Bank Employees Pay-it-Forward
You think everyone would have something they dislike about their job -- with the notable exception of the people at State Bank and Trust in Fargo, North Dakota. "What do you hate about this company?" Steve Hartman of CBS asked some workers. One said: "I haven't found anything yet." Another: "No, this is a good place to work." And it doesn't stop there. Last Christmas, the bank gave each of the 500... posted on Aug 06 2008, 4,803 reads

What Leaders Should Know About Followers
There is no leader without at least one follower -- that's obvious. Yet the modern leadership industry, now a quarter-century old, is built on the proposition that leaders matter a great deal and followers hardly at all. Most of the limited research and writing on subordinates has tended to either explain their behavior in the context of leaders' development rather than followers' or mistakenly as... posted on Aug 04 2008, 3,596 reads

4 Principles Great Managers Share
Great organizations have one thing in common: great managers. Much has been written about what makes a great organization, but poor managers can cause even great organizations to lose momentum. So how can successful managers achieve breakthrough performance regardless of the quality of the organizations they manage? From the managers of the Girl Scouts, to Partners In Health, to the city of Provid... posted on Jul 21 2008, 7,201 reads

What Business Execs Should Know About Non-Profits
Business leaders play vital roles in the nonprofit sector – as board members, donors, partners, and even executives. Yet all too often they underestimate the unique challenges of managing nonprofit organizations. In this article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, 11 executives who have played leadership roles in both for-profits and nonprofits reveal the critical differences between the... posted on Jul 15 2008, 3,580 reads

Building High-Quality Connections at Work
What is the key to transforming the workplace experience? According to this Stanford Social Innovation Review article, it is to build and nurture "high-quality connections." In a high-quality connection, people feel more open, competent, and alive, and one of the best ways to foster these connections is by encouraging respectful engagement between coworkers. When co-workers engage each other respe... posted on Jul 07 2008, 3,541 reads

Resonant Leadership
Leaders have responsibility, influence and, it turns out, their own brand of management maladies: power stress and the sacrifice syndrome. These afflictions and ways to avoid them are the focus of Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee's Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with Others Through Mindfulness, Hope and Compassion. According to these writers, the key to navigating all this i... posted on Jun 30 2008, 3,722 reads

Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution
How does economic growth happen -- from a strategic point of view? Joseph Schumpeter argued that growth happens through a process of creative destruction. But creative destruction has two sides -- the costs of destruction as well as the benefits of creation. And as creative destruction intensifies, the costs of this great tradeoff sharpen. How can we avoid this tradeoff and how do we begin reorgan... posted on Jun 29 2008, 2,279 reads

Practicing Spiritual Capitalism
Art DeLorenzo, a 67-year-old retired financial adviser, and I were having a hard time connecting. Several appointments we set were moved or missed, but we kept trying. Late one evening, as we settle on yet another date for our interview, DeLorenzo threw out a comment that would prove as valuable as anything he said in our hour-long phone call days later. "Wait a moment." DeLorenzo paused. "I could... posted on Jun 18 2008, 3,386 reads

Work When You Want, Where You Want?
Picture an office where no meeting is mandatory and employees can come and go as they please as long as they get the job done. "Too good to be true," most cubicle occupants would probably say, but new research shows that such an empowering work environment can be more than fiction. Best Buy, for example, gave 3,000 of its corporate staffers a chance to work without micro supervision and producti... posted on Jun 06 2008, 5,389 reads

Mystery of Money Creation
The world's money system is in need of an overhaul. A system created to facilitate economic transactions is now creating economic tragedies. In this article, James Burges strips the academic verbage to uncover the mystery of money creation.... posted on May 25 2008, 3,760 reads