Creating Authentic Solutions for Stubborn Systemic Problems
Are leaders suffering from a serious lack of curiosity? According to the gurus of today, leaders want to receive information in soundbites, and it must answer only HOW-TO questions instead of any WHY questions. Does that mean leaders need or want to be prescribed how to do their job? These gurus assume implicitly that the …
Continue reading “Prescription Without Diagnosis Is Malpractice”
Who believes in their heart of heart that: Familiar management approaches have become less and less relevant? Thought leaders struggled to find a better approach to managing a business? Coaching for leadership is that new management approach? This opinion was formulated back in 2000 by the greatest coaches and thinkers in the world on management …
Continue reading “Leadership Inflation and Management Devaluation”
The current Zeitgeist dominating our decision-making processes is unsustainable because it conflicts with our humanity, which refers to the quality of compassion or consideration for others (people or animals). CEO Adventure is a call for the human maturation of our executive leaders. How to Live within a System We live our lives in relationships to …
Continue reading “To Be a Mature Executive Leader is a Choice”
Serving as my Rotary club’s International chair, I was asked if we would want to participate in a project in Latin America. It involved piping drinking water to a small rural community on Bolivia’s Altiplano. The benefits of this relatively small investment to an entire community were not immediately obvious. For example, girls could go …
Continue reading “What Leaders Should Learn from Helping Girls Go to School”
When invited to speak to an executive coaching group, the chair impressed upon me the need to deliver “Take-Home Value”―something that participants can apply immediately upon their return to their desks. I interpreted that request as a demand for prescribing a specific action, something to DO as opposed to something to THINK, to ponder, or …
Have you ever wondered why the exhortation “This Is Business!” should be an acceptable and definitive justification for a decision that undermines a business’ structural integrity? Typically, these decisions involves implementation of operational efficiency measures such as making employees redundant while demanding fewer people to carry the same work load sometimes even without getting paid …
Every day of the week, you can attend a conference, workshop, seminar, webinar, peer coaching group, or read business books, -journals, -articles, and LinkedIn posts. What they all have in common is the offering of solutions that promise to make you a more successful leader. Apart from sharing non-tangible best practices, these meetings and reading …
Continue reading “CREATIVITY- Freedom to Pursue Your Sense of Quality”
Books don’t get written in the order they ultimately appear in their published form; the title, sub-title and introduction may well be the last pieces that are created. When contemplating to write what is now CEO Adventure, I titled the book “It Depends”, as a reference to a consultant’s idiosyncratic answer to most of the …
Imagine being the director of finance at the Facilities Management division of a major financial institution. You provide the institution’s executive management team with financial reports on its large number of branch network offices. Here is Your Predicament: Every month, the Information Technology (IT) department processes financial data from the branch network that you …
The premise of CEO Adventure is that failure to understand business system complexity and the disruptive nature of events undermine CEO EffectivenessTM. Complexity refers to the fact that these networks of business functions, –processes, interfaces, and technological tools―are intricately interconnected and dependent upon each other. In order to justify the ever increasing cost of operating …