The personal blog of Caneel Joyce PhD, executive coach & culture builder. Work is a spiritual journey and sometimes a total cluster.
Link: Seth Godin’s Creative Process | Steven Pressfield Online
THE CREATIVE PROCESS Seth Godin By Steven Pressfield | Published: January 26, 2010 SP: When it comes to generating ideas, what’s your process? Solitary? Collaborative? Is it fun, is it grueling? How,…
Link: FT.com / Stefan Stern – The simple (but not easy) task of focusing
For some time it has been fashionable to describe businesses and organisations as “complex adaptive systems”. The phrase sounds learned. It is a cousin of that other knowing statement: that leaders…
New on the Caneelian FT.com / Stefan Stern – The simple (but not easy) task of focusing: http://bit.ly/9WHwiF
A grasp of finance, strategy, marketing and all those “big picture” subjects only forms part of a serious leader’s education. Those sometimes neglected or disdained topics – organisational development and behaviour, communication, team dynamics – that are often rejected as insubstantial turn out to be crucial to success as a leader.
Stefan Stem, in the Business Education supplement of FT on May 20, 2010, argues cogently for the importance of the ‘soft skills’ training that is all too often neglected and/or under-valued.
For some time it has been fashionable to describe businesses and organisations as “complex adaptive systems”. The phrase sounds learned. It is a cousin of that other knowing statement: that leaders need to be “comfortable with ambiguity”.
Well, yes. It is a turbulent world. It is hard to be certain about the future. But isn’t part of the problem for business leaders that life is in fact too complicated? Particularly in larger organisations, the legacy of old structures and traditions adds to this complexity. It is easy to lose sight of priorities. No wonder that, these days, the role of chief executive is often described as being an impossible job.
Five principles describe how the most focused and successful businesses are designed: self-awareness, principles, distributed leadership, closed feedback loop, and small number of key operating measures.
Confession time: I am the worst about procrastinating (especially if a task requires sitting still for extended periods) – even though I know that innovators are always doing things.
Here’s a fun but eerily accurate video by Mickey and Johnny. (The narrator’s accent gives it a sense of being serious and important, like only the British can.) I found this on my co – author Jono Hey’s blog.
The ones that resonated most with me were “arranging your bookshelves by color”, “not being able to decide how to do something” and “not knowing how to finish something.” (Constraints do help with the knowing how to finish part, though!)