After thirteen weeks, I can take that fork out of my leg and celebrate: we have a winner. Pleasingly, the person most of the office here picked a few weeks back, not least on the grounds that hindsight is better than myopia or having a crystal-clear view of your own adoring reflection. As the four finalists presented their business plans to Lord Sugar’s hired human ‘demolition balls’ (thankfully, with the emphasis on the demolition – His Lordship’s testicular fetishism has rivalled Gordon Ramsay’s in this series), it went mostly as you’d expect.
authentic leadership
Archived Posts from this Category
19 July 2011
Take a chair, Tom: The Apprentice Final
Posted by Ed under authentic leadership, coaching, HR, leadership development, leading performance, recruitment, talent management | Tags: innovation, leadership development, the apprentice |Leave a Comment
21 June 2011
DVD Review: Made in Dagenham
Posted by Ed under authentic leadership, HR, leading performance, life, management, reward and recognition, teamwork | Tags: dvd review, equality, ford machinists strike, made in dagenham |Leave a Comment
Many films have trailers that do them slightly less than full justice. I was aware of Made in Dagenham, but even Mark Kermode’s listing of it as one of his Top 5 Films of 2010 didn’t get me past the trailer and into a cinema at the time. The involvement of the Calendar Girls director left me thinking that film might well be one of those films you label as ‘very British’ and ‘nice’, but might not pack the punch that it might have done.
Its appearance on DVD, the cajoling of some friends (of both sexes), and a quick Amazon order later, I finally spent 108 minutes in its company. And was very glad I did. Yes, it is ‘very British’ – there’s a down-home smallness to it, but appropriately so. Though fictionalised in parts (the central character, played brilliantly by Sally Hawkins, is an amalgam of several real women), its narrative arc is a true story: in 1968, 187 ordinary working women really did set in train a real step in history.
3 May 2011
Who’s Zooming Who?
Posted by Ed under authentic leadership, communication, leadership development, leading performance, motivation, relationships | Tags: derek sivers, leadership, TED, tribes |Leave a Comment
… in which we explore the nature of leadership, the nature of cynicism and the crossroads where these two paths meet. You may or may not be getting to the ‘yada yada yada’ stage with video clips that make points about this, that and the other. If you are, pick another blog posting now and spare yourself. If you’re feeling more tolerant, trying watching this:
And then have a read of a TED Conference 3-minute speech Derek Sivers wrote based around the clip. Your inner cynic may be thinking several things at this point:
29 April 2011
The Prophet Margin: accepting feedback
Posted by Ed under authentic leadership, leading performance, management, motivation, reward and recognition, talent management, teamwork | Tags: cd, innovation, les paul, norio ohga, sony |[2] Comments
If you’ve ever listened to music on CD, one man that you need to thank is Norio Ohga, former Sony Chairman, who died on April 23rd at the age of 81. If the music on the CD was built on multiple tracks of recording and featured an electric guitar, spare a thought also for another man who is no longer with us – Les Paul, who died on 12 August 2009, and left us as a legacy not just one of the most famous electric guitar designs of all, but also multi-track recording and a range of effects devices for treating both live and recorded sound. Even if your entire collection of recorded music is now on an iPod or just streamed at you from Spotify, its existence was shaped by two men. But they have something else in common – their achievements sprang from a conviction that things could be both different and better, and that they had ideas that a big corporation would benefit from listening too. If neither had had the courage to complain, we might even still be listening to live recordings, in mono, on vinyl.
23 March 2011
Conscientious Objectives – and the trouble with setting them
Posted by Ed under authentic leadership, communication, HR, life, management | Tags: Libya, setting objectives, SMART, UN resolution 1973 |Leave a Comment
Conflict is never attractive, even to those that are merely onlookers. If you watched the BBC’s recent screenplay based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin diaries, Christopher and his Kind (on iPlayer for a few more days), you may remember his mother’s words at the dinner table to her son and his German partner: “That’s what wars do: kill people.” Raising arms against another – as individuals or nations, as acts of aggression or of intervention to help protect the beleaguered – raises a dense moral cloud. The current action in Libya is proving to be no exception. The situation in Libya is one in which many world leaders have clearly – and entirely understandably – felt that “something needs to be done”. The difficulty has been to decide exactly what.
18 March 2011
More than saying Grace
Posted by Ed under authentic leadership, talent management, leading performance, behavioural change, relationships, line managers, communication, management | Tags: managers, integrity, interpersonal skills, persuasion, working relationships, high performance teams, giving feedback, receiving feedback, personal impact |Leave a Comment
In his 1960 novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth posed a question about manners:
Is man a savage at heart, skinned o’er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man’s gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel’s arse?”
Either way, I can’t help but feel that they are innate. Manners – like grace or ‘cool’ – are one of those things that either you possess or you don’t: they cannot truly be feigned. They are something you evidence, rather than something you simply ‘do’: manners are not a form of karaoke. Needless to say, Oscar Wilde had a relevant quote – “A true gentlemen is one who is never unintentionally rude” – but opinions on the importance, meaning and role of manners are as variable as standards of behaviour themselves.
10 March 2011
“Well said, that man” – the modern speech
Posted by Ed under authentic leadership, behavioural change, coaching, communication, HR, leading performance, motivation | Tags: employee engagement, ghost writers, inspirational leaders, interpersonal skills, persuasion, robert schlesinger, soundbites, speechwriters, working relationships |Leave a Comment
The Guardian recently ran a feature article about great speeches – a timeless topic, even in an age where – despite the dreams of the digital prophets, and the predictions of the demise of language under an onslaught of little dancing icons – words are probably being read more than ever. (Is it just me, or is the Kindle the most ironic invention yet? Wireless connectivity, USB, cloud computing, mobile that, digital the other – and it does what: mimics a book? Mmm.) So, still timeless, but let’s ignore the fact that the times are changing. Significant moments still call for The Big Speech – usually now televised (and then YouTubed and viralled off across the Internet’s virtual pontoon of social networking platforms): Kennedy in Berlin, Obama in Tuscon, Gaddafi in Tripoli, Cameron in Battersea Power Station …
Some situations – whether they are a time of crisis, a sense of a crisis that may occur later unless they are pre-empted, or an urgent desire to kindle change (rather than merely changing Kindle) – demand a response. As there is only so much that any of us can achieve single-handedly, that response is very often a statement: the first action is the call to the action that will – it is hoped – follow. It helps to be mindful of the ‘meta message’ you’re sending, of course.
Ed
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The Graduate
