Browse by Category: Leadership
March 12, 2012 by Alan Pentz to Creativity & Innovation, Leadership
I’ve been working with clients on strategy for many years now and I’ve been through the defining vision, mission, goals, objectives, action planning, and key performance indicators drill so many times I can recite it in my sleep. Not that any of that is a bad thing. Strategy has its place, and I’ve seen it turn into shelfware too many times. Many times that is because there is a lack of leadership as strategies move into the implementation stage. In many other cases, though, a strategy fails because the conditions under which it was created no longer hold.
As the great military strategist General von Moltke pointed out, “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength.” Or more commonly, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Conditions change and objectives and often goals change with them. Most elements of a strategy are dependent on external factors and players that we cannot control or at times even influence.
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March 8, 2012 by Alan Pentz to Leadership, Program Management
Whenever I go to my Pilates class, it is me and about 30 women in the room. I have never seen another man in there. Although some people would tell me not to complain, it got me thinking about why I’m the only man in my Pilates class. One reason is that most men simply aren’t very good at it. I can personally attest to a lack of aptitude. It’s hard; it takes patience and lots of practice to be good. It actually takes a while just to get to the point where your form is good enough to reap the benefits. Most men were reared on lifting weights and running. It’s all about heaving the biggest weight, sprinting extra fast, and generally using brute force and determination to get to your goal. Pilates requires precision. It tones and strengthens rather than bulks. So why is this post on my business blog?
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February 2, 2012 by Alan Pentz to Creativity & Innovation, Leadership, Performance Measurement
We live in a time when many people have little faith in large institutions. Congress’s approval ratings hover in the low teens. Wall Street seems plagued by corruption and a lack of remorse for their wrongdoings. The recent Penn State scandal showed yet another example of trusted leaders failing to act to protect the vulnerable. This list goes on. Trust in institutions seems at an all time low. Politically we’ve seen leaderless, self-organized movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street that are distrustful of institutions rise to vent frustration. It all seems a little dark and angry.
It got me thinking that at the heart of this problem is a culture obsessed with success and in particular monetary success to the exclusion of all other achievements and values. You don’t report child molestation because the football program pulls in all the big alumni money. Wall Street’s only real metric is quarterly profit. The professions are also subject to this trend. Law firms and lawyers themselves have become focused increasingly on profits per partner rather than taking into account a broader group of factors. Most public corporations emphasize short-term shareholder value and quarterly profits over long-term investment or non-monetary goals. In reducing every aspect of our professional lives to one number, we’ve reduced our own humanity and damaged our culture.
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January 3, 2012 by Sarah Agan to Leadership
Perhaps our greatest learning and growth comes from when things don't go well - and yet, we want things to go well and we organize our life so things will go well. If growth comes from learning from failure then the experience of failure is required for growth. That statement is totally counter to our western view of success and achievement. Failure is not a word we associate with success and in fact, most of us are afraid to fail. It creates quite a dilemma, doesn't it? I want to learn yet I'm afraid to do anything I don't know how to do because I might fail and look bad. If I fail and look bad people won’t like me and I won’t be successful. If people don’t like me and I’m not successful I’ll be lonely and I won’t be able to get a job and pay my bills. If I’m lonely and can’t pay my bills I will be sad and I will not have a home to shelter me. If I am sad and don’t have a home to shelter me I will eventually want to die or I will die on the street. Wow! No wonder we don’t want to fail; if we fail we will die (or so we think).
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