
Exercise Your Ethical Muscles: Here Are 4 Keys to Being a Better Boss
Lessons on how to be a better boss from corporate-leadership guru Dov Seidman.
Lessons on how to be a better boss from corporate-leadership guru Dov Seidman.
This fall, some 20 million students will attend colleges and universities across America. At a formative time in their lives – intellectually, emotionally and morally – they’ll be exposed to a range of people and ideas that will shape the way they think, feel and relate to others and the world.
Today marks one year since the passing of Professor Elie Wiesel. To me, and certainly to countless others, Elie Wiesel was a, if not the moral conscience of our world. Professor Wiesel said that “words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the status of deeds.” His morally courageous and truthful words in so many moments of consequence – especially when in the face of hatred or persecution – transformed into deeds that made our world more just and human.
With shared truth debased and trust in leaders diminished, we now face a full-blown “crisis of authority itself.'
In the face of rampant technology and automation (including warnings about jobs being lost to robots), Seidman points out that we must cultivate trust, truth, values, passion, and other human-related qualities. He notes that numerous companies tout the word human in their slogans. In many cases, these companies do exemplify human-centered values. However, “though these efforts are likely earnest attempts to embody human values, companies get into trouble when they don't fully and completely instill these values in their organizations.” Citing the example of Nelson Mandela, Seidman writes: “When you demonstrate moral authority, people follow you not because they have to, but because they want to.”
Technology isn’t just changing our world. It’s reshaping it faster than individuals and institutions are...
Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and current Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, recommended President Trump five books in the earnest spirit that “reading can make people better leaders.” Each offers insights into the human condition and metaphors for navigating the vicissitudes of life, and when taken together,…
The one thing machines will never have: “a heart.”
Every single day, business leaders and the people they work with are constantly reminded that the world around them is moving faster than they are currently able to respond and in ways that they struggle to predict, comprehend, let alone control. The world around us is not simply speeding up, it is being fashioned into something altogether new; the amount, level, and magnitude of change has accelerated to the point that we have gone from a difference of degree to a difference of kind.
I began election night writing a column that started with words from an immigrant, my friend Lesley Goldwasser, who came to America from Zimbabwe in the 1980s. Surveying our political scene a few years ago, Lesley remarked to me: “You Americans kick around your country like it’s a football. But it’s not a football. It’s a Fabergé egg. You can break it.”
The financial crisis may have begun with a lion’s roar, but it seems to have concluded with something akin to a lamb’s bleat. In late August, the SEC announced a settlement with former Fannie Mae CEO and President Daniel Mudd, who was accused of misleading investors about the organization’s exposure to risky mortgages, marking the conclusion of one of the last legal battles…
Businesses of all kinds are mired in a crisis of trust. Whether it’s the exposure of embarrassing corporate details stemming from a hack initiated in Asia; the revelation that a company has systematically misled its customers, subverted regulators, or made unreliable claims to patients; the release of sensitive financial documents through WikiLeaks or the Panama…
People see that many of the companies where they have put their time, money, and faith are not actually working for them. Many employees and customers have adopted mistrust as a way of life, assuming that every big mainstream business will sooner or later fail to live up to their expectations.
As long as I have more dreams in my head than achievements, I am young.”.
The world is not just rapidly changing, it is being dramatically reshaped. It is being reshaped faster than individual humans and the institutions are yet able to respond. Recent technological advances and disruptions have generated a world that operates so differently that we struggle to comprehend its meaning and adapt to the circumstances it presents to us. This new world poses profound challenges for organizations of all kinds as they try to cultivate resilience and simultaneously determine a source of growth.
“The vast majority of business leaders are looking for innovation in all the wrong places. In the 20th century, a CEO could command his employees to, ‘produce 10 times as many widgets as you did last month,’ in the same way that a general might have told a soldier to, ‘Take that hill.’ You could…
The world has seen many failed alliances, from the League of Nations to the Warsaw Pact. We should all hope that NATO does not become one of them.
In modern business, perhaps the most sacred management adage is that what you measure is what you get. Therefore, it follows, you must manage what you measure. At the same time, Albert Einstein cautioned that, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” All of these sayings contain both truth and wisdom that apply to this day, but as we forge ahead in a new century, we have yet to come to grips with what is, perhaps, an even deeper truth.
1. Top Performing Companies Will Focus On Connecting Customers
Everyone knows that a workplace in which people feel appreciated and valued, with more autonomy, is a more pleasant place to work than one in which they don’t. What has been less certain is that workplaces with high trust and a strong culture actually do better as businesses.
The vast majority of business leaders are looking for innovation in all the wrong places. In the 20th century, a CEO could command his employees to, ‘produce 10 times as many widgets as you did last month,’ in the same way that a general might have told a soldier to, ‘Take that hill.’ You could measure such progress easily.
Unless you’ve been cryogenically frozen for the last 16 years, you’ve probably noticed how radically our world has been reshaped by ever-expanding technology. Perhaps no part of our world, however, has embraced this shift as fully as business.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, boundaries don’t restrict team members; they empower them.
A few weeks ago Hillary Clinton said that we should “Make America Whole.” She may have said it as an aside, just as a contrast to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” but it actually encapsulates an ethos of leadership both deeply rooted in the American political tradition and central to the future of both our country and the corporate world.