We want to make an end to strife, to balance the warring factions of our lives, of the demands they make of us, and we of them. Just some peace and quiet, please, for once. Why is that so difficult, so fraught with fruitless struggle and seemingly endless failure? Well, one reason is . . .
Most discussions about reconciling one’s person with one’s work – particularly when we wake up one day to find that we’ve been, for decades perhaps, neglecting that little point – tend to start with a reexamination of who we are. What kind of a person are we, or do we want to be, we ask ourselves. As we look back across those unexamined years, can we discern a plot struggling to leave its mark in the otherwise featureless terrain, a trajectory to our lives? What kind of story does it tell? This isn’t necessarily mid-life crisis stuff. Indeed, many of our younger colleagues . . .
Henry Mintzberg is known as an eminently practical academic researcher: he doesn’t just do surveys and analyses of stock market data and the like. Nor does he do interviews alone – he goes to managers’ workplaces, follows them around, and notes what they actually do – not what they say or think they do. He is also regarded as something of an . . .
On occasion we reflect on our lives and wonder who we are, how we can define the kind of person we have been, what we have contributed, what we amount to. Not a bad exercise – and all the better for the doing of it. The thing is, we will probably get the sums all wrong no matter how many times we go back and do it over, but we sure stand to learn a lot from the exercise. One thing we should learn is . . .
A book I’m currently reading pokes a little fun at the general belief among managers, especially in the United States, that they must read only the “latest” “research” on management. Anything not excruciatingly current runs the risk of leading them down dangerously out of date side paths. It’s as if management “science” is equivalent to quantum physics, continuously transforming our view of reality as new facts are uncovered. Have you read anything lately that uncovered any new “facts” about management?
When do you really know something? Is it when you can recite it on demand? Must you further be able to manipulate it to help you make decisions, chart courses of action? Or, must you actually understand it? There are distinct differences between all three of these levels of knowledge possession. In particular, it is useful – important – to not mistake the second for the third. . .
There seems to be a peculiarly odd riddle hidden in the rise of supposedly exceptional individual leaders to the top of their organizations. We have discussed here the inadequacy of the doctrines of the modern leadership movement for developing such leaders from raw material, or even of predicting which such material is especially amenable to such training. Indeed, there is an abundance of evidence that many such predictions or depictions – some trumpeted with especially unfortunate prematurity – have proven decidedly and despairingly false. . .
Or:
Jim Stroup's Business card:
Come visit the Managing Leadership
Managing Leadership® is a registered trademark of the author
Bad Behavior has blocked 908 access attempts in the last 7 days.
