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Tag Archives: Leadership

Leadership on a Cliff

  By Fred H. Schlegel | March 23, 2011 - 1:31 pm |
5 Comments

What was a harrowing descent had just become worse, the steep scree slope ended in a cliff of unknown dimensions. We had all bought into our guide’s decision to take the short-cut. Down was bad. Now we had to go back up. (from events recounted below…) Leadership fascinates me. Of course, recommended flavors and real life often don’t seem to line up as neatly as rah-rah management guides try to make us believe. While it would be nice to think that every successful conclusion was due to good leadership and every failure was due to bad, the lessons tend to be individualistic, full of false positives and negatives. Often the ability of followers to succeed in spite of leadership inanities is a more fascinating process question. That’s why it was refreshing to see that the 8 management points (and 3 pitfalls) put forward by Google appeared to be good common … Continue reading →

I’m One of Many Seeds, and Happy To Be…

  By Fred H. Schlegel | March 7, 2011 - 12:35 pm |
7 Comments

“My positioning statement is two words: “Empower people.” What’s your’s?” Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment Bringing about change is a lot like swimming upstream.  Everything and everyone pushes you to run fast with them promising safer, faster, easier waters via alternative compass headings. But changemakers in the world not only swim against the current, they pull thousands upstream with them. Motivating movement with the force of an idea. Guy Kawasaki takes on this force in his latest book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. I’ve long enjoyed reading Kawasaki for his ability to present ideas that can help you move mountains in ways that are both motivating and realistically grounded.  So I was delighted to receive a pre-release copy from his publisher last month to review if I felt so inclined. You have to enjoy a book that wraps up with a chapter on how to avoid being wrongly … Continue reading →

Filtering Ideas – Yodeling Pickle

  By Fred H. Schlegel | January 18, 2010 - 6:00 am |
6 Comments

How many ideas have you rejected this week? It’s tough to keep track given the velocity they come at us. (Heck, we get bombarded with 34 gigabytes of information including 100,000 words a day, not to mention what we think up for ourselves.) As children most of us were thoroughly trained to censor our thoughts before letting go with the ridicule inducing comment. (The Cubs are going to win the pennant! – ah, some of us never learn.) This sometimes serves us well. In the world of ideas it can be deadly. Ideas are fragile things in business. Any number of stray comments, poor politics, and concerted efforts at logic can drive a good idea (and it’s conceiver) into the mud. Problem is, most of the tools we use early on to sift through ideas are little more than personal opinion. But decisions must be made and so politics end … Continue reading →

Avoid Middleman Status

  By Fred H. Schlegel | December 2, 2009 - 2:00 pm | ,
7 Comments

Are you a middleman? I ask, simply because I’m regularly looking over my shoulder at middleman status myself. If you’re not being pushed into middleman status by technology, then it could be your customers and suppliers who put you there. Paranoia reigns. Sorry. This is not a new state of being. Walmart began its attack on independent distributors (middlemen with warehouses) ages ago wiping most of them out. They are so efficiently tied into their supply chain now that orders sometimes bypass headquarters and go straight to factories. (Headquarters as middlemen, who’d of thunk it?) In the print industry process middleman felt the pinch. First typesetters went, followed by color separators. As newspapers are fast finding out, the entire printing process is being pushed to the side. Moving news to eyeballs quickly means that in some places even editors are seen as middlemen now. Middlemen. They start as facilitators but … Continue reading →

Being and Entrepreneurship

  By Fred H. Schlegel | November 20, 2009 - 10:40 am | ,
8 Comments

“Organizations tend to evolve in ways that are inherently resistant to entrepreneurship. Yet Entrepreneurship is instrumental for ensuring the long-term sustainability of any enterprise.” (Properties of balance: A pendulum effect in corporate entrepreneurship, Michael H. Morris, Jurie van Vuuren, Jeffrey R. Cornwall, Retha Scheepers) Whether you call it corporate entrepreneurship or individual creativity, it is difficult to drive behavior that challenges the status quo, questions existing procedures, or increases personal risk. “More fundamentally, fostering corporate entrepreneurship becomes problematic if company executives do not know what they are trying to achieve.” (Morris, et al) Finding balance in large organizations is difficult at best. The larger the group the further removed any single individual is from the source of cash flow, from the feel of customers, from the pulse of technological change. (You know, the smell of the sawdust, the feel of the earth type stuff.) The meaningfulness of any individual change … Continue reading →