Edelman’s Annual “Trust Barometer” report is out. Maddie broke the news on SocialFishing, pointing out that trust in CEOs dropped precipitously (50% last year; 38% this year), where trust in the “regular employee” was up by a similar margin (34% last year to 50% this year). That’s big news, and it’s consistent with what she [...]
Continue ReadingLeadership
This weekend I taught a three-hour session on Systems to students in Georgetown’s Organization Development and Change Leadership Certificate program. I went through this program 11 years ago myself (though it didn’t have the “change leadership” moniker back then). I love teaching this class and digging into the idea that when we get together in [...]
Continue ReadingThere is an article in the Volunteer Leadership issue of Associations Now titled, “Balanced Conflict, Better Decisions.” The conclusions in the article concern me. I’m paraphrasing here, but the article says: “Cognitive” conflict is about contradictory perspectives, where “affective” conflict is personalized, emotional, and political. Association boards make better decisions by delegating cognitive conflict to [...]
Continue ReadingDuncan Watts has a great blog post on HBR that talks about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Specifically, he has noticed how perplexed many of us are by the fact that the movement itself has no single, identifiable leader. How can it continue without someone to set a direction and lead the people there? Interestingly, [...]
Continue ReadingI suppose that sounds obvious, but when I talk to people about changing the way they lead and manage organizations, I’m not so sure it’s that obvious. Instead, there seems to be a default assumption that in the future, management will look roughly like it does today, except that somehow it will be better and [...]
Continue ReadingWhenever I get some time to think deeply about things related to the workplace, like how do we make work better, or what is leadership, or what is management, then I end up inescapably coming to the conclusion that is the title of this post: We have no idea what we’re doing. Sorry to be [...]
Continue ReadingSteve Drake pointed me to an interesting blog post based on some of the material from the most recent Steve Jobs biography. Apparently Jobs thought it was a problem when CEOs become too focused on sales: I have my own theory about why the decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does [...]
Continue ReadingI give credit to Shelly Alcorn and her Association Subculture blog for triggering this post. She wrote a post about “volume,” referring to a very cool video of George Carlin. Carlin talked about how, later in his career, he learned to “raise his voice”–not literally, but upping the stakes in his comedy. Elevating his voice. [...]
Continue ReadingI already did an overall recap post on the ASAE Annual Meeting over on the Common Thread blog with some big picture reactions to the event. Here I wanted to dig into some of the issues a little more deeply, and there’s one that I have been stewing over for a couple of days now. [...]
Continue ReadingTony Schwartz wrote a fantastic post on HBR today on Ten principles to live by in today’s complex world. All of them are spot on, so read the whole thing, but I’ll focus on one of them that jumped out at me: Emotions are contagious, so it pays to know what you’re feeling. I’ve been [...]
Continue Reading
Jamie is a Vice President at MSP where he leads the consulting division. 
