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Category Archives: Change

“Horses for Courses”: Changing the Guard at Citibank

Posted on October 23, 2012 by David

This week Vikram S. Pandit resigned suddenly as CEO of Citibank, together with his longtime lieutenant and business partner, John Havens, who was President and COO. Although Pandit claimed that he left voluntarily, it is clear that he and Havens … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged CEO succession, change, Citigroup, context, culture, ecocycle, John Havens, Michael Corbat, Michael O'Neill, Robert Rubin, social traps, sweet zone, Vikram Pandit | Comments Off

Drucker Forum: Capitalism 2.0 – New Horizons for Managers: Asking the Right Questions

Posted on October 16, 2012 by David

The Drucker Forum, which is taking place in Vienna from November 15 to 16, is now only a month away. It promises to be an excellent conference, with exciting speakers and the promise of great discussions. There will be some … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged Adrian Wooldridge, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Bent Flyvbjerg, CEO pay, change, Chicago Booth, complex systems, Fixing the Game, Global Drucker Forum, Gretchen Morgenson, hedge-fund, Masters of Management, Peter Drucker, power, private-equity, Roger Martin, Steven Kaplan, Walter Bagehot | 1 Comment

Management in China: The Problem of Trust

Posted on October 9, 2012 by David

Some weeks back New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote an article about China and its perceived lack of ability to innovate. Some say that innovation is not in the Chinese DNA and that their rote education system inhibits their … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, Leadership | Tagged Alibaba, Catch-22, change, china, Chinese capitalism, Chinese Family Business, Communist Party, community, Confucian philosophy, expatriate, explicit knowledge, Gordon Redding, gwailo, Hong Kong, innovation, law, management development, markets, nepotism, network, rural, Tom Friedman, trust, urban, virtue | Comments Off

Communities of Faith and The Spirit of Capitalism

Posted on October 2, 2012 by David

Last week I asked in the context of the US presidential elections, “Do Mormons Make Better Managers Than Leaders?” The question was intended to be provocative but I do not think it either impolite or improper, especially as well-known HBS … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged achievement motivation, Adam Smith, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Catholicism, change, chocolate industry, Christian, Clayton Christensen, communities of faith, community, Crisis & Renewal, ecological perspective, education, Harvard Business School, head, innovation, management ethics, Max Weber, moral sentiment, Mormons, Nonconformists, Old Testament, Protestant Ethic, Quakers, religion, Robert Barclay, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, social entrepreneurs, spirit of capitalism, start-up, steel industry, The New Ecology of Leadership | Comments Off

Romney and Obama: Do Mormons Make Better Managers than Leaders?

Posted on September 25, 2012 by David

We are into the last six weeks of the presidential election and the contrasts between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama throw light on the sometimes-controversial distinction between managers and leaders. In his 1977 article in the Harvard Business Review “Managers … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy, Uncategorized | Tagged Barack Obama, Clayton Christensen, context, David Brooks, Democratic National Convention, George W. Bush, leaders, manager, means and ends, Mitt Romney, Mormon, narrative, pull, push, strategy, Varieties of Religious Experience, William James, Zaleznik | 1 Comment

Essay Based on The New Ecology of Leadership Wins a Top Prize in the Drucker Global Challenge Essay Contest 2012

Posted on September 18, 2012 by David

It’s official! My essay, “Practical Wisdom: Reinventing Work and Reinventing Organizations by Rediscovering Ourselves”, which is based on the ideas in The New Ecology of Leadership, has won a top prize in the Drucker Global Challenge Essay Contest. The organizers … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged Aristotle, behavioral economics, body and mind, business schools, Cartesian, Descartes, Drucker Challenge, ecological rationality, emotion and reason, employee society, English Enlightenment, entrepreneurial society., evolutionary biology, facts and values, functional silo, Global Drucker Forum, ideas and matter, ideology of reason, innovation, management thought, markets, moral sentiment, neuroscience, Peter Drucker, phronesis, Plato, positive empirical, Reinventing Organization, Reinventing Work, Scottish Enlightenment, social ecology, social entrepreneurs, Spanish treasure, stability and change, Stephen Toulmin, Thirty Years' War, Vienna, World War II | 1 Comment

“Go Ahead: Make Our Day” – What Clint Eastwood Might Have Said

Posted on September 4, 2012 by David

The unintended highlight of the Republican National Convention (RNC) last week was Clint Eastwood’s rambling address on Thursday that consumed 13 minutes of precious prime time, delaying Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech. Scheduled for only five minutes in the rigidly scripted … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged Anglo-Saxon capitalism, apathy, Barack Obama, challenge, change, chaos, Clint Eastwood, communities of capitalists, community, cowboy, Democratic National Convention, despair, entertainment, government service, gunslinger, heart, hope, how, identity, individual, meaning, mission, Mitt Romney, narrative, narrative centre of gravity, network, obstacles, passion, political parties, purpose, Republican National Convention, stories, support, tension, trade-off, unemployed, values, what, who, why | 2 Comments

Shareholder Value Part III: A New Narrative for Capitalism

Posted on August 28, 2012 by David

The ripples from Joe Nocera’s August 10 column in The New York Times, “Down With Shareholder Value” continue to radiate throughout the blogosphere. This past week I came across Miguel Padró’s Yahoo blog, “Is ‘Maximizing Shareholder Value’ No Longer the … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged Alexis de Toqueville, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Aspen Institute, Berle and Means, community capitalism, context, crisis, destruction, ecodynamics, ecological perspective, ecology, English Nonconformists, evolution, externalities, family business, Gerald Davis, hunter-gatherer, Joe Nocera, John Kenneth Galbraith, managerial capitalism, MiguelPadro, narrative, narrative centre of gravity, neoclassical economics, re-localize, renewal, retention, selection, shareholder capitalism, shareholder value model, Sisyphus, The New Industrial State, variation | 1 Comment

From Machines to Plants: Wandering in The Gardens of Democracy

Posted on August 21, 2012 by David

In The New Ecology of Leadership I draw an extended, disciplined analogy between the cycle of an ecosystem (my favourite is a fire-dependent, lodge-pole pine forest) and the trajectories that organizations follow as they go through their lives. The objective … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged complex systems, destruction, ecological perspective, ecology, economics, Eric Liu, Gardenbrain, Gardens of Democracy, government, hedge-funds, Machinebrain, means and ends, Nick Hanauer, politics, Second Enlightenment, The New Ecology of Leadership | Comments Off

Shareholder Value – Part II: “Down with Shareholder Value”

Posted on August 14, 2012 by David

In Saturday’s New York Times, Joe Nocera wrote a column entitled “Down With Shareholder Value”. In it he traced briefly the rise of the concept and then suggested that we are at the “dawn of a new movement”, although it … Continue reading →