Monday Steve Roesler wrote a terrific post briefly recapping a Peter Drucker article in the Harvard Business Review called “Managing Oneself” (Steve included a link to the full article).
A part of that article is The Act of Noticing and it really resonated with me.
“While everyone is blogging, Twittering or tweeting, linking in, booking their faces, and coming up with other digital ways to “connect”, it would be good to ask: “Am I too busy to notice?”
I bookmarked an article last week that included solid research about the bulk of the population preferring to buy goods and services through face-to-face contact. …read more

A couple of weeks ago I wrote Leadership is All Hype (credit Peter Drucker for the title) and among the commenters was Bruce Lewin of Four Groups; as I told Bruce, his most recent comment deserved a full post response. (I hope you’ll take a moment to read the whole thread.)
This part of the conversation is focused directly on leadership as a business.
“Leadership is arguably a nascent industry.”
Leadership has been around for several thousand years, but it was only after WWII that it attracted practitioners who actually earned their living by teaching ‘leadership’ skills, in spite of “little consensus …read more

Jim Stroup writes an amazing blog. He reads widely, thinks deeply and writes superbly—of course, it doesn’t hurt that we hold similar views on the subject of ‘leaders’.
Last Thursday Jim wrote Clarifying leadership and supplied me with my quotes for today.
The first is from Peter Drucker, who said,
“Leadership is all hype. We’ve had three great leaders in this century – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.”
Jim considers this the most sensible thing Drucker ever said about leadership and I agree. Jim goes on to say,
“He was right. Those guys had it all: vision, oratorical ability, relationship building skills, charisma, relentless focus, …read more