“Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits...

  Q: As leaders, how do we strike the right balance between providing the long-term vision for where we are going with the short-term immediacy of the crisis at hand? Isn’t that the very definition of leadership though? I find that some leaders are confusing the pandemic as the only crisis we’ve ever had. It’s as if other catastrophes haven’t happened before, or will occu...

A vice-president approached me one day after I finished delivering a keynote. The talk was focused on organizational culture. He was friendly, but rather cocky. The first line he spoke to me was telling. “It takes too long,” he said. “These engagement things you talked about, it takes too long to implement. I need to drive results, not worry about people’s feelings.” It was a wee bit st...

Warren Bennis, in 1993, noted the following in his book “An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change”: Given the nature and constancy of change and the transnational challenges facing American business leadership, the key to making the right choices will come from understanding and embodying the leadership qualities necessary to succeed in the volatile and mercurial global ...

In 1973, Peter Drucker stated in his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, “Management is not culture-free, that is, part of the world of nature. It is a social function. It is, therefore, both socially accountable and culturally embedded.” Some thirteen years later, Tom Peters remarked in the article Managing As Symbolic Action: “It requires us, as managers, to get peopl...

There is a dilemma that exists in the 90-9-1 phenomenon. Do we first require an organizational culture adaptation prior to any meaningful Enterprise 2.0 adoption? Thus, helping us reverse the order where, now, 90% of the population are active creators versus 1%? Or, do Enterprise 2.0 tools need to become so simplistic, easy to use and of course generally available to an organization be...

Billed as “The Great Transformation”, its work was cut out for itself from the moment you could register online. A conference paying homage to the brilliance of Peter Drucker has now become an annual calendar fixture not to be missed. The 6th iteration of the Global Peter Drucker Forum — recently held in Vienna, naturally — has arguably become the TED or Davos of all leadership conferenc...

My thinking, learning, and writing tends to fall into the theoretical camps that propose how technology, leadership and learning can (or should) converge to improve the health, productivity and culture of an organization. Isolating any of them does none of us any good. Recently, however, I’ve been spending more time thinking about the traits of an individual leader – specifically in th...

In early March, Wilma was promoted to a sales management position. Although she was experienced at the organization and knowledgeable of their selling strategy, she was entirely new to leading people. When the pandemic shut their office down a week later, she was thrust into a tumultuous state of change as a new leader. Her company’s goals changed overnight, and the organization’s expec...

That bitter, older manager in the office who’s always grumbling about the younger generations being “all selfies and no respect” might actually have a bit more bite to his bark than you think. A Notre Dame study tracked empathy levels in college students beginning in 1979 and found that over the course of 30 years, average empathy levels in college students had dropped nearly 50%. No on...