Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these summaries of 5 GREAT articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!
Want to innovate? Develop top leaders
That is a key finding of a new study by the Hay Group, a talent management consulting firm, that identified the best-managed U.S. companies for 2011.
The top 20 highest-rated companies for leadership development included corporate stalwarts such as General Electric (GE), Procter & Gamble (PG), IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT). One common ingredient -- these businesses all place a premium their leaders emphasizing flexibility, customers, new ideas, and collaboration. It is in this last category where leaders show their stuff because as the study concludes, "collaboration is the process that brings [people and resources] together."
Forget Empowerment – Aim for Exhilaration
There is no doubt that there is tremendous goodwill, not to mention countless exciting experiments, when it comes to making the world of work more deeply human—designed to promote more freedom, equity, and engagement, and passion. Why, then, can those words sound so cheap and drained of their juice when we hear them repeated over and over by leaders of all stripes? Probably because they’re spoken so much more often than they’re ever enacted.
That’s why it’s so very refreshing to spend time with a leader who is relentlessly inventive and impressively effective as a champion of the fullest expression of humanity at work. We aim too low, says Ricardo Semler, the irrepressible force behind Brazil’s Semco Group. “We constantly talk about passion—serving customers passionately, filling in forms passionately—but what if we created the conditions for people to feel exhilaration, to get involved to the point they shout ‘yes!’ and give each other high fives because they did if their way and it worked?” What if, instead of assuming passion will just show up when we invoke it, we focused on designing organizations to unleash human flourishing?
Are Failure and Mistakes the Same Thing?
if we value innovation; we must expect mistakes, help people learn from them, and don’t let them hide them from the rest of the team.
At the break one of the participants from American Honda Motor Company suggested I watch a video on failure on their website. I watched it and loved it – this well-made video gives us great food for thought about failure. I highly recommend it.
At the time, I was thinking about failure and mistakes as synonyms. Then I found the quotation I sent to my Powerquotessubscribers this afternoon.
“Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.” — Jim Rohn, speaker and author
I think Jim was right, and that leads me to think that failure and mistakes are not the same thing. Failure is, by Jim’s thinking, something that occurs over time. We all can think of mistakes we have made that we learned from, that become incredibly important in our growth and development, and in fact far from being failures, they contributed to our success.
Twitter Chat Reverse Mentoring as a Means of Cross-Generational/Cross-Life-
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell
Please join @weknownext on May 16 at 3 p.m. ET, for #NextChat for a discussion on “Creating Generational Engagement with Reverse Mentoring.” We can’t wait to hear your thoughts on the following questions:
Q1. How are four generations in the workplace affecting the way we work today?
Q2. What strategies is your organization using to successfully manage four generations in your workplace?
Q3. What is your experience with reverse mentoring?
Q4. Should managers think differently about how they manage age groups?
Q5. What benefits can companies expect from reverse mentoring programs?
Q6. Based on your specific Reverse Mentoring experience, what roles do you feel HR can play in organization’s generational silos?
Q2. What strategies is your organization using to successfully manage four generations in your workplace?
Q3. What is your experience with reverse mentoring?
Q4. Should managers think differently about how they manage age groups?
Q5. What benefits can companies expect from reverse mentoring programs?
Q6. Based on your specific Reverse Mentoring experience, what roles do you feel HR can play in organization’s generational silos?
Build This: Your Culturematic Laboratory
“Every organization needs a Culturematic laboratory... It gives the senior manager a “landing party” with which to search for navigable spaces, habitable worlds, futures we want as opposed to ones that will be otherwise forced upon us. Managers can wait for the future to “happen” to them. Or they can use Culturematics and choose. Culturematic labs are a new management tool.”
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