by Daria Steigman on September 16, 2009
by Daria Steigman on August 4, 2009
Being a baseball booster can be fraught with disappointment. Just ask Cubs fans: 101 years and counting. My team, the Washington Nationals, is on its way to getting the first overall pick in the draft for the second year in a row. This isn’t a good thing.
Last month, the Washington Nationals fired their manager after the team won only 23 games through June (losing 64 or so). While by all accounts Manny Acta is a good guy, he isn’t a leader. As the team floundered, he:
- Rarely held a team meeting. His successor holds a short meeting every day, win or lose.
- Didn’t talk much. While some players were fine with that, others reportedly needed a more high-touch approach.
- He rarely, if ever, talked about accountability.
Acta’s worst offense: he kept doing the same thing over and over again even when it wasn’t working. That’s bad management. It’s terrible leadership.
What are you doing to inspire your team today?
P.S. The team’s still got issues, but they’re definitely playing better and with more spark under interim manager Jim Riggleman.
Photo by cliff1066. Flickr Creative Commons license.
Tagged as:
baseball,
Manny Acta,
Washington Nationals
by Daria Steigman on June 25, 2009
Do you have what it takes to be a leader? And is this even the right question to ask?
John Ryan, president of the Center for Creative Leadership and a former superintentent of the U.S. Naval Academy, has a great column in Business Week that posits that leadership has as much to do with environment as it does with innate abilities. He writes:
If you live in a culture where your colleagues believe you can be a leader and help you develop the skills you need, you will enthusiastically embrace the mantle of leadership… [R]egardless of your occupation, you will view yourself as a leader at home, at work, and in your community. But if you live in a culture that assumes leadership is not for everyone, is dependent on whether you have innate leadership skills, and that leadership is defined by your job title rather than your actions, you will have an entirely different view.
With this concept in mind, Ryan then suggests that organizations need to look at how they manage employees and whether their corporate culture permits risktaking.
This is interesting stuff, not least because of its implications for entrepreneurship. If we applied Ryan’s model to the typical entrepreneur, would we find a similar mindset?
Tagged as:
Business Week,
Entrepreneurship,
John Ryan,
Leadership,
U.S. Naval Academy
by Daria Steigman on May 26, 2009
Great interview with Wal-Mart Vice Chair Eduardo Castro-Wright about leadership and what they don’t teach you in business school. The crux of leadership: trust. Leadership is “about being able to get people to go to places they never thought they could go,” he said in an interview with the New York Times.
Other highlights:
- “You can accomplish almost anything in life if you do not care who takes credit for it. So I’ve tried to do more of that. And I’ve tried to do less of the things that make business more complex. I really like simplicity.”
- “I think that business schools could do more to prepare kids to deal with the often more difficult side of business management and leadership. The balance of courses is probably weighted to the numeric side of business as opposed to the people side of business.”
- “I honestly believe … that cultural differences, which are so often touted as the rationale for making decisions in business, are grossly overrated, and that human behavior really doesn’t have a language. It’s pretty much the same everywhere.”
And my personal favorite, in response to how people make business more complicated than it is: “I think that all of us read far too many business books…We have a very clear view of what we do for consumers around the world. And we can describe our complete strategy in 10 words.”
Read the entire interview here.
Tagged as:
Eduardo Castro-Wright,
Leadership,
New York Times,
Wal-Mart
by Daria Steigman on May 6, 2009
It’s never a good idea to get too caught up in our great ideas, inventions, and innovations. Ask Tropicana, the most recent brand to get wrapped up in its righteousness without stopping to take the pulse of its community.
Businesses need fresh voices and outside perspectives. And not just from outside, but from the inside out. Including the membership of their boards.
As I talked about here, there are some really good reasons why solopreneurs and small business owners should consider serving on boards. But there’s also a reason why corporate boards should be looking at entrepreneurs and small business people. We’ve typically done it all, from strategic direction to sales to marketing to finance and so on.
I’ve always wanted to serve on a corporate board. But how to get noticed? I haven’t cracked that code yet, but here’s a great post on the Washington Post Leadership Blog that talks about financial fluency and other skills you need to bring to the table.
Any suggestions?
Tagged as:
Business,
Entrepreneurship,
Leadership,
Tropicana,
Washington Post
