If you are a manager and despair at the quality of people that fill your entry level positions, not their attitude, but their skills and basic education, prepare for it to get worse.
Perhaps instead of ranting and whining about America’s loss of global leadership we should look closer to home for the real cause—US education.
The ethnic groups with the worst outcomes in school are African-Americans and Hispanics. The achievement gaps between these groups and their white and Asian-American peers are already large in kindergarten and only grow as the school years pass. These are the youngsters least ready right now …read more

What do you do when you are booted out of your business leadership position? Go into politics, of course.
Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard’s ex (to the great relief of people both internal and external) CEO is the latest to throw her hat in the ring, touting her corporate problem-solving skills; problem-making is more accurate.
So what do you do when you are booted out of your political position (or your term expires)? Go on the speaking circuit.
I realize that I may offend some of my readers, but to learn that George W. Bush is being paid $100K to speak for 40 minutes ($2500 …read more

In spite of the importance of Obama’s success in office, there is only so much I can read on a subject before I become jaded. As a result I try to make my sources as objective as possible, which is difficult when the subject is political.
I’m also not a political junkie, so in looking for ‘how’s it going’ information I tend to skip sources with rigid ideologies, since I pretty much know what they will say.
(I must say I find it amusing and satisfying that we finally have a president that both the far right and far left don’t like.)
I …read more

Boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, have been in the forefront of everything that’s happened in the country from the time they were born and that’s not changing any time soon.
So what’s up with the generation that changed the world, marched to end a war, protested for equal rights, overturned sexual mores, ushered in consumerism and turned on to drugs and rock and roll?
Harvard believes they are still the future and to that end has set up the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative “to lead significant systemic change in education, health care, community development, and the environment.”
Ads may be …read more

In September, 2007 I wrote Leadership—Nature Or Nature; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., former Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, and author of The Powers to Lead used the same topic for his 2009 commencement article.
In a comment on my post Wally Bock says, “I do think there’s a “nature” part to people who turn out to be successful leaders, at least there are things that seem pretty much set for most people by their mid-twenties.”
But how much of leadership is the person and how much the circumstances?
As Nye reminds us, “In January 1940, Winston Churchill was regarded as a failed …read more

Why Can’t We Figure Out How to Select Leaders? was the question asked by Harvard’s Jim Heskett at the beginning of February.
It’s a pertinent question right now, since for more than a decade many of the people held up as examples of great leadership have fallen on their faces and even ended up in jail. Worse still, the companies they ran were destroyed or badly damaged—short term Wall Street numbers were met at the cost of long-term innovation and sustainability.
The Forum drew 88 comments that Heskett says fall in three categories,

enumerating the qualities that we should look for in a …read more

I only received one response to my query last week and it was positive, so here again are three food-for-thought links. I wouldn’t want you to run out of stuff to do this weekend.
First up is a post from Denis, who starred in my post, A Follower Leads. Denis is a senior software developer who says he isn’t a great follower, but he’s not a manager and doesn’t seem to see what he does as ‘leading’. The other day he wrote about Group Coherence/Common Purpose—one of the best explanation/discussion I’ve seen on the topic. I think Denis a leader, what …read more

I found a great quote on JD Prickett’s blog by Harvard’s Roland Barth.
“Show me a school whose inhabitants constantly examine the school’s culture and work to transform it into one hospitable to sustained human learning, and I’ll show you students who graduate with both the capacity and the heart for lifelong learning.”
I agree passionately that the school’s culture is the basis for its accomplishments and that the principal’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) is the source, whether active, passive or by benign neglect.
Unfortunately, the culture described above is constrained, distorted or totally destroyed by education policy—Dallas Independent School …read more

I love it! I just read a great article called Leadership Malpractice. Not by the media or some external pundit, but by Harvard Public Leadership Lecturer Barbara Kellerman, author of Bad Leadership and Followership.
What a terrific idea. Kellerman says that since “leadership is increasingly considered a profession,” so leaders should be subject to the same punishments as other professionals, such as doctors and lawyers.
Doesn’t that sound like an idea whose time has come?
Kellerman points out that business leaders are appointed; “in the first nine months of this year a record 1,132 CEOs quit or were shown the door” due …read more

Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: hellolapomme
Yesterday’s NYT Bits wondered who is the smarter of two Harvard dropouts, Bill Gates of Microsoft or Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Neither bothered attending class, but Gates caught up “in a single intense burst during a separate reading period at the end of the term.”
Zuckerberg was to busy with Facebook to even do that. “So in an inspired last-minute save, he built a Web site with all of the important paintings and room for annotation. He then sent an e-mail to the students taking the class offering it up as a community resource. In …read more