manager would be utterly predictable – and completely boring.

And yet dullness is not how most organizations choose managers today. Instead, they look for flash and vision, and bold displays of confidence – whether or not that translates into actual competence. Indeed, despite the vast body of knowledge – including independent scientific evidence – on what makes a good manager, too many people get promoted to management positions based on past technical expertise or their previous individual job performance, so they end up, in effect, transitioning from skilled labor to unskilled management.

Minimum Viable Product doesn't mean half finished.

Minimum Viable Product: build a slice across instead of one layer at a time.

The Lean Startup movement challenges the assumption that customers must have all imaginable features available in a product before they will start to use it.
Eric Ries coined the term minimum viable product (MVP) to describe a strategy of investing a minimal amount of resources to test the underlying assumptions of our hypotheses with customers.
The objective is to eliminate the waste generated by over engineered solutions and accelerate our learning by testing a solution with early customers as soon as possible.

Organizational Culture Is Like An Iceberg

By Torben Rick (torbenrick.eu) Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg

In 1912 the Titanic was the largest ocean passenger liner of its time and was significant for many reasons. It was built in Belfast for trans-Atlantic travel as well as being sanctioned as a carrier of the Royal Mail Service. It was a great innovation for the period it was built.

The Titanic was thought to be an unsinkable vessel. Yet it was not prepared for the ill fate it met on April 15, 1912; this passenger vessel sank after colliding with an iceberg.

Organizational culture is like an iceberg

An iceberg is a large piece of freshwater ice. It has broken off a glacier or an ice shelf and floats freely in open waters. It can become stationary if it becomes frozen into pack ice that came into contact with the seabed.

Because the density of pure ice is much less than that of sea water, it is typical for only one-tenth of the iceberg to actually be above the water.

9 Reasons to Conquer Self-Doubt

Do you depend on others' opinions because you lack confidence in your own? By Minda Zetlin (inc.com)

Getting lots of input on important issues is a good idea. It can help you be successful when, without expert help, you might fail. But it can turn into a problem if you're depending on other people's opinions because you have no confidence in your own.

There's a fine line between the two--I know because I've crossed it more than once. If I have to make an important decision I tend to ask for advice and opinions from people who seem smarter than I am. Then I ask for a few more. By the time I finally settle on something, it's been crowdsourced.

That's bad because failing to trust your own judgment can be lethal for an entrepreneur. So if any of the above sounds familiar, here are 9 good reasons to change:

Organization's culture, adaptability it's the most effective aspect at driving financial performance.

By Lisa Holton *

Corporate leaders and academics have been debating the connection between institutional culture and growth for more than three decades. Yet most can't really put their finger on the single aspect of an organization's culture that's most effective at driving financial performance. Stanford Graduate School business professor Charles A. O'Reilly and fellow researchers have found the answer lies in a key word: adaptability.

In his research update published in the August 2014 issue of Journal of Organizational Behavior, O'Reilly teamed with colleagues Jennifer A. Chatman and Bernadette Doerr at the University of California-Berkeley and David F. Caldwell at Santa Clara University to examine whether corporate culture had a positive impact in the fastest growing companies--specifically high-technology firms. The team noted that the supremely adaptive cultures in Silicon Valley and beyond contain transformative medicine for most companies, no matter what the industry.