5 steps toward becoming a self-made leader

"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." - William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Remember those 20th Century debates we had about whether leaders were born or made?

Today, they seem sort of...

I wasn't surprised when the World Economic Forum (WEF) posed the following question on Twitter:

@Davos: "How can we make capitalism more moral?"

After all, WEF itself has become "more moral" over time. The annual WEF gathering in Davos was historically about bringing business and political leaders together to...

This Election Tuesday, I celebrate our American tradition of exercising the right to vote. While there will certainly be a lot of talk about voter turnout and exit polls, today's true significance is that Americans will be acting in good faith, as they always do as citizens. Each of us,...

Budget season is upon us. As companies start mapping out plans and projections for 2013 and beyond, it's time to step back and ask: Can we really, seriously, engineer a five-year path of linear growth?

We shouldn't even have to ask. Cycles don't move in 10 years, five years, or...

For years, the business world's approach to managing employee engagement has been out to lunch.

"Out to lunch" as when executives tell managers to get their employees "more engaged" by taking them to out to Olive Garden more often.

Survey statistics drive home our engagement ignorance. For years, employee engagement...

I'm concerned that the social transformation we keep hearing about has a couple of glitches. First, our collective understanding of what it means to be a social enterprise needs to be re-defined. What does it mean to be social? The second issue is that if we continue to act in...

A debate about Best Buy's behavior, and the retail giant's very existence erupted in the blogosphere this month. Although the issue qualified as "big" -- the electronics giant's future as well as the competitive threat Amazon poses to traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers -- I believe these deliberations were so heated because...

The business world is heading for a Moneyball moment.

As a book and on film, Moneyball conveys how Oakland Athletics (A's) General Manager (GM) Billy Beane revolutionized baseball by stepping back and asking two fundamental questions: What truly matters to the endeavor of baseball, and how can we measure what...

"There are times I wonder, 'Will I be the next Mubarak?'"
This question was posed to me not by a despotic ruler in the Middle East but by the highly-respected CEO of a multinational company who was worried about the prospect of his employees or consumers organizing against...

As we continue to frequently lurch from one crisis to another, forging a sustainable path forward requires business leaders to rethink the very nature of how their organizations conduct business. The "New Normal" -- defined by hyper-transparency, hyper-connectivity, and ever-deepening interdependencies -- demands new governance structures, organization models and leadership...

Business leaders often state they're going flat because they want employees to "think outside the box." I want to "push back" on their reasoning. I resist the urge to "push back" because I'm trying to eliminate concepts associated with traditional organizational structures from my leadership vocabulary.

What if leaders...

One of the most frequent points I heard at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos cropped up during offline discussions in which business leaders revealed that they were eager to lead their organizations on a journey. The undertakings they described sound less like the linear trajectory most businesses try...

You'll find one of the best illustrations of 21st-century business innovation inside not a Silicon Valley corporate campus but rather a Ritz-Carlton hotel, where a guest might return to her room to discover a spread of champagne and cake requisitioned by an employee who discovered it was the guest's birthday.

The demand for ethical leadership is growing, yet the supply remains low, as evidenced by the recent credit crisis that sparked the worst global recession since the 1930s. The rising generation of leaders appears equipped merely to navigate rather than to guide. Navigating describes how we naturally react and adapt...

When I think of how we've successfully taken the humanity out of business, I often think of what Michael Corleone tells his brother Sonny in the movie The Godfather: "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business."

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, chief executive officers managed their...

Chief executive officers are concerned about employee engagement — and rightfully so. Senior management teams are investing great time, effort and money in improving their workforce-engagement numbers. They shouldn't be — at least not until they are prepared to harness the full energy of an engaged workforce.

Despite significant effort...

With apologies to rapper-actor L.L. Cool J and his song "Mama Said Knock You Out," don't call it a comeback.

In fact, let's not call our wobbly progress from the brink of a global financial meltdown a "recovery." Why? Because we are doomed by our collective mindset to plunge into...

"Shame on you."

We can expect to hear that inspirational phrase more often now that we've entered what I call the "Era of Behavior" — a time when what we do and how we do it is under greater scrutiny and is essential to our ability to succeed in business...

The financial and climate crises, global consumption habits, and other 21st-century challenges call for a "killer app." I think I've found it: philosophy.

Philosophy can help us address the (literally) existential challenges the world currently confronts, but only if we take it off the back burner and apply it as...

Everywhere I travel, I hear the same refrains: "We need more regulation," or on the flip side, "If we hadn't deregulated, we wouldn't be in this financial mess."

It looks like the White House is of this mind-set. Citing Wall Street for helping to create a "culture of irresponsibility," President...