Recommended Reading - Making Sense of Leadership, ReputationXchange.com

ReputationXchange.com’s author, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, had another insightful piece today on leadership. She examined the specific difficulties leaders particularly CEOs have today as compared in the past. Her blog piece focuses on the latest issue of the Economist’s World in 2010. Dr. Gaines-Ross focused specifically on an article in the Economist authored by Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new CEO, on leadership. The article entitled, Leadership in the Information Age according to Dr. Gaines-Ross was full of useful advice. There was one section of the Bartz article that Dr. Gaines-Ross quoted that I thought was especially insightful and worth reading.

How are leaders expected to lead when they are on stage for everyone to throw tomatoes or applaud madly? Bartz suggests that the old model of command and control is obsolete. Leaders have to change direction and be able to explain this new world order to those around them. To make that happen, she suggests listening carefully to employees. Leading from the bottom up. Second, she recommends finding the thought leaders within your organization. Why? Bartz says: “But equally pressing is finding those employees who, though perhaps not the best managers, have the ability to digest and interpret information for others. Grooming these in-house ideas people helps foster a culture of openness to fresh thinking—the greatest energy an organization can have.” Leaders need to lead by ideas, not by force of power. Products and services alone are not enough.

Readers interested in leadership, should read the entire Economist piece as well as the short blog by Dr. Gaines-Ross.

Suggested Reading - Subprime Leadership, ReputationXchange.com

Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross wrote a clever piece in her blog ReputationXchange entitled Subprime Leadership. Dr. Gaines-Ross is the public relations firm Weber Shadwick’s chief reputation strategist. Her piece focused on a presentation David Gergen, the presidential consultant, current CNN commentator and Harvard professor, made at the Council of PR firm’s Critical Issues Forum the other day. If you are interested in CEO leadership or what it might mean to a company’s performance check out the blog or go directly to Gergen’s comments.

Recommended Reading - Can Good Leadership be Learned?, The Atlantic

Lane Wallace ,a correspondent for The Atlantic, examined Alan Deutschman’s new book, Walk the Walk: The #1 Rule for Real Leaders. Wallace was pleasantly surprised at how insightful the book was. She wrote,

… Deutschman’s premise about the importance of management being authentic, honest, and not asking anyone beneath them to meet any standard or make any sacrifice they’re not prepared to meet or make themselves is clearly not as obvious or widely understood as I once might have thought. Take yesterday’s column by David Carr of the New York Times about the management at the Tribune Company arguing to a bankruptcy court–after leading the company into bankruptcy (in no small part because of a badly-conceived, heavily-leveraged purchase that left the company saddled with debt) and depriving more than 2,000 employees of jobs– that the managers should be awarded between 45 to 60 million dollars in performance bonuses. The bonuses are necessary, the company’s lawyers argued, because getting a company out of bankruptcy is hard work, and “not being rewarded for hard work and hard effort is demotivating.”

… Another point Deutschman makes is that a great leader has, in the words of Urban Meyer, head football coach at the University of Florida (where Tim Tebow plays), “the ability to make the level of play of everyone else around him better.” Again, a seeming statement of the ridiculously obvious. But consider this piece on Bank of America’s outgoing CEO (and former chariman) Ken Lewis, who announced last week that he was retiring–although he said he’d stay on through December because a successor wasn’t waiting in the wings. And why wasn’t a successor waiting in the wings? Because, according to the article’s author, Joe Nocera, Lewis “brutally fired many of the firm’s most talented executives, seemingly afraid to be surrounded by potential successors.”

The book appears to be worth a read.

Recommended Reading - Leadership angst: Who is the new CEO?, Financial Post

Karen Mazurekewich wrote a story for the Financial Post examining the need for new leaders to serve as CEOs.  The writer examined the difficulties that many financial firms and their CEOs have experienced over the last two years.  In the piece the author quotes a number of academics who are pushing for changes in CEO leadership.  

“The world is crying out for a new type of leader,” says Carol Stephenson, dean of the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.

Ms. Stephenson says today’s leaders need to be more “collaborative” and “encourage their teams to work across an enterprise or industry.” 

The story is brief but worth a quick read.