Viva Espana!




June 30th, 2008

…great sport, flair and atmosphere in Vienna last evening with Spain beating Germany 1-0 in the UEFA Euro 2008 championships. An engaging match, despite the dominance of Spain over Germany, who were only a little less pedestrian than in the semi-final against Turkey. With this Spain breaks a 44 year fallow period of no wins of a single major title. And, as the commentators kept on reminding us, with a coach just short of his 70th birthday. What happens next with Spain will be an interesting case in succession management, as the team finally finds its form, but with Luis Aragones moving on, and the World Cup in South Africa in a couple of years.

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Brand extensions




September 30th, 2007

After Brand You (Tom Peters), the Employer Brand (Simon Barrow and Richard Mosley), now the Leadership Brand (Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood) offering insights on the value of a strong leadership brand. The attributes? Consistent and predictable quality of leaders across levels, and across generations of CEOs. The effective transitions from Reginald Jones to Jack Welch to Jeffrey Immelt is held up as evidence for GE’s capability at this over the years. Good for continuity, for corporate culture, and ultimately, for shareholders. The authors also argue that leadership development in the firms that do this well is of a higher order than the usual exhortations about the need for vision, direction and energy. And there’s a grain of something in this. Certainly GE, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, and McKinsey leaders have a distinctive and common identity once beyond their company of origination. All these firms export a lot of leadership talent arising no doubt from positive perceptions about the sustained strength of their corporate performance. And by association, the quality of management. For the quick version on these arguments see Harvard Business Review July 2007.

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Picking winners




August 9th, 2007

Some food for thought for the business community in its ‘war for talent’ at an exhibition on gallerist Vollard presently at the Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Focusing on his promoted artists from the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries the exhibition includes many of the greatest painters of the early modern period, in a richly rewarding selection.

A champion of potential, actively encouraging and mentoring his charges, the bets Vollard placed on relative unknowns or shunned artists appear to have been made good with uncanny dependability. A lawyer by training he combined dealmaker skills with soft people skills to brilliant effect. And those soft skills as applied to artistic temperaments must be the hardest-to-master soft skills of all. For the corporate setting, think prima donna, high maintenance, diva, and so on.

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Centered on Centre Court




July 12th, 2007

… this last weekend what a feast to watch Roger Federer take the Wimbledon trophy for a fifth time in a row, matching Bjorn Borg’s record in the seventies. The way of Federer in leading himself is worthy of study, not least for his unfazed attitude to celebrity, his understated unassuming Swiss way, and coolness of character, but his emotion as well. The unrelenting pressure of the occasion, of history, of all the other titans watching from the royal box, and a champion opponent who took it all the way to five sets including a tiebreak at the third, can but have been vice-like. To concede in the after story that at 5-2 in the final set he ‘nearly cried’, I guess from relief, rather than at that point a fear of losing, only accretes his humanity. Tennis is a classy game with fantastic grace and Federer’s is class act of leadership, also now proven, under real fire.

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Was Rodin’s Thinker Overthinking?




March 20th, 2007

….Newish to my radar, the verb of ‘overthinking‘. …Is this a new malaise or just a rework of the old paralysis by analysis? By now self-awareness and reflection are promoted as desirable leadership traits, but not to the point of the ‘just can’t make a decision’ variety. Which brings me to question: Are self-reflection and action orientation, by and large, mutually exclusive? Come to think of it (no pun intended) it’s a long time since I heard of any senior corporate leader described as a bit ‘cerebral’, or of anyone referred to as “..the thinking man’s…” anything in fact. I was probably out of consulting too long. In that business, claiming the high ground in terms of intellectual capital or thought leadership is a key business driver for most firms in one guise or another.

While onto thinking, if you’re in Zuerich anytime soon, take in the Rodin exhibition at the Kunsthaus if you can, including his iconic, if often satirised, The Thinker. It’s on until 13th May. I saw this at the Royal Academy in London last year and it’s a fantastic exhibition, not least for his life story, including breakthrough originality, prolific output, and the ups and downs he traversed before his eventual success.

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