by Charles Plant | Sep 5, 2013 | Leadership Development, Literature Review
I would be remiss if I did not include at least one Peter Drucker book in your reading list. For today’s book I have reached back into the depths of time and recommended The Practice of Management which Drucker wrote in 1954.
I once gave this book to a new manager and was asked why on earth I was giving out a book that at the time was over 40 years old. The reason I keep going back to it is that it’s a classic.
It was the first book that looked at management as a discipline and saw a manager’s job as something distinct from the other jobs in an organization. Every book written after is just taking a tangent on this, the first of a genre.
Now if you like you can cheat by reading The Essential Drucker or Management instead, both more modern takes on the same theme.
by Charles Plant | Sep 4, 2013 | Leadership Development, Literature Review
By now you should have finished reading yesterday’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you haven’t finished yet then you’re going to get behind in these reading assignments so you better hurry up.
Since we started yesterday with a prescription that if you want to have influence, you should try to make people feel important, I thought it would be useful to give you a book today that helps you understand how people think and what they want.
I evaluated recommending Drive by Daniel Pink or First Break All the Rules by Buckingham and Coffman but you’ve probably already read these as they’re pretty mainstream.
Instead, I decided to recommend Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. It’s a great book that explains why we consistently make dumb irrational choices.
“From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random or senseless. They’re systematic and predictable – making us predictably irrational.”
by Charles Plant | Sep 3, 2013 | Leadership Development
Many years ago I worked with a guy by the name of Dave Langley. He always considered the day after Labour Day as the real beginning of the new year. In many ways, I agree with him as we need to get back to work seriously now that summer has faded.
So in honour of Back to School Day I have developed a reading list for you. Over the next four days, I’ll give you four books you really should read. These are ones I’ve read recently and I think have something worthwhile to say.
Today’s book is “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Dale Carnegie wrote the book over 70 years ago and it has sold over 15 million copies. I re-read this book recently, probably 40 or so years after I had first read it. This time it sunk in a little better.
This isn’t a sales book although it will help you improve sales. It isn’t a leadership book although it will help you become a better leader. And it isn’t a networking book although it will help you network.
It’s more of a bible for getting along better with other people. The one key point in the book is what Dale Carnegie believes to be the most important law of human contact: Always make the other person feel important.
This book is particularly useful on Back to School Day as it’s in the playground that you’ll have your greatest influence at work.
by Charles Plant | Aug 23, 2013 | Leadership Development
I”ve come to the conclusion that the greatest example we have today of Complexification, Over-thinking and paralysis by analysis is what we’ve done with the whole field of leadership.
Research has shown in the past that leadership is a hygiene factor, meaning that it is not a motivator but it is a de-motivator if it’s absent.
Recent research I’ve done has borne this out in a survey of what employees like and don’t like. About 30% of my 500 respondents say that management is the thing they like least about work but only 1% say it is what they like most.
So if leadership is not all that critical to success, why are we spending so much time focusing on it. Perhaps we should do as IBM did in its heyday. They spent a lot on training new managers, not so they would be great but just so they wouldn’t piss off all of the talented people they had working for them.
Our paralysis by analysis has also made leadership such a complex subject that everyone is left feeling inadequate by the sheer volume of behavioural characteristics that go to make a ‘good’ leader.
If good leadership is a function of behaviour then how can two very dissimilar people with completely divergent behaviours both be good leaders? And how could anyone then call Steve Jobs a great leader given his irascible nature?
Research I’m doing is showing instead that leadership is 80% process and 20% behaviour or inspiration. It appears that great leaders all share a similar process for dealing with followers even if they don’t share behavioural characteristics.
If I’m right then it would be easy to implement good leadership processes and get 80% of the way to being a good leader.
Instead of the paralysis by analysis within which we’re stuck, perhaps we can break out and deal with leadership process instead of debating whether good leadership is a function of nature or nurture. Perhaps instead of training people to adopt new behaviours, maybe we can train them to follow a new process.
Which do you think is easier?
by Charles Plant | Aug 20, 2013 | Leadership Development
As if Complexification isn’t enough, it looks like we’re over-thinking things too. What I don’t get is if we have so little time that we can’t simplify things, why are we taking all of our precious time wasting it with over-thinking?
Case in point – Career Angst. Fifty years ago, you found something you moderately liked doing that paid OK and you stuck to it. You might have moved around a bit to progress but you wouldn’t have been spending all your time analyzing whether or not you were optimizing your career.
I meet from time to time for lunch with friends, a number of whom have been in relatively the same career or job as when they started work. While some are miserable just because that’s who they are, others are perfectly happy and not worried about what they could be doing instead.
Others however are constantly hoping around trying to optimize their career experience. And as I look to Gen Y I see more and more of this jumpy optimizing behaviour.
Thing is that those friends who have stuck with relatively the same thing for their whole careers are decidedly better off than those of us (myself included) who are jumping around, always in search of something better.
I think we might all be better off keeping it simple and letting some things just happen rather than always be over-thinking.
by Charles Plant | Aug 19, 2013 | Leadership Development
Every year about this time I think about going to see a few movies at TIFF and just like today, every time I go to their website I get confused by the process of getting tickets and end up giving up and not going.
I think my failure to engage is a result of Complexification.
Complexification is about making simple things complex.
The problem is that we do it to ourselves all the time. We’re often making life more complex than it needs to be.
I’m reminded of the quote first attributed to Blaise Pascal who said that “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
And that’s why we’re doing it more and more often. We have less and less time to get things done so without the luxury of taking time to think something through, we’re throwing everything we can at a problem in the hope that something sticks.
And in the process, we’re making things overly complex.
